BigTime

Pros

The ability to communicate in detail with QBD and QBO. FYI to all who job cost... You CANNOT job cost in QBO. It is not a limitation of BigTime, it is a limitation of QBO. Which is what i mean by my partial experience answer above... (allow more text there).. if onboarding is completed with a premeeting checklist about the firms existing workflow and time management and by someone intimately familiar with the industry that is using BigTime the cons below could be addressed upfront. The team at BigTime were difficult to get a hold of but once they were aware they worked like crazy to get us setup and working in the time frame we had. We moved our QBO file back to QBD (we had to do the testing on our own because the team at BT didn't know why job costing wasn't working in QBO) Once we moved back to QBD the job costing, invoicing, payroll work like a charm inside QBD. Hands down, it is the best integration with QBD of any practice management software out there... We had 2 people who spent 8 months testing many software solutions... most were lacking at least 1 "critical" requirement... Big Time was not. As we become aware and work through things like "terminology" we are becoming more and more confident in the workflow and keeping track of what is due when and who has what and what state the work is in. This is key as we go into tax season but also something we cannot live without on a day to day basis as 95% of our work is recurring on various time schedules. Thank yo

Cons

The wide range of terminology used in the software is confusing and causes errors to be made during implementation. Examples: Start Date and End Date... without these terms being defined you would think that start date is the day the work should begin and that End Date is the DUE DATE. Not so within Big Time. For recurring tasks, Start Date means Due Date in Big Time language. Another example: Completed vs Archived. Completed in most software solutions means that the job is finished or done; and archived means done and sent to storage with no recurrence nor future work is expected. In Big Time the term Archive means Completed or Finished or Done and removes the task from the workflow list and generates the next task in the reccurence. In BigTime the term Completed means something different... still unsure what it means because even when you update a task/project status to "completed" the task remains on the workflow list.

Pros

BigTime allows users from a variety of backgrounds to connect to the software from various platforms (desktop, laptop, smart phone) to track time per project, to track expenses on a daily basis with electronic submission of receipts, to run reports on time spent, to connect with external accounting software seamlessly.

Cons

the software has some limits on "naming" items that do not always correspond directly to our external software and do not fit within our company culture. (For example: In BigTime, billable means charged to the project, may invoiced or may not invoice. In our company culture, billable means an invoice will be sent for payment to the client.

Pros

Straight forward navigation on all tabs makes all operations easy. I like that all of the administrator functions are kept fairly simple; there are a lot of great ways to customize almost everything, without being overwhelming to learn. Most customizations are nice since you really only need to set them up once, then make small tweaks until everything is just right. The software will be very easy to train new employees to use. I love that it links to Quickbooks; I have so much less leg work than my previous software when it comes to data entry. So far a fairly smooth transition from the previous software.

Cons

While there are a lot of ways to customize the appearance of pages for employees, the invoices are still fairly restrictive. I find it odd that I can't change little things like: justifications (Overall message stuck in the center of the page and I can't indent it lower), and the job name is right justified and continues long names to the next line mid word sometimes; the color or boldness of each text line (ex. I would like the job name bold or larger font and some lines to be in color). I know these changes can be made as a word doc, but then it won't change my template in Big Time.. Second, creating a report to my liking has been very challenging. I need a monthly report for each project manager with an individual detailed overview of each project every month. However, when I have tried to tailor existing reports or make my own I always get an error that my report can't be created. Third, our billing cycle falls mid month and it would be preferable if timesheets and billing could be broken up by custom billing cycle rather than monthly. It's hard to track the cycle with just a weekly timesheet view. It's a change we can work with, but it requires a lot of extra work for the admin to constantly filter in invoicing. Lastly, the character limit on job titles is painfully small. We have a hard time getting all crucial information to fit. It would help dramatically if the job info screen had a place to record the address of the job.

Pros

The ease of use and setup, management and flawless connection to QuickBooks to post information and allow us to invoice clients, print and pay expense reports and collect project information in an easy to use project database. Time tracking is a breeze and built in reports allow us to view important information with a few clicks.

Cons

That the BigTime monitor is not a service but it requires an account to be always signed in in order to run. I hope it can be converted to a service that we don't have to worry about.

Pros

The ability to pull out job lists with titles is very convenient for having team review meetings. You are able to pull out most reports into excel and filter and sort from there. Having the task status is very useful for those who utilize that feature. My office does not take full advantage of the capabilities this system offers but does work for us when being used.

Cons

For the new Gantt chart feature I have not been able to use very much but am disappointed it is not able to be exported into excel like the other reports. The difficulty with this system is that it is only as good as your weakest link. For my office enforcing full participation is difficult and that prevents us from taking full advantage. I do not work in accounting but apparently it does not sync as well as it used to for quick books and other software. This makes work duplicated on that end which is really inconvenient. Another item that is irritating is when pulling complete job list you have to do it a certain way or else it will not pull old jobs that you were not listed as team member for. That caused some confusion/concern during review meetings.