BQE CORE vs. Podio

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.

Some people seemed to be confused by too many options. Customizing your work in a digital workspace needs means rethinking your possibilities by knowing your toolset well. In the beginning, I was a little bit frustrated, because I didn't see all these options and there was a lack of best practise. Studying the large Podio App Store solutions helped me to understand. If you do not have the time it's the best moment for getting in contact with one of the Podio partners.

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

• Podio's apps are the most customizable tools I have seen anywhere, and I have tested and evaluated a large number of work management solutions. The abstract nature of their apps makes them ideal for very specific, niche cases as well as common, general purpose uses. The solution is elegant: an app is simply a collection of app items, with characteristics and perhaps links to other apps & their app items, all of which can be defined by your needs. Anyone who enjoys making "lists" of "things" should love this.
• Custom reporting is a dream in Podio. I can take any characteristics or fields in any of my app items, compare or filter them with other apps' items, run calculations on them and figure totals by month, team member or almost anything else you can imagine. The possibilities really seem limited only by your imagination.
• Podio has a lot of features, but another strength to factor in is third-party support. There are a lot of outside companies that offer additional features like detailed workflows, synchronizations between other cloud-based apps, and possibly even graphs in the near future.

• 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

• Not sure if this has been implemented but having drop-down menus that change depending on your previous selection - AND/OR functionality would be great.
• Some ability to reskin Podio.
• Archiving of old projects / content of apps without manually moving contents.

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

Podio customer service is great. The cloud and mobile service is fast (almost instant, continuous syncing). With a solid user base, and backed by Citrix, this is a serious business solution. They're also constantly working on improving and making it more powerful. I anticipate it only getting better

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

It is usable, for sure. Requires a bit of thinking to be really useful.

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

Never experienced an off-time. Minor Bugs often solved within hours after reporting.

Incentivized

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.

It works all the time and if I have a question, support get back to me ASAP

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

Podio support was always responsive and very quick to provide answers and assistance during the history of using this product, their support team has always been top notch. There have been several cases where calling podio support a feature was not available and they provided either workaround solutions or added the features straight into their roadmap.

Incentivized

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

wont let me skip

Could of got more help sooner and mapped out structure after the 1st month. Future planning

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

As everyone knows Asana is a well-known project management solution but because of its ranking Asana and its functionalities are coming down and coming up with some complaints. So, I decided to choose Citrix Podio because it works well and provides effective services.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

As you business grows, so does Podio. There seems to be no limit to the workspace and apps you can create on the platform

• 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

• Podio has made our internal communications more fluid and timely.
• It's much easier to search and find things (previous developments, notes, updates) in Podio than in the traditional combination of email, document storage, etc.
• The Podio platform fosters a clearer understanding of all the work, projects and updates we are juggling at any one time.

Incentivized