Deltek WorkBook

Pros: excellent resource planning and project management, good summary information for PMs. easy to use. HTML interface is much better than Silverlight now.

Cons: a lot of the reports are unclear, where figures are derived from. There are too many of them to be of real use. It would be great if reports were tailored to company requirements as part of set up. As an engineering firm and not an agency, we feel that sometimes our core requirements are disregarded, or overlooked.

Comments: Pros:
We have used 3 different PM-tools previously and about 20 trial versions of different PM-tools previously before Workbook. No other tool keeps their promise like WorkBook when it comes of being the full solution. Most other tools can't even do half of the features that WorkBook handles. They really have an extensive solution for all parts of our business; from CRM, to Cost calculations, Quotation, resource planning, time reporting, flex-hour handling to billing and accounting and analysis all in the same interface. The platform also handles global multi-regional clients and billing in a good way. A need for us since we are handling clients with multiple debtors scattered across different countries. I know no other platform which handles that without being a very expensive custom made platform. WorkBook easily handles different regions with individual currency, payment cycles and VAT rules, making a lot of the process automated. Just set up your client sub debtors and it's all there. Cons: WorkBook is very extensive, so I would not recommend this product to smaller companies. WorkBook suits companies where there's a resource available for handling Admin / Traffic of such a tool. So if you don't have that setup, then it is not a tool for you. In other words, probably a solution for minimum 10+ employee companies. Summary: WorkBook is the only one out there we found that handles pretty much everything you need for Admin of an enterprise and at an attractive price. But it is not for micro-companies with 3-10 employees.

Comments: We were looking for an intergrated CRM / Pipeline / Job Costing and finance system. We had conducted intensive research on the options available on the market. Our challenge was to have realtime information that allowed us to react swiftly and in an accurately informed way to work in process, not only on the external spend but the recording of time and the financial impact it was having on the project and therefore the company. Workbook was a last minute option and we decided to have a demo in order to confirm our original choice but that demo changed our opinion and workbook proved it had arrived at a place the other systems were looking to achieve. It is intuitive and easy to use that the key component areas of timesheets and budgets that the majority of staff use have been adopted enthusiastically. The move from our old systems hasn;t been without teething problems but customer service has been great and they have responded to all the requests and challenges we have thrown at them. There are still some challenges around certain elements in the finance section, the replacement of Sage 100 in our case, but these are now under development as thier model is to constantly seek to improve the product. Importantly we now have the data from projects at our fingertips and this has proved invaluable and will in the long term it will have a positive financial effect on our business. I would recommend this to any business that is fast moving, needs to record time accurately and respond to clients changes and needs quickly.

Comments: Ultimately, the software was mostly used for tracking hours on tasks and assigning them to the right client. But it could get tedious depending on how many clients you have or if a client had subproject codes which necessitated using dozens of rows to track keep track of hours and billing. However, this would be more agency and client-specific issues. As a task and hour tracker, it gets the job done.

Pros: The program gives the ability to pin project codes for clients which means that if you have static clients you don't have to dig through codes week to week before beginning to insert hours. This removes a tedious part of hourly project tracking, unlike some other programs that require you to reinsert them week to week. The program also has a comment section that allows you to describe the tasks that were worked on, so it makes it easy to recall what exactly was being worked if you need to look back at your hours or track down projects.

Cons: The navigability of the software can be confusing at times. Especially if you are mostly just using the program for work task tracking. Often, I would have messages that I wasn't sure how to get rid of or messages in the inbox making you think there was something urgent that needed to be taken care of but was really for just something from the previous week like clicking on a button to resubmit approvals or things of that nature.

Comments: We've been running our consulting and accounting business for over 20 years. Most of the time we used various project management, time tracking and billing systems. Last year we decided to introduce WorkBook and replace the previous system we used. As we knew what we needed, the implementation was fast (approx. 5 working days). The new solution was easily accepted by all people in our organization and we didn't experience any challenges in this area, opposite to previous systems. Some features that were important for us:
- multi-language interface,
- invoicing in many currencies and languages,
- direct access to the database allowing easy creation of own reports and integration with other systems we use,
- easy administration,
- ticket system for quality management system,
- conversations that are very useful not only for communication, but also making reports of the minutes and tracking various project activities. When we started using the Polish interface we found many translations inaccurate or even funny. We were not very happy about it, however the translation tool allows us not only to adjust the translations to the Polish language, whenever we find a mistake, but also to the nomenclature we use internally. The only thing we miss is a wiki module that would allow to describe the internal processes and tracking their changes. The customer service answers very fast, what is not to overestimate these days - 5 stars in each category.