Accelo is a professional services automation software featuring an end-to-end cloud-based platform that manages all aspects of client work delivery, from prospect to payment, including sales, projects, tickets, retainers, timesheets, resourcing, and more, regardless of where you are.
Capabilities |
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Segment |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, Mobile Android, Mobile iPad, Mobile iPhone |
Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
1) Planning projects. 2) All correspondence is in one place
Daily Timesheet has had a bug that Accelo can't (doesn't want to?) fix
Planning projects and logging time
There is a ton of customization options, but if you aren't highly knowledgeable about Accelo, it's hard to figure out.
I hate that there aren't rich text fields for descriptions. If you need to write a long description or note, than it is impossible to read without any formatting.
Keeping projects organized and being able to more easily track a budget. It's easy to see where we are at on a budget on a client project.
I like the feature of having multiple work timers and being able to pivot quickly between tasks while not losing time having to log each entry before moving on. I like having a timesheet that can be viewed in multiple ways. I like that it has an app that I can use on the go. I like being able to see progress on a project, and which of my teammates have been working on each project.
The system runs slowly often. The system also does not recognize the "&" symbol in searching and typing, which is rather annoying. The scheduling functions don't seem to be very smooth or user-friendly, and it allows you to schedule more than 24 hours of work in one day. The project due dates will change automatically without prompting, which leads to confusion when sequential due dates on a project for sequential tasks should remain fixed.
We can keep track of time, logins, and URLs to specific sites all associated with specific clients. We can see work history and project progress per client.
I really like one of your recent features which is adding expenses and converting into invoices. Also commission calculation feature is great. Also I like you guys adding more new features and good maintenance and quick response. I am excited to see Purchase Order feature very soon.
There are a few odd things still need more attention. For example, when creating an invoice GST isn't default as Sales, so without knowing that an invoice doesn't get pushed to Xero. The most dislike is not able to know projects/tasks schedules in one picture, so sometime there are too many projects/tasks or too little. For example similar to Gantt Chart style will be good to have a big picture for adding more projects/tasks. Retainer should be improved, for example if current month's retainer not spent shifting balance of hours to next month is too manual way and taking too long.
At the moment we are having some issues with employees not logging their timesheet, ended up not able to invoice to the clients. It will be good to have some kind of indicator for employees to realise they must add their timesheet every hour/day. Also it will be great to have KPIs related to resources, for example if one employee's weekly work hours are 38 hours but logged hours are 29. So KPIs indicate that loss of hours that converting into a dollar values. Also It will be great to print easily from any pages. For example, not able to print material pages.
actually it's common compare to Atlasian Jira as an end level user.
the timesheet using ajax to save data/log time, but why the summary did not refresh once the popup is close? why do we need to refresh the page manually? Liquid planer have better ajax and user response, thought they too complicated
easy to manage resource
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
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.
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.
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.
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.