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…
N/A
Workamajig
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Workamajig is a project management system with capabilities such as file sharing, resource management, and revenue projection.
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 …
Accelo is a system that can do it all. It's extremely sophisticated. Depending on the sophistication of your organization, or specifically the abilities of the people you put in charge of the implementation, it can almost be too sophisticated. It all just depends on your situation. The more you use it, the more data you give it, the more you'll be able to see and do. It's incredibly powerful. But it's definitely not a tool that would be appropriate for smaller boutique type organizations that have only basic needs.
If you're looking for a system to help you address accounting that's not suited for marketing agency structures, this is the right tool. It is a bit cumbersome, but it has streamlined our reporting, billing, estimating, and tracking. As for project management, it's great that it integrates with the estimating and finances, but it's just not enjoyable to use. The interface is clunky. So if project management is your main criteria, I'd choose something else. We would never use it to collaborate with clients either because I'd be afraid of making them frustrated by the tool, so we use Basecamp to do that.
The Platinum version has a particularly robust time tracking system, down to a 'timer' function that can be critical for an agency like mine where you want to be accountable for billing a client arruately
The ability to make projects available only to those who are permitted to assign their time to it has apparently been very helpful during our revenue reconciliation meetings where time incurred is reviewed against scope
The mobile app, while I still feel needs some work, is pretty handy for a quick calendar check if I'm in a client meeting and cannot utilize my browser to get information
WMJ's interface is dated. Despite an html5 driven "sheets"-based interface, it takes a lot of time and effort to manage the interface, which could be streamlined considerably. On a UX/UI scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, WMJ would earn a 6 from me.
Despite the amount of documentation available, there is a distinct lack of clarity in that documentation, and it doesn't fully cover everything you would expect. Branching thoughts, for instance, are not addressed. Additionally, because there are two editions of the software online, there are two support sites that aren't sequestered. So information from both commingles, creating confusion.
Support is available on an email and phone basis. They strongly encourage you to use email, however, and they are resistant to phone time. This is likely because the support staff is limited in number, but has a great depth of knowledge. If you want immediate phone support, however, YOU ARE OUT OF LUCK. You are placed in a queue and the odds of same-day help are low. For email, the response is usually within an hour, but when you are stuck with a configuration issue, or need to generate a report and don't know how to do something, waiting is not optimal. That said, the support team is TERRIFIC.
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)
Accelo doesn't really exceed any competitors in any one area of their product, but in 2015 when we made the move this was the best option that included all the tools we wanted. However, user adoption was low in some areas due to the UI, so we scaled back Accelo and added other tools.
Workamajig definitely isn't the prettiest among the project management tools I've used, nor does it have the friendliest UX/UI. But it does have some advantages when it comes to automating tasks in a schedule, automatically replacing versions of files with the same name and finding past projects. It's not my favorite tool, but I've experienced worse.
The subscription expense and IT overhead has been substantial. That being said at the time of implementation, most other competing platforms were in line with their pricing.
As more competitive alternatives have come to market we would have probably gone with an entirely cloud base alternative at a lower price.
We ended up with ClickUp as our primary project management platform. If our finance/accounting software wasn't already so integrated with Workamjig we would probably switch to it entirely.
