Accelo provides cloud-based Professional Services Automation (PSA) software designed to unify and streamline client, project, resource, and financial management for service-based businesses. By centralizing operations into a single, intuitive platform, Accelo eliminates the need for fragmented tools, delivering a comprehensive solution that improves efficiency, transparency, and collaboration across teams. Serving industries such as consulting, engineering, architecture, IT…
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Deltek Vantagepoint
Score 5.9 out of 10
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People and projects are the heart and soul of a business. So Deltek created Vantagepoint, which they present as a powerful, intuitive solution that helps users manage projects from start to finish. Deltek Vantagepoint’s 360-degree view of projects puts client, project and financial details in a single location. The vendor states this adds up to making well-informed tactical and strategic business decisions and a more efficient, productive and profitable company.
The best services management, easy operations reporting, and data analytics features from Accelo are impressive and easy on data visualization and workflow management software. Accelo was very helpful in collaboration and easy to collect feedback from integrated platforms and the scheduling ability is very unique. The Automation tools are also cost-effective and the ability to manage time through Accelo is perfect.
It is well suited to connecting customer relationship databases and a project lifecycle. Business development people and other personnel should be able to get good use out of it in their daily jobs and functions. It is helpful to keep a record of ongoing projects and new pursuits among the team.
Tracking customer interactions. Nice integration with G Suite, could be a lot better if they acknowledged that contacts may actually have more than one email address.
Support Ticket system is integrated, so we can view support history and other email correspondence easily. It's cheaper that Zendesk.
Support is reasonably good, usually prompt and responsive.
Constant development - lots of updates, just not often to areas that we use.
The client portal needs to be improved. It does not have the same user interface as we have within Accelo and we get a lot of client complaints about it.
It needs more executive-style reporting and the ability to create your own reports and filters.
It needs to be faster. With all of the things Accelo is doing to give you all the data, it is kind of slow compared to other systems in the browser.
Reporting is very clunky and anything but intuitive.
Compared to Vision, Vantagepoint layouts are very cookie-cutter. The latest release allows you to create up to 5 columns, still, it is so much less customizable than Vision in look and feel.
Customer service is poor. If you have a question or issue you can expect it to be addressed in 2-4 weeks, minimum.
Software testing has been poor in the past. Too many bugs have made it through to release on things that should have easily been caught, such as certain workflows not working, etc.
It is ok to use; it is not the easiest to use in terms of usability and user-friendliness but it is not the worst. It still feels somewhat outdated. Many cloud options are cleaner or look more modern. But it is good enough and you should be able to get the hang of it.
From the beginning the Accelo team has been very invested in ensuring our success and overall happiness with the platform. The initial implementation specialists and trainers did a fairly good job of learning our company and needs, and tried to tailor the trainings accordingly. However, once we made the formal switch to the platform, meaning we no longer were using our legacy systems, we found that we had a lot of questions....and a lot of ideas and recommendations. The support team is extremely responsive and seemingly happy to receive our continual feedback. And if we encounter an issue that seems to be a system issue, they work diligently to fix it (we've actually had an engineer join a call with us to learn of the issue - and subsequently fix it)
I would rate Deltek VantagePoint highly in terms of the overall support. You can receive support any time you need it and there is a representative from Deltek assigned to your account so that you can always get the help when you need it. Sometimes, they want to go more in-depth than I would like, however.
Harvest and Asana combined don't even scratch the surface of what Accelo can do. Harvest is nothing more than rudimentary time tracking. It's about as easy to use as they come, but it stops there. There's no tie in to project management, invoicing, capacity planning, etc. and the reporting isn't great. Asana we found to be very difficult to use for complex projects with multiple deliverables, multiple deadlines, multiple teams - and it didn't tie back to budgets and hours worked. So the deficiencies of those two tools are what led us to Accelo. In terms of more comparable systems, I had previously used Workamajig. The sophistication of Workamajig was there, but it didn't seem to have quite as much flexibility and customization. ProWorkflow we evaluated just based on sales and marketing information available on the platform and felt it wasn't quite as good.
The one-stop-shop of CRM, accounting, reporting, and planning is the biggest appeal for Vantagepoint. When you set up your system to provide a "single source of truth" it makes use of other systems impractical and obsolete. Other systems can provide a portion (CRM, accounting, planning, etc.) of what Vantagepoint offers in a single package, but very few provide the one-stop-shop Vantagepoint provides.
Save Money on Lost Time. You won't go over your client retainers in any given month if you use Accelo properly. This ultimately saves your company time and money.
Lost or Broken Communications. They need to get it together with their email system, aka "request inboxes" ... There are too many lost or broken emails for them to be trustworthy with this. My suggestion is to make sure you know everyone you communicate with (including outside sources like Google or other companies) and set them up in Accelo, then send test emails. Also, when in doubt, use your Outlook or other primary sourced email when you want to make sure an email goes through with all appropriate files.
