Accelo Reviews & Product Details

Connectivity between each module is great.

Complexity to set it up was worse than expected.

We found a lot of holes in our processes when going through implementation.

Accelo has been a very helpful tool for our Project Management, specifically the Budget Tracking. I appreciate the reminders you can set for yourself / your Team - allowing you all to track the work in real time and not lose sight of the bigger picture along the way. Another resourceful tool is the ability to monitor the minutes / hours you work on each project. For example, if I spend 1 Hour doing logistics / resourcing for a particular client - Accelo allows me to utilize a kind of stop watch to monitor every second.

Accelo has a lot of features, making it a little overwhelming at times to navigate. Speaking from personal / professional experience, I have been using Accelo for over 6 Months and feel like I still have only scratched the surface. I want to know my company / my Team / myself are all getting the best possible solutions for our work to benefit our clients. Programs like Accelo can be difficult to master, unless you lean on them for training.

Accelo allows us to keep our Projects organized and details the timelines. The problem solving capabilities are rooted in project timelines. Accelo gives us the ability to keep ourselves / our Team / our clients on track to fulfill every goal in the appropriate timeline. We can solve the problems / accomplish the goals with a clear end in sight and be able to address any roadblocks before they occur. When used correctly, Accelo can guide a project timeline from start to finish without missing deadlines or going over budget.

Accelo really helps in project planning ,tracking and streaming all activity effectively. Its Time tracking feature made it standout of other tools. It supports all devices and it is very updated CRM. The best part I like about this tool its centralized email function where any team member can access information easily. Analytics of also good. User engagement community keeps you updated with all the information.

Setting task sometimes is difficult and for beginner without training its difficult to do application setting as it is really complicated and various options which is confusing sometimes. It needs to be little speedy to make it more effective.

We have Accelo to automate the process which really helped us and make the work time saving. All the information is there at one place itself which simplifies the process. We have tried using this in our finance team which make them generating invoices directly from time sheet.

It is great for linking every email to one project, project and personnel management.

The on-boarding process was great, but the only downside was that we only had those people there for on boarding and nothing else. Yes, Danielle would check in every now and then when my teams usage slowed, but there wasn't anyone to help with new team members and integrating them to the system.

Onboarding my whole team is the biggest issue. Some members are receptive and others are not. Sadly , some employees are not held to the same standard in terms of using the software, which keeps us all from using it and seeing the full benefits

As a manager of projects and teams, I like the granularity Accelo affords me. I can create a big bucket of work and leave it as a milestone, or I can specify the nitty gritty of a project implementation. I also like how I can create a task and give it a budget using a variety of methods--time or dollars. I've used other task/PM tools, but this one is geared well to agencies. It's complex, but that's good because I serve many clients and I need a tool that can keep it all straight. The steep learning curve is worth it. One thing to note is that you may find that you will have to modify your business processes, such as invoicing, to accommodate the software's limitations. You'd think it would be the other way around, but no. You'll have to cram how you bill into the Accelo tool's capabilities. This isn't a bad thing necessarily, because if you use the tool according to the directions/recommended best practices, you may benefit from process improvements. If this tool doesn't fit the way you do your billing and service delivery, then maybe you could get on board with the Accelo way and discover cost savings and efficiency.

If your business uses odd billing structures like ours does, some kludging will be required. For example, we make a quote and then bill time up to that maximum. Clients are only billed for time incurred. Therefore, Accelo's "recurring" projects don't really fit us, because we don't really have a straight retainer model. At some agencies, it's a $X,000 per month bill every month. Accelo is great for that. My other minor gripe is the project plan editing tool. This is clunky and cumbersome compared to other Gantt tools I've used that feature a better UX. We've struggled to fully leverage all the things the tool can do, and we are still getting better with compliance and training. Our training sessions were poorly structured and ineffective, so we've had to largely figure out how to operate the tool on our own. However, tech support has been very responsive.

We are able to have better accountability for each contributor. I can see who is accruing time against work down to the minute, and I love that. Our agency is also improving profitability by preventing over-servicing of accounts.

The fact that you can keep track of all your tasks in one place, and see what team members are currently working on or have in their pipeline.

The complexity of the platform. There are too many ways to do the same thing, especially logging time.

We can keep track of what time we spend on each client, and bill accordingly. This means that we can measure our ROI effectively.

The consolidated list of sales and track record of each sale The ability to detail your sale cost and Gross Profit Easy to grasp Easy search function for clients & companies alike

Unsure how to make emails confidential so that they are not visible for everyone to see Lag delay on the system sometimes. Loading speed can be slow at times The fact that you have to edit the sale in order to state the GP amount. It should be easily editable on the front page of the sale

Remembering what sales are in the pipeline as well as tracking your numbers quite accurately Motivate me to do better as the whole team can see each others performance

What I love best about Accelo is that I can easily stay on top of interactions with my customers. I check the customer stream prior to customer calls to get up to date quickly on the interactions, questions, and issues with my client. In addition, instead of having 4 different tools for CRM, project management, support and invoicing, we do it all in Accelo.

With any SW program, there are bugs. However the support team does a great job to reply to questions and help fix the issues. The screens are not overly intuitive. This is something I know the Accelo team is working on and it is getting better with each release. I also find that the time it takes to load a page when you save something could be improved. Sometimes you sit there for 35+ seconds waiting for teh page to load.

The primary benefit we have realized is that we now have a one stop shop for our customer, project, retainer, support, issue and pipeline. PRior to using Accelo we had these functions in 4 different tools. IT was hard to integrate them and it was especially hard to get data to move between them. One big problem that Accelo solves is doing invoicing in USD. Thank you for solving this problem. We also now have a way to manage our work tasks and categorize the work done and to do. This is helping us plan for hiring by identifying the skills we need to hire to fulfill the services we have sold.

The platform has a number of serviceable solutions that integrate well with each other, and with Google Apps / Gmail. The onboarding options are helpful and support staff are very friendly. The Retainer tool does a decent job of managing recurring tasks and commitments once you figure out how to use it.

Unorthodox vocabulary, modules operate differently from class leaders, so the learning curve is significant and that can impair adoption across a team. None of the modules can reasonably be called best-of-breed - but most are still useful. - The Ticket system is a far cry from Zendesk, but still good enough. - The quote feature doesn't stack up to Quote Roller, so we still use QR for sales proposals. Accelo used to support integration with Quote Roller, but no longer does. - We tried to get by with their Project Management tool, but everyone gave up. Now we use JIRA for major projects. - We have multiple businesses operating in different currencies, so we reply on Xero for accounting, and Freshbooks for invoicing.

We switched to Accelo (then AffiniityLive) in 2014. We acquired another company that was using a different CRM and had to choose: Move their stuff to our CRM, our stuff to their CRM, or everything to a new CRM. Given the number of tools included Accelo won the day. We have benefited from significant cost savings.

I love Accelo as a platform. I have implemented it 3 times in my own businesses and can't fault it for the most part.

We have been on the Servops licenses on all three implementations however, on our most recent implementation, we got switched to a new pricing model, which costs over twice as much. I haven't seen a marked increase in features in the product, in fact, we now would have to pay extra for the support I used to love (Chat support)

It's great as a ticketing tool, OK for sales and needs work in billing.

The price is right for the features it delivers, it is easy to use, it streamlines our work, the features are customizable and very useful.

the amount of gb of cloud storage is very low

This platform helps us manage operations with our clients, under the confidentiality rules that I wanted, the profitability obtained thanks to accelo is convenient

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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.

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.

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.

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.