Marg Accelo

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.

Beware and really dig in and talk to other users in your specific industry. The sales team will tell exaggerate the benefits and features of the tool to close the sale. Plan for a 3-6 month implementation period with at least 200 hours of training and hands-on practice. Most of that time is the later and know that it will be frustrating. The structure and naming convention for the tool is not ordinary and you will be forced to think and do things differently than you might think is best for your business. Accelo expects you to make significant changes in your processes to accommodate the restrictions or shortcomings of their tool.

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

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.

Only consider Accelo if your teams has more then 60 hours for training and setup and you are willing to pay for them to personally walk through each and every aspect with your team. This is NOT a DIY software.

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.

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.

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

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.

Implement as many features as possible the more you v-can train t=your staff to use the better the overall experience will be.

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.