BQE Software Inc. — BillQuick 2008

Ease of Use & Navigation Features – 5 Stars
BillQuick 2008’s installation screens guided me through an easy install.
Once in the program, an intuitive Outlook-like navigation screen makes it very
easy to get around. Navigation menus include company setup, firm management,
time and expense, billing, and client and project management. Once you click
on one of these main areas of the program, the associated screen that appears
will ease the processes for accomplishing the related tasks at hand. The time
entry, expense entry, client setup and other icons located across the top of
the screen make the routine tasks easy to launch with just a click of a button.
These shortcuts simplify navigation.

Once in the time and expense entry tab, a workflow allows for time entry in
a sheet view, a simple timecard view, or you can actually use a timer and record
time in real-time. Each method of entering time is easy and intuitive. In addition,
time cards can be completed in Microsoft Outlook. Along with the main tab mentioned
above, a wizard’s tab provides a step-by-step setup of several day-to-day
tasks such as employees, clients, projects, etc. I really like the overall design
of this program as well as the ease of use and navigation features.

A Practitioner Says:

“Our Maryland firm has two partners with an office manager and a CPA who works 20 to 40 hours a week depending on the season. We also have a few part-time employees. We do approximately 200 individual returns each year and have about 50 corporations as clients. BillQuick is very efficient. We find it to be a very good product, and it makes our practice run much more efficiently. It’s hard to quantify, but financially, it’s made money for us because we are able to get our bills out quicker. We were using another package that was aged and inefficient, so we looked at several packages. The people at BillQuick were the biggest determining factor. They held my hand, and walked me through my questions. I would recommend that anyone considering this product should have a plan and a focus on what you want to do and how you want to get there. Ask yourself, ‘What information do you want to capture and in what form do you want to capture it?’”

Management Functions – 5 Stars
Whether you are managing clients, staff or projects, I think you will find this
program meets the challenge. Each of the navigation screens gives you the ability
to drilldown into reports, which makes viewing critical business information
easy and quick. If you want control over time approval, the navigation screen
makes it simple to submit and have approved time entries by staff members; the
same works for expense entries. Managerial reports allow you to analyze employee
productivity, profitability by client and engagement, and much more. Clients
can be setup with spending caps that will alert managers or the responsible
persons on an engagement when those caps have been met. This feature gives the
manager a significant amount of control over the management of a project. BillQuick
uses a .NET data engine, which provides significantly improved stability and
greatly enhanced speed improvements.

From a staff standpoint, you have several billing rate options and multiple
rates for a staff member. You can apply an overtime billing rate if necessary,
and you can also have different billing rates per client. Tracking employee
vacation, sick and holiday time is also an option. New for 2008, you can assign
projects, activities and expenses to employees. This complements the program
as it was before, where you could assign employees, activities and expenses
to projects.

Billing & Reporting – 5 Stars
The billing navigation screen allows for quick drilldowns on reports, including
WIP Reports, Project Time Records by Activity and several others. A navigator
is also available to walk you through the process of billing review, which allows
you to view time entries by client and project. You can group by project manager,
client manager and a few others. At this point, you have the option of generating
an invoice, creating a phased invoice or producing a retainer invoice. An invoice
wizard is available to help new users get oriented with the process.

The invoicing formats are highly customizable. Invoices can be sent electronically,
and an option is provided to accept payment via all major credit cards, which
can be easily accessed by a link on the invoice itself. At least 145 invoice
templates are available as well as over 330 different reports. Invoices and
reports can be exported to Excel, Word, PDF and a few other options that make
further customization a snap. I think you will find the reporting options to
be robust.

Integration – 5 Stars
Whether you are using Quick-Books, Peachtree by Sage, Micro-soft Office Accounting
or MYOB, tight integration is available for all. The program also offers direct
integration with Intuit’s Complete Payroll. BillQuick also exports to
Excel, Word, PDF, HTML and XML. Integration with Outlook for e-mail and calendar
to timesheet entry is also a strong plus.

With the mobile workforce we see today, remote integration is also important,
and BillQuick Web Suite is BQE’s response. You install Web Suite on your
web server, and remote users will run an intelligent ASP.NET utility in their
browser that will give them access to their BillQuick modules. Web Suite provides
the main time and expense tracking, billing and reporting functionality, and
much more. If you have remote workers or multiple offices, this is a solution
worth investigating. An eTools add-on is also available that provides automatic
data sync from remote locations via e-mail protocol.

User Support & Help – 5 Stars
As I mentioned throughout this review, wizards are available in just about every
section of the program to help with different functionality. In addition to
the wizards, you’ll find context sensitive Help offered throughout the
program. BQE’s website provides an online support center with program
documentation, integration guides, newsletters, a knowledgebase, tutorials and
demos. You can also get customized training services and access to consultants.
Ample user support and Help is available if needed.

2008 Overall Rating: