BQE CORE vs. Upland PSA

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.

Tenrox has been the only solution we can find that can make a simple timesheet that basically turns the old Excel timesheet into an online cloud based glorified Excel sheet. No drop downs for employees to pick through and little room for error. The reporting could be great but not in the way we have customized it. The reports are useless most of the time and writing a report is very difficult. If you want a nonprofit adapted timesheet for multiple funders and contracts without any frills or reporting then this is it!

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

• You can create a report combining virtually any field that the application tracks, so in this way it's a very flexible tool. There are also very flexible workflows and security settings within the app so that you can really make it fit your organizational structure, whatever that may be.
• You can download the report into Excel and work with the data in Pivot tables to get even more customized reports.

• 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

• Their customer service is horrible, every email I send they insist on following up with a scheduled phone conference to tell me they can't help me. I have wasted hours on conference calls over the years.
• They upgrade their products but none of their upgrades will work with their current customer's system or "customizations". We are stuck with a 5 year old product that will only work with Internet Explorer on a PC and only when the browser is in compatibility mode. Even this functionality is touch and go.
• They have continuously failed to make time off accruals for a semi-monthly payroll a possibility.
• Anytime you ask them to upgrade you to their latest product they first tell you that will be another $3,000 and then they find out their upgrade isn't compatible with your settings.

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

I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.

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 feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.

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

The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.

Incentivized

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

wont let me skip

The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.

Incentivized

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

Tenrox as a system is one of my favorites, if not my favorite. I really like the system-structure and its capabilities. Previously, the only negative mark I gave Tenrox was customer service and as stated that has shown great improvement in the past months. Conversely, our other primary system (Advantage) has always provided us with excellent customer service as one of their strongest points, which made it even more frustrating to have those issues with Tenrox support. I did not select Tenrox myself, but if I were shopping around now, I would be very very likely to decide on Tenrox. I would recommend it, so long as the system fits the needs of your business and staff

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

• Tenrox has caused headaches across offices and the frustrations with reporting is huge. It's been great to have a starting point to track hours and try to see what is billable and non-billable, but after this was implemented across our company where are seeing the negative ROI as its been so difficult to pull these reports accurately across teams, individuals, and clients!

Incentivized