G2

Verified User in Supermarkets

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

8/25/2026

"Centralized Project Management with a Few EU-Specific Hiccups"

4/5

What do you like best about Bearbook Projects?

I like how Bearbook Projects rolls project task management, time tracking, and invoicing into one unified workspace, which perfectly fits our mid‑size retail team at EuroMarkt Retail GmbH. We don’t have a dedicated project management office, so our digital transformation team handles all store renovation, self‑checkout hardware rollout and retail‑process improvement work across multiple supermarket locations. Before this tool, we juggled separate task trackers, excel time‑log spreadsheets and our accounting system, constantly copying data back and forth between different platforms. What stands out is how tightly time‑tracking ties directly to individual project tasks, letting my team and external contractors log hours right under assigned tasks without maintaining standalone timesheets. A few months back we completed a full self‑checkout hardware deployment across three of our downtown supermarket branches, working with an outside hardware integration vendor. Every technician logged their on‑site working hours against installation, configuration and staff‑training subtasks inside Bearbook. When the vendor submitted their final bill, I pulled the built‑in time logs and cross‑checked line‑by‑line against their invoice. We quickly caught that they billed for six hours of after‑hours on‑site work that never actually happened. Thanks to those task‑linked time records, we successfully negotiated down the invoice and avoided unnecessary over‑payment. I also value the flexible project‑workspace structure that lets me spin‑up separate dedicated workspaces for each individual store‑upgrade project. All related tasks, site‑visit notes, contractor communications and draft invoices live inside that single workspace. Store managers, procurement colleagues and external vendors are assigned granular access permissions matching their role. This keeps our geographically scattered retail stakeholders aligned, even when our supermarket sites are spread across different towns. Team members no longer need to sift through long email threads chasing project updates. Even with its German‑tax template shortcomings, this all‑in‑one functionality removes huge amounts of redundant manual administrative labour for our lean retail team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Bearbook Projects?

The biggest practical pain point is the lack of region‑specific financial templates for EU and German business requirements in Bearbook Projects. There are no native invoice presets pre‑configured with correct German VAT fields, mandatory legal footnotes or local tax‑compliant layout standards. Every single invoice we generate must be manually edited line‑by‑line to add EU‑required financial metadata, which adds repetitive administrative overhead for every store‑renovation or hardware‑deployment project. We had a nerve‑wracking close‑call incident during our city‑centre supermarket self‑checkout rollout. I rushed to generate a draft invoice for our hardware subcontractor at the end of a busy workday. I forgot to manually insert our mandatory German legal disclaimer block and full VAT breakdown. Our in‑house finance team spotted the error only minutes before we planned to send the document out. If that non‑compliant invoice had been dispatched, it would violate German commercial law and create serious audit risks for our retail business. I would welcome region‑aware validation checks built directly into the invoicing workflow. The platform currently gives zero warnings when key EU‑required fields are missing. After that stressful close‑call, my team still has to rely entirely on human memory to verify VAT rates, legal notes, and company registration details for every draft invoice. If Bearbook Projects could flag incomplete EU‑specific fields before an invoice is saved or exported, it would prevent human error, especially on busy sprint days when my team is rushing to wrap up store‑project paperwork. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Bearbook Projects solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before adopting Bearbook Projects, our retail digital‑transformation team depended on Business Builder paired with piles of disconnected spreadsheets to manage store‑refit and hardware‑rollout initiatives. We exported raw contractor hour data, filtered excel rows manually, and compiled billing verification reports completely by hand. This old workflow created real‑world risks and wasted significant working hours, especially when we managed multiple supermarket projects in parallel. I still remember a frustrating experience during one of our early supermarket renovation cycles. We worked with an external fit‑out contractor for our suburban store remodel. All task updates and contractor working hours lived inside uncoordinated spreadsheets that multiple team members edited. File versions kept getting overwritten, and we had no single reliable source of truth. When the contractor delivered their large final invoice, we burned two full business days digging through site logs, email threads and scattered notes just to validate billed hours. Even after all that manual labour, we could not fully rule out hidden billing discrepancies. Bearbook Projects solves these core pain points. It combines task oversight, time logging and invoicing all within one tool. It eliminates messy disjointed spreadsheets and gives us a clear, immutable audit trail of every task and logged working hour. We can quickly cross‑reference contractor submitted invoices against actual logged time, greatly lowering the risk of over‑billing. It also simplifies our internal cross‑department cost allocation; I generate preliminary charge‑back invoices for different supermarket branches directly inside the platform for finance review. That said, it still carries notable drawbacks. We must manually adjust every invoice to satisfy German local tax and legal requirements, and we lost our old historical project data during migration. Even with these workarounds, it drastically cuts our manual spreadsheet work, helps us catch billing mistakes early, and speeds up our retail project iteration cycles for store upgrades and hardware deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.