Unclaimed: Are are working at Accelo ?
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 |
Compare Accelo with other popular tools in the same category.
It's a central source for all our operations activities and then some. For the first time we can see what's going on between support, projects, retainers and sales. The activity tracking is something that now I could not live without my staff doing.
There could be more views that suit software consultancies, but I can live with that easily compare to all the other benefits
Employee, contract and project profitability. A 15% increase in margins by being able to easily identify bad contracts, and poor project work.
We love the myriad of reports provided by Accelo that help us make more informed business decisions. It definitely helps bridge the Sales and Consultant gap, which is a common problem businesses face when their consultancy business grows to a size larger than 15 people. Data drives success, and Accelo definitely excels at that. Consultants also particularly like the ease of time logging, and ease of knowing what they need to work on, with the robust scheduling feature built into Accelo. Support from Accelo is also great, and as customers, we feel our voice and opinions are heard, and worked on diligently by the team Accelo. This is definitely a company that cares about their customers' success.
We do use Accelo for our Support team to communicate with customers as well, but that experience is definitely below par
Our company was previously using Jira's Tempo Timesheets addon to manage consultant time logging. This was good until our consultancy business grew to the size it is now. Tempo was not able to cope with our scheduling, forecasting and utilisation report demands. This resulted in us not being able to project consultant availability accurately, and hindered Sales from closing opportunities that should have been closed, due to the inability to see who is capable, and available for a particular engagement. We then decided to switch to Accelo, and this turned out to be a brilliant decision, as Accelo was able to provide all the necessary reports we needed to properly forecast and schedule each consultant to projects. Sales was able to make better decisions in regards to availability, and this data is then used to drive other decisions across the company, such as hiring and pipeline goals
Since we started using Accelo in December 2015 the product has continued to evolve and improve. Money is invested in the platform and requests for upgrades and changes are considered and often implemented. This is unique in my experience. The tool is a powerful tool enabling my business to make data driven decisions in a timely manner.
Financial reporting dashboards could be more detailed in Accelo. This is however overcome by exporting and using platforms such as Bright Gauge and Power BI
Monitoring budgets , project management, time management of consultants through timesheets. Consultants are having to own there own budgets as they are updated live and can be seen by all levels of management. Transparency is key.
The fact that one product platform tracks our sales through to projects, manages our service desk ticketing. Tracking and managing our support contracts and integration with our accounting package is the icing on the cake.
Main dislike is profitability reports only include labour effort and not profit margin on hardware (material) sales on a per user basis. That and the issue you cant bulk approve expenses.
Accelo solved numerous business problems for us. Prior to Accelo we relied on seperate products for everything with no real integration between them. A lot of processes were manual as opposed to now our whole end to end workflow is automated. Time spent invoicing has dropped from around 20 hours to 1 - 2 hours. Engineers have greater visibility and hence ownership of the projects they are allocated to. We are into our second year of using Accelo and looking back don't know how we managed without it!
The ability to customise worklfows and automate task creation, email templates, reminders, project planning etc, and the ability to track statuses and other data.
As a product sales business I sometimes feel Accelo is more geared towards service businesses (e.g. billable hours) than product businesses.
Increased efficiency, increased standardisation, more manageable sorting of data.
Accelo is really exciting, all-in-one platform. There are plenty of "tools" out there, but they always seem to fall short. Accelo is a true system and it has already helped our team immensely. I would absolutely suggest that you check it out.
Honestly, the only frustration I have with the platform is the fact that my team and I haven't allocated enough time internally (yet) to complete the implementation. With that said, we will slowly but surely work to wake up this real beast of a system over the next few weeks!
The first thing that comes to mind is the Client Portal. As part of our management services, we actively serve 100+ properties and systems. The Accelo Client Portal allows us to receive, prioritize, and track customer tickets and requests all in one place. This feature is mission-critical for us to continue to scale our operation.
fast prompt responses and detailed training
we are very happy with the platform to date there is nothing that we are unhappy with in the manner that we currently use the platform
project management, clarity over project status
Accelo has helped our firm: 1) Standardize our workflow on tax work. This via Accelo project and or retainer custom workflows. 2) Automate some tasks that would have usually required a manually follow up. This via Accelo Triggers. 3) Provide better client communication via a self help portal that can provide file/current engagement views. This via Accelo client facing secure portal with very customizable user permissions build in. 4) Wonderful integration with office 365.
1) Syncing with QuickBooks desktop and online works but is not a true bi-directional sync for customer information and invoice changes. Accelo is working on this thou and it seems to be based on a limitation from an intuit API perspective which is updated regularly. So we have high hopes that the sync will be a true bi-direction sync in the future for customer information and invoices. 2) Office 365 calendar, email, and contacts are flawless. Tasks are another story. This likely based on an API limitation based on outlooks tasks. We would like to see as a replacement a Lync with SharePoint as one possibility
Specifically the following: 1) A bottleneck of open items and questions to complete tax work. By utilizing Accelo triggers - custom retainer fields - and Accelo work flow progressions we have been able to send automated email reminders to clients every week. This has helped clients follow up quicker and when deadlines approach removed the issue of "why is my work not done". Accelo is all about communication with clients we have found. 2) Follow up during the year. By utilizing the office 365 integration and the Lync with clients in Accelo a trigger has been setup to send a friendly email to those clients where communication has not been made for 60, 120 days. This simple email trigger has improved client retention as well as led to further billing opportunities basically paying for the Accelo service fees. 3) Improved overall work quality by forcing the tax professional both at the prepare and reviewer level to follow a preset yet flexible workflow that communicates with the client every step of the way. Accelo has helped us provide a more informed client experience with a better product/service overall.
I work within a marketing department as a graphic designer and am solely reliant on my workload being briefed in by account executives. Accelo allows all of my work to be fed into me online with everything i need in one place. Task description, brief, deadline, time frame, attachments, previous correspondence, stakeholder and links to overall project details. The team schedule also works well as i manage one member of staff so it allows me to keep up to date with their workflow, timescales and progression on particular projects all in one view. The timers are a real bonus as historically we have had to bill internal clients for our marketing time, this was a great tool to help you stay focused on one task!
Although loading times have decreased some of the screens still take a while to load or update. Predominantly the pending tasks screen. When you have more than 4 pages of pending tasks this screen auto refreshes which slows down the whole process. When search for a client to log a task under - this is really slow at loading. Creating projects is still a bit clunky. Especially when a project could hundreds of tasks assigned to them. I think this could be streamlined.
Better management of projects. Accelo is the only single place where all of the team (10 strong) are able to keep up to date on projects and progression of them. The timer function has enabled me to better quote on timeframes for future projects. This has essentially decreased the backlog of work due to better planning.
The best part of Accelo for our team is the Gadget. Once connected with Gmail, the transparency that Gadget has created allows us all to work more efficiently and effectively together with the shared information.
Accelo is not incredibly intuitive, and it has taken us a lot of time to figure out small details. We feel that it was designed with a programming-literate user in mind, but most of us do not fall into that category so we have had to spend extra time working with the software to get it to do exactly what we want.
We have greatly solved our communication issues and work delegation. With the ability to quickly assign or change the assignment of a task or issue, we are able to stay on track and get SO much more done. Where we once had to communicate everything verbally (and not well), we are now able to quickly send emails and notes as soon as the ideas are fresh in our heads. Everything is now in one place, and we can be so much more accountable for the work that we have to do.