Accelo Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice

The comprehensivity of the tool. It serves so many functions in our business. It helps us to manage resources, budgets, forecasts, and utlisation.

It's buggy and inconsistent in some areas - especially when it comes to managing multiple currencies with quoting. It is not very intuitive and the UI needs improvement.

Resourcing projects is easy with accelo schedule. We are better able to resource projects globally by having visibility into everyone's schedule. It also help us to distribute the workload among our team using schedule and utilisation scores. We can also ensure that people are both billable and non-billable and we have KPIs around these metrics so accelo is hugely beneficial to our entire team.

Accelo is great for the basics - tracking leads and opportunities, client contacts and projects. It's user interface is pretty easy and simple to pick up for the most part.

Project planning in Accelo is a nightmare and something we can't use in any helpful way - made unnecessarily complex by having to link exact hours/mins to cost for every line item

Tracking projects and fees in real time

Accelo is a good solution for professional service companies requiring a platform to manage and control project and retainer costs and profitability. It is easy to create quotes, convert to projects and bill, along with recording time and associated costs.

I called it the SalesForce of project management because its most significant weakness is the number of ways you can configure things and the complexity that can result. It is also a bit lightweight on reporting (most solutions are), so we have exported data to build better dashboards. Finally, the integration with Xero is not as effective and seamless as it could be, but we have created a solution of sorts.

Project management and better visibility of the overall capacity of the team

Accelo has a very logical way of working, which pairs perfectly with its automation. The layout is clean and easy to use, with you also able to set your own capacity levels on the schedule dashboards which makes Accelo super customisable for your own business needs. The reporting has a lot of options so there is always something available for what you need.

The biggest pain point of Accelo is the customer service, when bugs and niggles do crop up it takes a lot of work to try and get across what the issue is and then the responses aren't the most helpful and the fixes can take a while. When the issue is just a niggle this can be merely frustrating but it can be a major problem when an issue crops up that affects the way your business works.

Accelo has been able to highlight where we are overdelivering on tasks and clients in a really clear way - we have been able to track where we are spending more time than we estimated and therefore update our business pricing and delivery where appropriate.

How ticket is manage and customer always gets new ways to make complaints

To many flows to build not enough built in flows

managing customer complaint tickets

Sending emails from templates and automatic reminders has been a game-changer for our business. I really like using Tickets to track the progress of work, and invoicing was so simple.

Found the settings on invoices very limited and did not like that it doesn't produce a separate receipt. Having to "Click here to generate PDF" after receipting a payment is a little frustrating.

Our business processes have been streamlined with progressions and rules, which have benefited our business.

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.

Email tracking so I don’t forget to log my time

A bit complex outside the normal time logging part.

Logging time for work. Creating tasks for the team. I like that it prompts you and suggests time to log

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.

Having already being using salesforce.com, stripe and Jira internal for sales force automation, readiness and project management, it was very easy to get all external engagements integrate with Accelo for professional services and external project management.

The cost per user / month is on the higher side especially since it is possible to use existing tools already in use (eg. Jira) for what Accelo provides.

End of end cloud based automation of projects, contracts and operations that are external client/customer facing.

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

Accelo is a great system that combines everything you need to work efficiently throughout the day. It allows you to email, book meetings, run reports and invoice from within it's portal which enables you to stay in the same program for all your business needs. It's easy to pick up and learn, but also has a great customer service team if you ever get stuck on anything.

The biggest downfall for us is the lack of dual currencies within the software which makes invoicing tricky for clients that are abroad.

Having emails and diary access as well as project management for each event has allowed us to streamline our tasks and improve productivity.

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

The timesheet reporting is easy and fairly straightforward

There seems to be almost too many options

It does make it easy to follow the progress of a job through milestones

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.

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.

Accelo is a hub for all projects that houses necessary information for all employees to access

The speed in which it takes to complete things, it's overall organizational structure could be improved

A means to assign tasks and communicate with team members effectively under a specific project, creating a paper trail

Accelo helps keep projects organized and I love the ability to have everything for a project live within Accelo. Looking back on old projects is so effortless with Accelo.

Navigating through Accelo is a lot to handle. It can be very difficult to find things and I wish it was simpler to use sometimes.

Accelo solves the problem of keeping projects and their moving timelines organized. It's an unbelievable tool for keeping track of what is on my plate for work, what is upcoming, and what needs to be done.

the daily timelog with the hours timeline is an easy UX and a good visual, the categories and projects distinctions help with tracking work

editing a day or item can be numerous steps, searching for my projects doesnt always work, can't see my daily timeline when im entering new items

time management, helpful historical logs for looking up projects, analyzing LOE for various projects, billing made easier, share with clients

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

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.

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.

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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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