Accelo Reviews

The Best CRM!

Comments: We've centralized several different services into a single place with Accelo streamlining our work and eliminating loss of data.

Pros:

Ease of use, completely customizable, thoughtful and useful features!

Cons:

I wish I would have found it so much earlier than I did!

Helps me stay on top of things and simplify my workload

Comments: Accelo helps me keep track of existing projects and give assignments to the right people. What I like most about it is how easy it is to see what the current status is at any given time. Having access to our company's email is a benefit to us as well, since we use the email integration.

Pros:

One of the nicest features is the ability to attach email threads to specific clients or projects inside a company. In our previous program, we had to duplicate task lists and pray we didn't mess anything up by not being able to create project templates.

Cons:

To have a good overview of the billing dashboard, you presently have to rely on the usage of filters, which isn't enough. At a glance, I'd want to know if an invoice has been delivered, received, and paid. The mobile app comes in second, but it falls well short of the online version in terms of functionality and is in desperate need of some love and care.

Run away! Terrible quality updates and the worst customer service. False advertising of integrations

Comments: The first reason we chose AffinityLive, now Accelo due to what was a great set of tutorials and video demos.
We requested a live demo as they offer on their site however we we're keen to do a live demo and paid for a single subscription for a month so we could start trialling it until our request for a demo was requested. The front line tech I spoke to said I was ineligable for a demo as I had already purchased the product. The training videos are ancient or totally missing large parts of the product as they update so much so frequently its almost a new product every few weeks....
We we're flat out refused any demo despite it being advertised on their site.
The actual product was nothing like the demo video so a live demo really would have helped us get off to a flying start.
The second reason we committed to an early purchase in good faith that a live demo would be provided, was because it advertised integrations with Kaseya and Maxfocus that I was later told by both those businesses and staff at Accelo no longer worked. They are still advertised on the page despite my multiple complaints about the false advertising (Maxfocus has been Logic now for 6 months and they still advertise the integration on their homepage). Our account manager spoke to us three times in 14 months. Once when we had complaints about the lack of a demo which he also refused and then again to help us cancel our subscription, then one more time when they took a payment a month after we had cancelled our subscription and requested a refund.... Staff have no idea about their own product as it changes so drastically so often. A huge billing overhaul left us unable to invoice for three weeks! This was the final straw for us. We organised an export of most of our data (about 10 different exports required) but had missed the time on projects, we requested a copy of this data but they had deleted it all just three weeks later and were unable/unwilling to provide any policy document on data retention. The CEO is the rudest person I've ever spoken to. All sorts of threats about the first amendment despite me being Australian, them having an Australian office and being bound by Australian consumer law. The product is useless out of the box unless you purchase every premium and module they have. We were paying around $450AU each month for 2 techs! We're now using Atera at $89 per tech with integrated RMM with unlimited endpoints! Staff are amazing! couldnt be happier!

Opitimized and Automated our Workflow

Comments: Automated our business process from sale, to project, to billing. All of our team can interface and contribute seamlessly at any stage of the project. The price point is perfect and the Accelo support has been amazing.

Pros:

We switched to Accelo after using other inferior products for 18 years. We have been pleased with the front-to-back automation that is now seamlessly running critical portions of our business. With Accelo, we have been able to place several business functions on one platform, where before, we had to use several products to accomplish the same thing - with little or no automation. We are now more automated and productive. Our team loves the product! With the current COVID pandemic, we have found ourselves having to do more with less. To meet these new challenges, we are taking full advantage of Accelo's Expert Services Program and have partnered with an Accelo Implementation Manager. The benefits to our team and bottom-line were immediate. When this crisis is over, we will recover quicker and grow our business with more confidence using the software.

Cons:

We love the software. As others have stated, we wish that we had been using it years ago.

Product Analyzer

Comments: I enjoyed working with both the Tech and Sales reps. The tech rep was awesome in answering any questions I had at any one time. We did several webinars where the tech and I worked through questions/issues I was having. They have great learning videos, and although I wasn't a part of it, they had a good setup and training program for the end user I was recommending them to. Not once was I told that I was asking too much and would need to purchase before getting answers.

Pros:

I loved the analytics of this product. I was demoing several products for a client that was looking for a PM software that handled a lot of their issues. This software fit the bill. They let me demo it for over 2 months, as I also had a full time job at the time that interfered with my daily testing/playing time with it.

Cons:

I pick up new software fairly easy. I did have a major learning curve with this software. But once I got over that it was smooth sailing from there on out.

