BQE CORE vs. Zoho Invoice

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.

Zoho Invoice is well suited for any business, regardless of size, that needs to have a way to create invoices with hourly or flat rates. It's easy to create and archive projects. It also integrates into their other tools, including Zoho Projects. Zoho is great for businesses who want to accept online payments.You can use PayPal, Stripe, and a few others. Clients can also pay via ACH. It lets you know when a payment is processing AND when it clears. I believe that it would not be well suited in instances where a company creates lots of credit notes (because from the invoice screen the credit will appear to grow, but when you check active credit notes, it is the right amount) or estimates (I can't figure out how to use this feature)

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

• Time tracking. Zoho invoice makes it super easy to track time and hours against specific clients and specific tasks.
• Unbilled / billed time reporting. Zoho Invoice gives a dashboard view of hours yet to be billed, which helps keep on top of invoicing so nothing is missed.
• Reporting. Zoho Invoice offers a robust reporting module for the price point. Canned reports can be customized easily.
• Invoice sending and tracking. Zoho Invoice makes it easy to create and send invoices. Invoices are easy to clone, which makes creating regular, repeatable invoices a snap.

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

• Zoho Invoice can be complicated if you want to create a more advanced custom invoice or custom recurring invoice.
• Zoho Invoice does not provide all of its functionalities on the mobile version of its platform.
• Zoho Invoice is expensive for some small business owners especially if they don't plan on using it often.

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

Ease of access of using the dashboard the buttons I mean like if it is taught in 10th I would have worked it. Simple and minimal hi give good entry to be more transparent and sharable to clients in seconds. The client also get shocked by saying it's fast.

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

Zoho Invoice streamlines bill creation and sending by personalizing invoices with logos, identities, and terms. It offers detailed payment reports, an integrated payment system, and payment summaries for tracking success. It automates invoicing and payment tasks, saving time and money for companies. Zoho Invoice integrates with Stripe Payments, enhancing settlement processes and promoting digital payment adoption.

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 biggest ROI for my business is that Zoho Invoice reduced the cost of invoicing so much, that I was able to invest that savings back into the business development allowing us to grow.
• Zoho Invoice provides the option of giving your clients a client portal through which they have access to their own accounts and can see and print their own reports as needed. That helps to create a transparency that our clients love.
• Zoho Invoice has been dependable. I have not had one issue with using the platform or its functions since I switched to it a few years ago.

Incentivized