BQE CORE vs. ZilicusPM

I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.

ZilicusPM is suited for any business that has difficulty managing and keeping track of office related work as well as project management. Its an efficient way to manage just about anything necessary. It is well-suited for our office, as structural/civil engineers - we are able to keep track of our projects as well as office/human resources related work.

Incentivized

• Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
• Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
• Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
• The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.

Incentivized

• ZilicusPM is great for an office regarding meetings and site visits. It's hard to keep track manually of where everyone is at. By sharing our calendars through ZilicusPM, we are able to access where someone is within a few seconds!! It is very convenient and less of a hassle.
• This a great tool to use to manage all documents that enter in and out of our office for certain projects. It is hard to keep track of everything through our office, so this programs helps us manage things very efficiently.
• This is great for prioritizing! I know many people in our office have an issue to do so. With the Project Issue Management feature, we are able to do this more effectively without causing any stress to our employees!

Incentivized

• Customizable Reporting
• Linking Project to Payment all together
• Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc.
• Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc.

Incentivized

• The only thing I would suggest that needs room for improvement is that you should break down Zilicus PM into different sectors. What I mean by this is that you branch off this program into different areas of expertise like accounting, engineering, etc. Every business is managed differently, so other options should be provided to accommodate each field.
• Other than that, I am very pleased with this program. It was WELL worth the investment. Saving a lot of time and money spent per worker by using this!
• N/A

Incentivized

We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.

Incentivized

The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.

As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.

Incentivized

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

wont let me skip

Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.

Incentivized

We have used Microsoft Project for years. We loved it until we found ZilicusPM. ZilicusPM is more efficient and directive in our field. Microsoft Project does not provide as many features as ZilicusPM does. I am extremely grateful for having found ZilicusPM. It was recommended to us by an architectural firm that swore by this software.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it.
• Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail
• Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role
• Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost"
• Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation

• A positive impact that ZilicusPM has made is we are able to work more efficiently and prioritize what needs to be sent out, what invoices need to be sent out to clients, where are project engineers at certain time of day, etc.
• We also have a higher ROI. I am able to manage what invoices need to be sent out without having to track people down for a summary of the work , which is extremely time consuming. I am able to get more invoices out while returning a higher investment for the company.
• A negative impact it has made is we had to hire someone to manage this software entirely. It is very time-consuming for myself to manage and make sure everything is entered in correctly. We hired someone who is familiar with ZilicusPM and is able to certify all work.

Incentivized