Accelo Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice

The Timesheet Report and the various reports it provides

The inability to right-click on certain links like task links

Not solving any problems right now. Main benefit is its time tracker.

I like that you can adjust the time spent on each thing and correct your own time logging mistakes

I don't like how the times overlap after pausing and unpausing multiple timers

I realize when I spend too much time on certain activities and can improve efficiency

That we are able to track our time with timers and that I am able to generate good looking sales estimates very easily. This saves me a lot of time.

In terms of sales - the potential sales dashboard data is not very helpful. Would not really recommend as a CRM or sales pipeline tool.

Tracking time and productivity. We are able to pretty transparently see what individuals are working on.

The stream to track previous correspondence and the setting /completion of tasks.

Any old invoices from previous accounting systems require a manual process of re-export - accept - credit note issue. Extremely time consuming, not user friendly and very messy for our accounting system to show invoice issued and credited when they previously been recorded.

Keeping staff that require the information about our clients up to date with out a lot of additional phone calls between departments. Overall Accelo increase our companies efficiency.

It has a lot of features, it is really hard to describe what is best in it. Probably it's the convenience to suite quite a large variety of company types, workflows and team constellations.

The UX is probably not the best, especially in time tracking. Loading times are quite high and the process of changing/editing times is tedious. Also the learning curve is quite high too.

It solved the problem to model our company setting into a structure without much sacrifices or cuts. So what I mentioned before, it is pretty flexible and adaptable.

I like the tracking features. I can assign tasks to my colleagues and keep track of project status. Timelines and dependencies are helpful. I can track my time on a project as well. I have picked up best practices on the platform well, but some of my colleagues haven't. Accelo clearly has a lot of features, including some automation that we aren't currently using. The support team has helped answer my questions and provide additional training, but because of our specific needs, we need to create some workarounds. I wish we had more onboarding to make Accelo work best for our project and staff structure.

There is a steep learning curve for Accelo. It can be hard to figure out how to adjust tasks, track time correctly, and make sure the information is in Accelo for how my company uses it. There are many features I'd love to add. I would appreciate features like copying tasks, assigning to multiple people, more specific budget viewing features would all be helpful. We have some workarounds to make the platform work for us, but I'd prefer some features added. There are also specific project cases that need customization. Accelo is pretty rigid in their setup, so we have to make the platform work for us. This requires some workarounds. We're still learning, so I'm hoping it will get easier. Many of our freelancers have had more trouble than our staff figuring out how to track their time and tasks in Accelo. We are providing them some training, but we still find some issues.

At my company, we're using the Projects and Retainer features. Projects contain our discrete projects with a set start and end date. The feature allows us to set up a timeline to track work and budgets. We also use the dependencies and project templates to make project setup even easier. Retainers allow us to track tasks assigned to our ongoing support clients. This allows us to create retainer periods for ongoing work and recurring tasks. We use Accelo every day to track our project, retainer, schedules, and task statuses. My company also use Accelo to track our timesheets every week. In addition, we assign tasks and work through the platform to our staff and freelancers. Accelo helps us keep our budgets in place and up to date. We're able to bill clients through Accelo and tie the project to a sale. Time tracking is in the hh:mm format, so sometimes I'd track the wrong time if I input 1.5 meaning 1.5 hours but it logged a minute and a half. I learned you can solve this problem by putting an "h" after your entry 1.5h will log an hour and a half. Accelo provides an auto log feature but this was causing our account to have lots of small time entries on a project. I learned it's better for us to turn that autolog feature off and manually log our time when we enter it. Accelo task boards help staff see what projects are assigned to them when, but those features require all staff to input as up to date inforamtion as possible.

Their ability to replace multiple tools we were using.

They couldn't work with our Salesforce system.

None, we decided to stop services during setup.

I like the daily and weekly time sheet and being able to synchronize my calendar

The fact that you cannot set in deadlines for tasks you create within a retainer

I am getting some better overview on time availability

Accelo is an all-round program that helps you manage your agency. It handles retainers very well

Hidden costs and cost of ownership is a big negative. After subscribing we were told that to get quick support we need to pay an additional $100 per month on top of the subscriptions. When asking for implementation support we were offered packages ranging from $600 for 3 hours to a few thousands dollars. Another negative was the fact that Acello does not have one screen that shows all the work assigned to a user. A user need to toggle between tasks and tickets to get a few of his day.

One view of client profitability

Accelo provides streamlined communication all in one platform.

Accelo uses confusing verbiage that is difficult to pick up as a company.

We had been using multiple platforms and repeating our efforts on those. Now, everything is one platform, although we are still learning as a company.

Honestly the only thing I can say I like is what the software presents itself to be. It seems like a "one-stop solution" for all needs of a professional services or consulting firm. This would be potentially very useful!

