BQE CORE vs. Plutio

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.

It's best at managing projects on a small or medium scale; managing teams and projects for large-scale projects might be complex. It also works perfectly for day-to-day tasks that aren't dependent; it might be challenging to manage a task that depends on other projects or teams. Another thing is that no automation or anything makes your workflow extraordinary. It's a simple but more likely platform to utilize and track growth.

• 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

• Task management is excellent. It can be broken down into so many levels and makes it easy to keep track of what needs to be done.
• The ability to customize your method of using it is key. Setting it up to both look and work in a way that fits your company and employees is very important and Plutio does this very well.

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 design of the invoices, when I used it, was not as sleek as I would have wanted it to be. There wasn't a proper template that I could use.
• Similar to the design of the invoice, there wasn't a proper email template I could use.
• The app itself didn't seem to be very secure, when I used it, it seemed to be buggy/clunky in some areas, not updating properly, etc.
• When I used this, there wasn't a professional-looking contract, and there was no auto sending of the contract once an action was taken by a client, such as payment. It didn't make for a smooth enough workflow for me.

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

Plutio puts work into real contribution, allowing me to connect with the team with white-label collaboration. It is an all-in-one platform for me to manage all tasks effectively. Consistently, it positively impacts work and overall growth by adding encouragement. It's worth using this tool to keep track of the task and overall development, so sharing positive reviews might be helpful to others.

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

I have only needed to reach out for support once and got a quick response. There was an issue with the Mac app, but I knew it was in beta. Leo, the owner, was quick to reply thanking me for letting him know about the issue, that the Mac app is still in beta, and that I can use the web version in the meantime until the bug was fixed.

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

Plutio continues to get better, offering more enhanced features that can help you customize the experience and keep you digitally organized. Where Slack has a great chat board, but Plutio offers more in project management and task completion. It may not be at nuanced as Trello yet, but it is a terrific middle combining elements of Slack and Trello into one confined location.

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

• We landed some contracts on platforms like Upwork, due to the professional image we portray with Plutio
• Excellent ROI, we save lots of time with this tool
• Very reasonable pricing for what you get (ROI)
• More organized in our daily business

Incentivized