BQE CORE Suite

Valuable software for billing at a law firm

Opmerkingen: Bill quick is a perfect solution to create invoices and be able to bill many different attorneys on different projects.

Pluspunten:

The ability to customize many of its features is great. You can setup and keep track of time associated with various cases, clients, projects. There are so many reports that you can run to keep track of your spending. Able to export invoices to LEDES format. Able to import time from excel spreadsheet.

Minpunten:

It takes some time to learn the software, the tech support team was great in getting me up and running. If you want additional reports they have a custom report group but their cost is a bit high to modify reports. It looks a bit complicated but actually it is easy to use.

Best product out there, basically out of the box .... no implementation needed

Opmerkingen: Just great, it allows me to have a far quicker pulse of the business in financial terms and also marketing wise keeping track of proposals.

Pluspunten:

It is very well structured, in a logical manner and has put a lot of attention into details of how projects can be deployed in so administrative ways in the AE industry. It can keep a project very simple o very sophisticated in terms of phases, budgets, reporting, etc.

Minpunten:

Moving from Archioffice (the previous software from BQE) to CORE was not flawless at all. I would have liked more support from BQE and that they acknowledge it is not flawless or that things willl appear automatically.

BillQuick - A look at one year post conversion

Pluspunten:

BillQuick is a powerful tool in tracking project time and expenses for professional services. We converted from 7 years of Quick Books data. Although the conversion and integration was not a seemless process, and the learning curve was much longer than originally anticipated, we are now tracking project profitability at a much higher level than we ever have before. BillQuick Tech Support is fantastic. They are patient and knowledgeable, and we have received a lot of added value by having the Gold Care Tech Support package added onto our services. Additionally, we have invested quite a bit of extra money on having Bill Quick Customization Department write customized reports. Although the standard reports section is extensive, we were unable to find reports that gave us exactly the data we wanted to see. It's nice that this additional service is offered, but it would be nice for them to give us a handful of customized reports as part of the conversion process and then charge extra from there on out.

Minpunten:

The software is not as user-friendly as it could be. Some things are overly complicated and require detailed use before you understand the functionality of the software. It could not be more different that QuickBooks, and the transition for us was difficult. Personally, I highly underestimated the learning curve. In the beginning, we were only using BQ for time and expense logging and we maintained our Quick Books file for all other general accounting, which I would strongly discourage. Although the SYNC feature does work to sync data between programs, it is not a clean sync and much of it needed cleanup on either side of the sync. This was very frustrating. We just recently converted all of our general accounting in QB over to the Accounting portal in BillQuick. This has helped to have all of our financial records in one software system and our data is much more consistent. However, the "Accounting" portal is not perfect and there are a number of features that are lacking where QB has it all dialed in. Examples: 1) in looking at a vendor bill, there is no indication or PAID FLAT to see it has been PAID or not. To see if it is paid, I have to look at the previous checks. 2) In a report that lists all AP checks written for a particular time frame, there is no TOTAL at the end of the report. 3) BQ allows duplicate check numbers. (This is not a complete list, but the top 3 things that drive me insane.) These seem like basic accounting features and for them to not be included in an accounting software is frustrating. DISCLAIMER: we have not yet upgraded to BQ2015 and remain on BQ2014 for a while longer. My understanding is that BQ2015 has updated a number of accounting features, so I look forward to seeing if any of those issues are remedied.

As seen from the perspective of Administration.

Opmerkingen: The entire team is more accountable for a wider list of aspects of the job. Time, expense are now relatable to the team, not just to management due to the analytics being on everybody's screens, not just management. Awareness is the first step toward making the effort to make changes.

Pluspunten:

The time tracking is the first and most impactful of the features. As the team grew more comfortable, they found it easier to get more specific with the breakdown...not being so vague. After six months most of the team seems very comfortable with the use of the product.

Minpunten:

I am HR Admin, and we do not yet have the HR module, so it is likely having the smallest affect on me. The time and expense features that I use the most is not always accurate due to some of the automatic features, but we have/had not stipulated our needs. It is customizable to make this work more in our favor, but we had to know of the effects first. I like least that we had to wait and experience the detriments to see what it would do first, so that we could then make those changes

BQE Core key to Business Operations

Opmerkingen: CORE allows us to operate efficiently as a business. Overall, the CORE product I would recommend to any business who relies on billable hours as their core business. The ability to invoice directly from the platform and customize project fields are nice features.

Pluspunten:

BQE Core is critical to the overall operation of our business. CORE allows us to charge time and expenses to different projects, in which we utilize CORE's invoicing suite to invoice customers in a timely manner. CORE's suite helps us manage cashflow and WIP better than we ever have before.

Minpunten:

CORE has moments where the platform loads very slowly. Invoices can be customized, but that comes at a cost. We would like for CORE to have the ability to allow it's customers to customize their own invoice templates. When a project has many phases, invoicing by master project is not possible.