Quality of the software. Shockingly terrible customer service. Manipulative and predatory sales tactics. This software was built a long time ago and has not been modernized to the extent it should have. Many modern User Experience functions are not included. It feels like early 2000's software that has had a UI facelift. The look is more modern, but the function is not. The user guides are not up to date and are not extensive. Finding out how this thing works is a tough slog. Help desk resources made some comments to us along the lines of "yes we know you've been sending us tickets very regularly". Seems they have a joke with each other about how our company reaches out to for help too often. Shouldn't this be a sign that they should improve the customers experience rather than laughing about how often they have problems? If you want to talk to someone who "almost" understands how the software works you must pay $300/hr. There are bugs that will make you wonder how this company is still in business. We've been using the software for 6 months and we've identified at least 4 bugs that they agree are not intended function. 4 in six months?! These are not small bugs either: 1. Template "overdue invoice" reminder sends a belligerent email to your customer without your consent. "We will prioritize this bug with the needs of other customers". 2. The customer portal has data labeled incorrectly for your customers so your customers are unclear on how they are getting charged. Was told they would "prioritize this with other needs" even though the fix is just changing a few text fields. 3. When consultants input time they are given access to your list of contacts within the customer even though user permissions are set not to allow this. Gives your consultants and potential third party partners a complete list of your sales contacts within a customer. It took 4 meetings with Accelo for them to understand why this was a bad thing. Then finally admitted it was a bug and given the "we will prioritize this" line. 4. Contractor license does now allow for valuable company reporting. We have about 20 contractor licences that we were sold. Then after implementation we find out none of their data flows into company reporting. Can't see them in profitability for the company etc. Why would anyone ever want a license where the financial data produced by that user does not flow into company reporting? Customer service manager told me "yes, well you have to understand that we want you to pay for the full license". Well, we were sold these other licenses and never told that the data would not flow into reporting until after implementation. Then we met with a senior implementation person that said no that's not intended function. He said he would get back to us with a fix, we never heard back. Still can't see profitability across the whole company. It's like being sold QuickBooks, then after you go through implementation you are told told "sorry the license you bought won't allow you to make a Balance Sheet you should buy the higher license that is 4x the cost of the one you bought" Bugs in software is understandable; it happens. Good software is hard to make and few do it at a high level. However, there is no excuse for bad customer service and predatory sales tactics. We evaluate software for a living. Accelo fails miserably in ease of use, function, price, customer service. It's bad. Really bad. Stay away if you value your sanity and hard earned cash.

It's not solving anything right now. We have spent many hours trying to get it set up and we cannot use it the way we wanted to. Accelo, at this time, has been a total waste of time and money.

I like the stream function where you can see conversations associated with a specific project.

Really poor customer service and the program itself is very dated and ugly to use. Poor user interface.

I'm not sure. I don't use Accelo to the best it can as it is enforced by management.

The UI has improved over the years, but that is pretty much it.

We were kicked to the curb after supporting their platform for years, through its ups and downs. Last month they decided to double our license fee since we had less than 5 licenses. We were willing to accept a moderate price increase, as seen across most SAAS solutions during times of inflation, but this action by Accelo was unacceptable. Complete disregard for our history with them. On top of that, for over 3 years we were waiting for them to allow for portal customizations that never materialized, along with other features pushed way down the development pipeline, if they even exist. We integrate CRMs for our clients. Simply put, there are many other CRM platforms available that surpass Accelo, in both breadth of features and price point.

Accelo was able to allow us to create effective retainers previously, however, the many bugs and glitches diminished our trust in the platform. It was able to solve some integration isssues until a better solution came along and surpassed Accelo.

I am unable to answer this question as I am very unhappy with the system and the team

We were sold things that do not exist. A task in Accelo is incredibly inflexible. We can not create custom fields, nor can we do any workflows and we are unable to add inline images. We were oversold and we are very unhappy

They were supposed to unify our systems and what happened was we ended up creating shadow systems on Google Drive and Hubspot to manage the Accelo workflows. Very unhappy with this tool and would not recommend it to any agency.

It's not ConnectWise, other than that nothing really

Slow, difficult to use, I can never find my way around the software, nit very intuitive. Not a particularly good project management tool. You have to spend a lot of time messing around with it to get it to do anything

Company uses it for project managemet and IT service desk

I loved the potential. Accelo claims it can do just about anything and I loved that. I loved the idea that it was everything that I would need out of a CRM. I loved that everything was in one place, and even though it was complicated, my company could grow within it. I liked the way that it setup projects, the way it set our timelines and could assign jobs to my team.

Far too complicated. My CFO told me that this software was too complicated, "overly complicated" but, I was in love with everything it was capable of. So, we signed up just one user and decided that we were going to figure it out, and then add the rest of the team. I have always been able to figure out my CRM software without training. I had no chance with Accelo. I watched every, single video, I asked a thousand questions. My CFO watched every, single how-to video. My team spent hours and hours and hours trying to get it all running correctly. Every time we made progress and were ready to spread into another area of the software, we started the whole nightmare over again. After six months we were barely using the project management, client portal, and the billing. The training was exhausting and took MORE time than just using a series of notebooks. A CRM should clean up time, eliminate complications, streamline everything. Accelo only complicated things. My clients couldn't understand the portal so I spent hours teaching them. I finally called it three days ago. I have been using our new software for two days. It is a Godsend.

We were attempting to create complete and organized systems and management for our business. We needed project management, a client portal, client contracts, everything organized, everything running like clockwork. Unfortunately, after six months, we had none of that. The setup was beyond complicated. The "how-to" videos followed no organized system or plan. We dumped hours and hours and hours into this software and were still not able to utilize the aspects that we needed.

The tool is highly powerful and has a broad feature set.

The learning curve is so steep that even highly tech-savvy teams may quickly be buried in training and frustrated by Accelo's attempt to demand a new way of doing many of your business processes. For the tool to work as fully intended you have to email and do all calendar entries from the tool - yet it lacks all of the common functionality like calendar sharing, scheduling a conference room or GoToMeeting integration which means you either loose features of Accelo or you work with sub--par technology. The gannt chart is pretty bad and the UI/UX is behind times. They admit this. They also admit that their client portal is lacking and poor. I would never have selected Accelo had I realized the complexity, learning curve and the way it causes you to completely shift so many processes. It's frustrating and disrupts your business significantly.

Task management, time tracking on projects, dependancies across tasks.