BQE CORE vs. Workamajig

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 this holds true to almost any CRM, but if you want to truly utilize it you sort of need to go all in. This can become tough with WMJ because it doesn't offer some critical options that many other CRMs do, like the ability to create and send emails, e-newsletters, to throttle and invite outside clients to look at projects, etc. As such we're pairing Workamajig with Hubspot (and slowly phasing out Mailchimp) and trying to keep the data clean and flowing between them all is pretty tough. I'm also not aware of any API bridge from Wordpress to Workamajig so while I can program and feed my leads from my site into the other spaces, Workamajig remains a manual entry for any insertions you want, even if simply as a CSV import.

But - if you're not worried about that and simply want to manage projects, budget time, and scope things, it's a robust system allowing you to do so.

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

• WMJ is a full-stack solution, so you can track the life of a project from beginning to end, and all of the financials associated with it.
• Time entry is easy.
• Project management is robust and yields a tremendous amount of information.
• WMJ has a "sheets"-based interface, which makes navigating thru modules easier.
• There is more than one way to complete any particular task.

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

• Auto-schedule population - The most inconvenient thing about using JIG was that the dates wouldn't auto-populate. Example: I move the review date but the rest of the dates stay the same. Depending on each project level, if one date is adjusted the rest should update as well. That way we aren't spending a lot of time moving dates around manually.
• Notifications - JIG should have desktop notifications so we can see when tasks are on us even when we aren't in JIG.

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

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've used QuickBooks and it didn't align well with our business, so there were a lot of insights I wanted from the numbers, but couldn't get. We use Basecamp, which is easy, but can get disorganized pretty quickly and takes discipline to stay structured.

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

• The subscription expense and IT overhead has been substantial. That being said at the time of implementation, most other competing platforms were in line with their pricing.
• As more competitive alternatives have come to market we would have probably gone with an entirely cloud base alternative at a lower price.
• We ended up with ClickUp as our primary project management platform. If our finance/accounting software wasn't already so integrated with Workamjig we would probably switch to it entirely.

Incentivized