Accelo is Great for PM, but not as Ticketing System

Comments: I use Accelo mainly as a ticketing system. My overall experience is it is a pretty neat tool with a lot of potentials to be made into a great tool. If you are using it for Project Management, you are using a great tool, as it has detailed features that will help break down milestones, objectives, goals, and so on.

Pros:

Accelo is alright to us, visually good, and easy to follow. Has advanced features that will help users manage tickets/projects accordingly.

Cons:

Does not integrate with other newly built systems: due to its popularity, I guess. Issues with Merging tickets, as can't revert once done. Does not fully integrate with Outlook, especially forwarded invites or replies from Outlook directly.

Game Changer for our Professional Services Company

Comments: The implementation support was excellent. They really worked with us to configure Accelo to meet our business needs. The tool meets 90-95% of our needs, and they continue to improve upon it. Their support team is one of the best we have seen (we have used many products over the years).

Pros:

Accelo provides a CRM, sales funnel, statements of work (quoting), active work (projects and ongoing), time tracking and invoicing -- all in one fully integrated platform. The tool is quite user-friendly if set up properly for your business.

Cons:

The integration with QuickBooks Online needs some additional features.

Accelo is one of the best out there

Comments: We have been able to professionally manage our projects and automated our billing. Integration with third party email clients such as gmail has made it easy to manage communication under the activity feature.

Pros:

This software is feature rich but more specifically, this is a software that has helped us manage our entire sales cycle from managing contacts, Lead tracking, project planning and automated billing. But the most impressive is there is a client portal feature for our clients to collaborate on projects, accept quotes and view invoices.

Cons:

I hate that one has to pay for customer support.

Good for managing and running projects

Comments: Overall a very organized software. Keeps everything in one place.

Pros:

I love how easy it is to understand. Completely customizable and very organized on a whole. Tracking transactions with previous customers is super easy.

Cons:

The ease for booking leaves is actually not so easy. It seems to be very complicated. Also I have having to do so many tasks manually.

Accelo review

Pros:

Ease of use, fully customizable features and efficient

Cons:

Does not integrate with other newly built systems

Customized Agency CRM with lots of ongoing Changes but might not be best fit

Comments: ordering and keeping track of our client base - with specific notes and stream or history of conversations and emails with each of them attached.
Easy tracking of support or maintenance tickets and conversion to invoices from a few simple filters.

Pros:

We transitioned away from an Excel Spreadsheet to Accelo and the transition was amazing. Just forcing us to cleanup our accounts in order to transition saved us thousands in internal errors, missed billing etc. Accelo keeps you organized and has a wealth of options that you can take advantage of depending on the package you select with them. For us the most useful things were 2 way integration with QuickBooks Online - and being able to track time on tickets and tasks in Accelo then fairly easily filter and convert those completed tickets into invoices within QuickBooks. We liked how easy it was to enter time on a ticket and we loved being able to filter on staff for customized time periods in order to see hours worked by project for billing purposes. Overall this is a robust CRM software that helps you keep track of your clients all in one place, make detailed notes on your relationship with them, track your historical conversations with them and integrate with your Accounting software.

Cons:

Our biggest issues with Accelo were integration and Price: At first everything worked fine but after a provincial PST increase we had to create a new Combined tax rate in QBO and it stopped working with Accelo. Customer Service chased this down for months but we never got a reolution - just updates that they were working with QBO on this. After several months of not being able to push invoices through - it became clear we needed another solution. Secondly was the price. That was just too high for us in the end. We found other software that was not as robust, but fit our needs better, integrated with QBO more reliably and charged us a flat rate rather than a per employee rate - which makes MUCH more sense for us. One last thing we didn't like that they may have already updated was that filters were not able to be saved. We'd have a staff meeting and load up a page with 3 or more filtering specifications then click something and the results of the filter were lost. We'd have to go through all the steps to get back there again. Same thing next week. It would be nice to be able to customize your filter selections and save them so you can run the same evaluations or reports repeatedly and easily.

