BQE CORE vs. Unanet ERP GovCon

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.

As I said, Unanet is great for timekeeping and expense reporting. It's very easy to navigate and intuitive for my staff to use. On the other hand, reports are a challenge. The ones that are "canned" only come out as PDFs so I find I waste a lot of paper each month. Customized reports are better and come in Excel, but setting them up is not that easy. We've been working with Unanet just over a year. We went "live" effective 1/1/2017 and we're still avoiding the reporting functions even though that was one of the main reasons we purchased Unanet in the first place

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

• Near real-time visibility into project financials. As soon as the employees save their time for the day, you can get a good measure of project financial performance. Work authorizations are embedded into Unanet so unintentional overruns are virtually eliminated.
• Nice integration with the Joint Travel Regulations. It is easy to import the latest rate tables for both CONUS and OCONUS destinations.
• Good customer support and highly responsive. Webinars on new features are free and broadcast on a regular basis. Feedback to suggestions for new features are addressed in a very timely fashion.
• It is easy to structure Unanet to support DCAA practices to be able to get approval for cost plus jobs.
• With exports to .csv files, it is easy to extract data for further analysis beyond the relatively rich built-in reporting features.

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

• Adding hours for subcontractors must be done via import because the hours don't update on the reporting if put in via vendor invoice.
• Make posting dates less complex.
• Should be easier to figure out roles needed for managers in the organization.

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

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

Every time I have reached out to customer support, they have been very helpful and resolved my issue very quickly and efficiently

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

We were previously using Deltek GCS. Deltek stopped the support for this software so we were forced to change to a new product. We reviewed Costpoint, a Microsoft product and Unanet. We selected Unanet because it had all of the features we were looking for in a new software and it was very user-friendly.

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

• Unanet has had a very significant ROI on several fronts. Our payroll department spends much less time managing and processing time in general.
• Unanet has allowed all of the project managers teams bill on a much more granular level which has saved significant time over the previous Excel based processes of gathering project level data.
• Using Unanet companywide has also saved many hours of time that were previously spent translating data from other platforms, and consolidating data via Excel for reporting purposes. Using the same tool (Unanet) with the included reports has saved significant time and hassle which has had an enormous impact on the ROI of Unanet.

Incentivized