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Accelo

Score8 out of 10

31 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Accelo?

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 services, and marketing, Accelo helps professional service firms optimize operations and scale profitably. Its platform integrates the entire quote-to-cash lifecycle, enabling businesses to seamlessly manage client relationships, track projects and resources, and automate financial workflows.

With tools for CRM, project tracking, automated retainer management, scheduling, invoicing, and real-time analytics, Accelo empowers organizations to align teams, improve resource utilization, and make data-driven decisions. Built for businesses aiming to enhance operational efficiency and profitability, Accelo offers a fully configurable solution to meet the unique needs of professional service providers.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

the PSA / Platform - a client profile
the included CRM functionality, used to communicate, track and engage with leads and clients
the Sales interface, providing lead management functionality
quote creation, where users can compose, modify and send professional work proposals
projects, the interface to plan, manage and collaborate on client deliverables
ticket generation, where users can submit, monitor and complete ad-hoc work requests
retainers, the interface used to set up and track ongoing contracts for recurring work
the billing interface, used to create, send and sync invoices for billable time
an example report. Users can generate, analyze and interpret core business metrics
the client portal, used to provide clients with secure access to work progress and updates
the mobile apps, where users can work and log time on the go with iOS and Android apps
some of the available integrations. These help connect, streamline and enhance critical business applications

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Reviews

What users are saying about Accelo.
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A good tool if you want a lot of integrated features, and are OK with not used best-of-breed

Incentivized
Ryan FreemanView profile
President in Corporate at Strider Inc. (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Cumbersome processes - feels like tasks take longer than they should.
  • We gave up on the Projects module, it was rather unintuitive. Switched to JIRA, which integrates with the Support module of Accelo.
  • Each email address requires a new contact. If one person uses multiple email addresses to contact you, that info will have to be spread across multiple contacts.

Return on Investment

  • Allows our growing team to have more client information and context accessible during client interactions.

Alternatives Considered

Norada Solve360, Zoho CRM, Insightly and Zendesk

Other Software Used

Xero, FreshBooks, SharpSpring

Easy Presentation Solution and Great Ability on Multiple Services Automation and very Simple to use.

Incentivized
Johnson MartinsView profile
.NET Software Engineer in Information Technology at JFrog (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Effective scheduling product which has multiple functional features and the customization of the Accelo features is easy and the configuration of the Accelo dashboard is quick. This platform connects multiple clients to different professional services and also the ability to plan and manage project workflow, Accelo is the best and very easy system for data analytics and services Automation capability is nice.

Pros

  • Multiple services management system and easy to use.
  • Accurate presentation solution.
  • Easy to create reports.

Cons

  • Accelo is excellent on the adaptation to its deep functionalities.
  • Managing multiple project is very challenging.
  • Not easy to collect multiple reports across platforms.

Most Important Features

  • Scheduling features on Accelo are perfect.
  • The Accelo reports are very useful and easy to gather multiple insights.
  • Connecting Accelo to other platforms is very simple which simplifies data migration operations.

Return on Investment

  • Excellent tool for data migration and effective tools on collaboration.
  • Real-time data results are easily offered by Accelo tools and the data planning tools are excellent.
  • Good solution to create amazing reports and the Automation of various services using the tool is great.

Other Software Used

Easy Projects, Mavenlink, FinancialForce PSA

Accelo brings sophistication and power to your team and your business

Incentivized
Charles Fashana, MBAView profile
COO (Chief Operating Officer) in Marketing at 19 IDEAS (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Complete end-to-end project management.
  • Job planning, budgeting, and time allocations.
  • Integrations to G-Suite for email and calendar sync/visibility.
  • Connecting clients to companies to projects and keeping a sightline of the broader relationships.
  • Easy task management and schedule views.
  • Seemingly limitless customization options for preferences, notifications, groups, permissions, etc.

Cons

  • While much of the data you will be looking for is there and within the system, it's not always easy to find, and the export functions are terrible.
  • Moving/reallocating tasks, meetings, or time entries is very cumbersome and in some cases not available.
  • Views of time sheet reports and different types of reporting for unbillable/agency time vs billable client time are not great.
  • Not able to have multiple assignees on tasks that are shared.

Return on Investment

  • This was/is a major investment for our company. Despite the consolidation of systems, it was an increase in cost. But we determined that this was the tool to help us grow. We were going to grow into Accelo. We are confident this will take us where we want to go.
  • Apart from the fairly hefty per user monthly cost, there will be a significant investment of team time required to lead the internal implementation and ongoing evolution of how the system gets best utilized.
  • We now can see true profitability across clients and projects based on internal costs and billings. This is helping us become more efficient but also plan for future project growth.
  • We determined to get the full value and power of the tool, we needed to go with the full ServOps Premium tier—which runs $69/user/month. If your agency or company covers multiple competencies, you'll want the full package in order to best leverage it. We felt it wouldn't make sense to take a lesser tier and forgo critical functionality.

Alternatives Considered

Harvest, Asana, ProWorkflow and Workamajig

Other Software Used

SharpSpring, HubSpot, InVision, 1Password, QuickBooks Online

Accelo - A great solution for SMB

Incentivized
Chris OsterhoutView profile
Vice President of Business Strategy in Professional Services at WSOL (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Retainer Management - I am not sure we could run retainers effectively without it.
  • Hour Logging and Tracking.
  • Customer Email Tracking.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • It substantially reduced the number of systems we use to run our business.
  • It reduced the need to train our staff on a variety of platforms.
  • It gave us the ability to have a client-facing portal that directly integrates with our backend systems.

Alternatives Considered

Workfront

Other Software Used

Basecamp, JIRA Software

GREAT Time Management, AWFUL Email Platform

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Marketing (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Timing Client Work: You are able to better manage your time on your clients.
  • Housing Client Info in one Area: You can view all you need for any given client in one area.

Cons

  • Email Errors: Countless issues with missed emails, scraped links, screenshots not going through, images/colors/hyperlinks all being stripped from emails.
  • Ease of Email: You can't just "send an email" to anyone. The email address HAS to be linked to an account (client). First, you must add an email address to a client before you can send an email. This is painful when you're trying to communicate with sources like Google and having to create many different 'companies' to add emails to the company before emailing them.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Teamwork Desk

Other Software Used

Teamwork Desk, Teamwork Projects, Slack

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