An excellent all-rounder

Comments: In our business we can have a long sales cycle, we also have consulting work, training, software we resell, support level agreements, adhoc support tickets, and we have larger project work as well. It is a lot to manage with a small team.
I tested many software solutions before we chose Accelo. Many packages were great in one area of our business but couldn't transition work as required. That is what really attracted me to Accelo. In Accelo you can start with a sale, migrate it to a project or a support ticket or a support ticket to a project. The system has the flexibility to work with the systems you are already used to and at the depth you want to go.
Accelo is a great all-rounder for a small business. It also integrates with the major accounting packages to ensure the tail end is taken care of as well.
When it comes to support, I've found the Accelo team to be supportive, encouraging and tuned in to their customers. The software is also evolved and improved regularly to respond to customer needs and to fine tune functionality in this worthwhile tool.
The time tracking functionality in the tool is excellent, and one of the features which sold me on the tool. I love the integration with outlook as well, creating that audit trail for future reference. In some ways though I think activities should come through with an aggregate cost, to simplify reporting to clients - sometimes too much information is a bad thing. It also takes longer than I would like to complete a time sheet and sometimes time is missed because work hasn't been approved. Also as updates are always happening, the time isn't static and this can be an issue when auditing time spent against an invoice down the track.
Customer facing reports/dashboards are also sourly lacking in the tool and my number one frustration right now. When a client calls me up and says how is my SLA tracking. I want to be able to produce a report which gives them the 5 key pieces of data they are after on the spot and send it to them, or at the very least screenshot it - at the moment we will export a detailed list of the support tickets and projects in progress for a client into excel, aggregate and manipulate the data manually and a create a dashboard front page which we then send them. It's a lot of work.

THE Project Management Tool to Use

Pros:

It is easy to create new projects in minutes with saved project templates. The gant chart view makes it easy to adjust timelines and due dates. You can alert teammates when their task is ready to start, and the task dashboard makes it easy for you to view your tasks for the day/week.

Cons:

The schedule view is not useful as is. Currently the schedule view will show how many hours of work you have for a given day. 1) You need to have a time set for the task in order to see this properly listed in the schedule view, 2) If you have a task that takes 3 hours, but you have it spread over 3 days it allocates 1 hour per day on the schedule view. If it's day 3, and that task had not been identified as started and no time logged it should show 3 hours of work on that day - but instead it still shows the 1 hour. If that logic were set properly it would make this schedule view much more useful. There is also a major issue with setting project schedules, you need to be sure to lock-in the dates otherwise your project dates keep adjusting until you start. It can really screw things up if you don't have that set right away.

Effective tool but missing some key functionality for management of a team

Comments: The company is good to work with. They try to be accommodating with requests. Their support team is responsive. There are some fundamental functionality missing from the system such as the ability to apply a discount to a quote. Also the way margins are calculated is incorrect. I need to recalculate by myself. Some of the dashboards are not meaningful. I would love to see the company spend time understanding reporting needs, and update the software to provide more meaningful information.

Pros:

The ability to create an opportunity, quote, and then close it into a project where we can assign resources and log time is very convenient.

Cons:

Reporting capabilities are severely lacking. I have to try many different ways to pull out data into excel and further manipulate it to do the type of analysis I need to do as the leader of a team. When I filter data, it doesn't always make sense and it doesn't leave me confident that the data is accurate.

Use this Everyday

Comments: I use this everyday and I love when our company transferred over to this software. We are so much more organized and work better as a team within this program.

Pros:

I love how organized you can be as a whole within the company. Everything seems to transfer well between coworkers and keeps us extremely organized.

Cons:

There are things I feel like are more difficult to understand but I also feel like that is mostly user error. When it comes to creating PO's I think the process could be easier inside of that to go ahead and create an expense.

I couldn't function without Accelo, but it still drives me crazy!

Pros:

It has so many features that it's light years ahead of anything else I've tried and I've been through dozens of programs. I'm probably using 10% of the features yet it's still indispensable. I love how I can set different rates for different clients, even the same clients but for different projects. I can fairly easily track my time and send invoices.

Cons:

That said, Accelo is so utterly confusing, that if you don't already have a complex management system that you're converting from, and is one which you already mastered, you can get very easily overwhelmed by the differences between Retainers, Tickets, Projects. You can attempt to just use one of them and see how it works for you, but then certain items won't be billable if not set up with the correct item. I wish they had templates set-up already designed for different industries, where they had instructions of how to setup and perform specific processes for your needs. Then a guide to stages to go to the next complexity of tools. I feel like I can't move forward for fear of breaking the 10% I'm able to use properly (or improperly). Support is very poor and only available via email. It can take a day for a response and I find myself having a week long back and forth on something that would take just a few minutes via phone.

I live in this 8 hours a day... here's what I have to say

Comments: I like the ability I have to manage my own tickets and while also being able to track my teams progress as well. The automation features really help cut down on time spent on writing responses and helps to deliver good service to our end users.
The ability to search past tickets seemingly from the beginning of our service with is insanely helpful when trying to remember back what I did to resolve a specific issue.
The stream is also a great tool to see what the team is up to. I dislike that it's web only. I feel that having a local app that looks to the online data would open up a world of possibilites.
I struggle with the fact that when I open a note or start sending an email I cannot reference ANYTHING on the ticket or site. The note or email consumes the screen. Being able to minimize that window or better yet have all the information on one screen so you can reference past notes on the ticket or review past responses and details in previous emails. Currently it's painful to do and it is hands down my least favorite aspect of the service.

