BQE CORE vs. EPM Live

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.

EPM Live is well suited for a business that feels they are slightly disconnected between departments. If you think you're sales and support staff need to be better connected with your development and programming (like us), then you can benefit immediately. There are a host of other features to help any business that has a lot of "irons in the fire". They make it a lot easier to pinpoint what areas need more attention and what areas probably should be spending so much money.

• 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

• EPM Live has several modules that users can use for their project management solutions.
• EPM Live can be customized by the company that is using it.
• It integrates well with Microsoft products.

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

• Performance is not always consistent. There are periods of time where everything goes wrong with the tool, and there are times when everything just goes perfect. It seems like a cycle that lasts couple months.
• Support is not that great in terms of solutions provided. Most of the time the support responses are not helpful at all.
• The vendor is not proactive in planning the releases specific to customer. We had many issues because of inadequate release planning.

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

Our staff have found it easy to implement and use. Virtually any company can improve the way it manages its resources, and those improvements can deliver real competitive advantages. If you are finding your current software wanting, look at EPM LIve. We are happy we did.

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

When we have needed help (infrequently), the help has been prompt and understandable.

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

The experience with TaskRay was like night and day. The TaskRay representative has always been responsive and helpful. EPM's promise to integrate with Salesforce was limited at best.TaskRay exists within Salesforce, so the install and customization took less than a day. Ultimately we are still evaluating solutions and working with EPM made it easy to see what we were not looking for in a partner.

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

• This product has actually caused major frustration for the IT team and we were never able to deploy it past IT.

Incentivized