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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Forecast
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Forecast.it is a project portfolio management solution built around features such as resource planning and time tracking, budget estimating, and analytics and reporting, with key third-party integrations.
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.
Forecast is well suited to track resources throughout a project or account lifecycle. The biggest benefit Forecast offers is the ease of scheduling resources across upcoming projects. This allows managers to confirm that projects are fully staffed or see which resources are over-allocated. This often will lead to department heads to analyze teams and determine whether more resources are required to be hired.
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.
Not as intuitive as its companion software, Harvest. This software takes longer to learn when on-boarding new staff. It is also difficult to view time notes without needing to physically open them up. This could be improved by expanding the "on hover" functionality. Personally, having spent as little time in workflow software is really important, as it gives me more time to code.
Because we use this software to plan schedules, items often fall through the cracks. I would like to see some more sophisticated syncing with not only Harvest but also with Asana.
Lack of integration with Asana. It would be nice to pull data from forecast and display it in Asana. This would be helpful for understanding how much time I have to spend on a project rather than bounce back and forth between web apps.
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)
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.
I have not used any other scheduling software other than Forecast. The company selected Forecast because it is used in conjunction with Harvest. The pair of web apps can be used to pull detailed data. This is very important to our agency, and making data-driven decisions is exceptionally important to our agency mission.
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.
Forecast does not integrate with other software in our workflow, and it makes it an entire extra step when it doesn't necessarily need to be. This takes extra time away from my actual job.
Forecast is powerful when used with Harvest, and allows for powerful data-driven decisions in hiring and project estimates. The more informed we are when making decisions and scoping, the more profitable the company can be.
It takes some time to onboard new Employees which can take time away from a profitability or other training.