COMPLICATED COMPARE TO ANOTHER SOLUTIONS OUT THERE

Comments: I GIVE THIS QUALIFICATION TO ACCELO CAUSE COMPARE TO OTHER SOLUTIONS IN THE MARKET IS VERY DIFFICULT TO DEPLOY WHEN YOU DONT PAY WITH THE DIRECT VENDOR THE SERVICES. I BELIVE THAT THERES OTHERS TOOL´S MORE INTUITIVE OUT THER

Pros:

ALL YOUR INFORMATION IN ONE PLACE SECURE AND MOST OF THE TIME AVAILABLE, ALSO YOU CAN GET ACCESS FROM ALL YOUR FAVORITE DEVICE´S.

Cons:

IS VERY DIFFICULT TO CONFIGURED IT IF YOU DON´T PAY THE ACCELO IMPLEMENTATION, IS NOT SO INTUITIVE AS OTHER SOLUTIONS IN THE MARKET, PEOPLE GETS VERY FRUSTRATED WITH THIS TOOL.

Beware of what you're getting into

Pros:

The tool is very powerful. It has a lot of features that allow you to do time tracking, project management, client communication, invoicing and much more. I think because it is trying to be so many things, it is lacking in most all of those areas and the user experience and overall feature set is quite cumbersome and falls below expectations for the money.

Cons:

The tool is overly complicated and lacks what you would consider basic features in so many ways. Our team of 8 people spent over 200 hours learning the tool and we are still learning and still frustrated weekly. They try to say that you can make the tool do about anything you want, but doing even the basics requires a tremendous amount of time. Things that should take 30 seconds often take multiple minutes. The system loads pages so slowly that it's not uncommon to watch the wheel spin for 30+ seconds which seems like an eternity when you are trying to work. I would not purchase the tool again and I would not recommend it to others unless you have a full time staff of IT or super users who will do nothing but manage the tool.

Awesome platform

Comments: Support team and onboarding experience is fantastic.

Pros:

Centralizes client retainers and billing into simple views that are easy to manage. Ability to view retainers/projects/sales verticals at a high-level while easily able to drill into specific client views is awesome.

Cons:

The ticketing system is not the greatest. It is VERY easy for tickets to get lost in the shuffle for users who manage a mix of ticket and task items.

TimeEntry/Expenses/Invoicing

Pros:

Though we don't use all of the features we do use it for several key functions including TimeEntry - Expense reporting - Invoicing etc. Nice to have one system to avoid numerous integration points, and reduce redundant data entry. For a small company we found it cost effective in comparison to others and keeps everything in one organized spot for increased productivity.

Cons:

Can be a bit touchy with removing users. Removing a user shouldn't delete them from ever existing in the history. Know what you're doing-take advantage of their training.

Great Project Management Software

Pros:

I love the quoting function and Customer Tracking/ticketing. This product allows you to track about anything you want. It syncs to your Gmail so you can get a notification on scheduling and different projects.

Cons:

In the beginning this product is hard to use. Once you use it daily and spend the time to learn it. It is a great product

Great experience, but a bit over our budget

Pros:

Accelo has a lot of modules, likely more than you need, but that's good because it can grow with you. I like the new projects module and how the project overview dashboard can help a lot with project planning. It is very fast and easy to add time to tasks and milestones. I also appreciate the estimates function and how easy it is to turn an estimate into a project. I think Accelo makes it much easier to keep your projects on budget.

Cons:

I felt a bit overwhelmed with Accelo because of all the tabs, features and buttons. I think they cleaned it up a bit recently but I still feel it is a bit more cluttered than other softwares. The price is also quite a bit more than some of their competitors.

Amazing and easy

Comments: Working remotely, this software has solved all real time issues between our company, helps us stay on track with deadlines, see what else is n3eded from us by the clientele, and ease of communication between the company when we are never physically together.

Pros:

It is available to use anywhere, anytime, just need to log in.

Cons:

There are a lot of options for creating tasks, tickets, items, etc. So it took time getting familiar with the use and difference between each one.

The best billing software we've used

Pros:

Are you looking for software that simplifies billing? This is what you need. Easily track timed expenses on tickets, retainers, and projects and then print out an invoice for your clients.

Cons:

The learning curve with this software is pretty steep. You'll need to dedicate quite a bit of time to learn how to use it effectively. With so many features and options, it's easy to get lost in the software.