BQE CORE vs. Brightflag

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.

I already recommend Brightflag to anyone and everyone who processes invoices. There is a lot of information and data that comes on these invoices, and having a system that streamlines the information in one place has been extremely useful for a department that is a cost center and needs a quick way to justify every spend.

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

• Easy interface
• Amazing customer service
• Measurable impact on bottom line

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

• More bespoke flags
• More benchmarking data

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

Super easy to set up and use. The interface is intuitive, but it's worth spending some time getting used to seeing where the different "file cabinets" are located. I recommend having one person dedicated to the day-to-day management of the platform (separate from the reviewers and approvers), someone who just manages to upload the invoices, setting up new vendors, liaising with BF Support, but cross-training everyone who uses it on the broad functions.

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

Customer support is spectacular. Probably the single best quality of this product. They are quick to respond, quick to troubleshoot, and quick to offer suggestions on workarounds for things that might still be in the works (or unique to us). That level of agility and can-do attitude is what I needed in a partner like this.

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

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

• ROI has been superb: saw a 30% drop in legal spend (based on invoice amount) due to catching items that shouldn't have been charged or charges that exceeded agreed-upon caps.
• Being able to add prior years' invoices to the system has been incredible since it allows for internal benchmarking and YoY comparison reporting.

Incentivized