BQE CORE vs. Expensify

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 think it's really good for small businesses. At least in the way we use it. It's very good for keeping an eye on employee spending in nearly real time. I'm not sure how it works for larger companies when there is a larger number of people to keep track of.

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

• I am able to submit my mileage and the great feature to put the starting destination and end destination. It auto populates the mileage for you!
• The coniserge is helpful and reminds me when I did not do certain things like submit my report. That’s a nice feature!
• I am able to submit my expenses quickly and it scans the receipts or you can upload a picture of them very quickly.

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

• Cant choose for specific lines of non -reimbursable expenses to several credit cards. only one preconfigured.
• there are limited cards to choose for with Expensify Travel as a corporate cards.
• The policy rules are pretty basic. i would like to have more granular options

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 company will use Expensify for as long as it will fit our purposes. However, it is obvious that once the fast-growing company will reach a certain size, we will need to transition to a more complex system. For our current purposes however, Expensify is great and I would recommend it to everyone

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

So simple to set up and use. It was easy to roll out to all our staff! The demos, instructions, and FAQ's were well written and enabled us to train our staff quickly. We have frontline employees who have mastered the system in a day. The scalability is also perfect. We are able to start with just a few cards and grew that number as our organization needed without any problems.

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

Our rep has been amazing. He has built custom reports for us that have been very time consuming and difficult. Our reps are also currently looking into new submission solutions for us that we are excited about. They came up with this and recommended it on their own without me complaining about an issue. They are about our success and are very excited about the product they offer.

Incentivized

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

wont let me skip

The implementation process went rather smoothly, linking it to the bank and cards was handled easily. without too many unnecessary steps. Getting the accounts setup did take some time, but that would be true with any organization. All in all things went smoothly and I was very pleased with the setup and implementation process

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

Concur is the only formal software I've used, though I think this was only used in my PhD program (2010-2014), so in fairness, it's been a while. I remember Concur being just OK. It was certainly easier to use than the 'upload documents to email' process my former employer had instituted, but it was not Expensify-level smart and easy. At least back then, there was no simple drag-and-drop document parsing for example.

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

• Positives include - timely expense reports to reconcile our fiscal year financials
• Negatives include - the monthly service fee per employee (even if no expenses were generated that month) - it is not cost effective for ALL of our employees to utilize the application.

Incentivized