Scenarios where ActiveCollab works well 1) ActiveCollab works well for small teams specifically T&M teams.Its invoicing feature is unique & can make your life easy. 2) It is very easy to use & posses good range of filters like on the task list, we can drag/drop tasks, Filter by assignee's, tasks lists, due dates, or completed tasks. 3) It has some simple but awesome features like when you're in the middle of writing something i.e a comment on story and get interrupted, it retains what you wrote. 4) It allows you to tag team members in threads of comments to grab their attention, its really needed when teams are distributed. Thus helping team members to collaborate easily & stay on same page. 5) It integrates pretty well with other web apps like quickbooks , Slack, Trello, HubSpot, Zapier etc Scenarios where ActiveCollab did not work well 1) Tasks can not have multiple assignee's here so if two members are working on same task it did not allow you to reflect that. 2) Sorting capability is not their under invoicing 3) It did not work well for larger teams 4) Search option is not very detailed & you may end up wasting lot of time searching one particular bug or issue.
PaySimple has made it next to impossible to become PCI compliant unless we purchased a separate computer for the sole purpose of invoicing. We switched to Chase Bank who does not store sensitive info on our computers allowing us to accept credit cards and still remain PCI compliant. Our money is available much faster by not using the 3rd party. Additionally, a simple company name change required more paperwork than closing the account and setting up a new one even when the same bank account was going to be used. This was the primary reason to shop around. We happily contacted Chase Bank and now save $125 a month and receive access to our funds faster. I cannot believe I stayed with PaySimple as long as I did. It's amazing anyone would jump through the hoops of PCI compliance when the technology exists to keep sensitive information off your small business computers. If this review stops anyone from paying those monthly fees, the time was well worth it! PaySimple, requires business owners to fill out forms that make no sense in laymens terms. Chase Bank fills them all in for you and highlights the areas that need to be signed and initialed. PaySimple, charges excessive fees and in my opinion has very emotional customer service reps. Chase Bank, was eager to help and get things rolling so you can focus on your business. I would never recommend PaySimple.
PaySimple is awesome for recurring payments. It's easy to set one up and make changes as needed. Without this feature, our business would be dead. Being able to easily set up recurring payments for our retainer is a must and PaySimple does it beautifully.
The payment portal feature is also really good fro collecting payments of differing amounts. We setup a single portal where customers enter the payment amount accessed from a link in the invoice email. This feature has transformed out collections and cut down our time to get paid significantly.
If you do have product type offerings, it's easy to setup individual products or an entire store.
It isn't possible to set members of staff as part time, so if someone is unavailable on certain days you must manually enter them as OOO every single day that they are not in, that other teammates work. Hours also can't be edited individually - everyone is treated as working the same hours in a day, rendering capacity planner useless for flexi working teams
Subtasks cannot be assigned their own hours and deadlines, meaning the To Do list view can't be seen in actual date order and capacity planner does not reflect all time allocated to an individual's schedule unless every task is set up as a separate task rather than subtask
There is no way to see all tasks of a certain type across multiple campaigns (e.g all copywriting tasks vs all technical tasks) - support team suggested exporting data and making spreadsheets
Kanban view isn't available for people's own task lists ('board' view here shows a list)
Not possible to have one task be assigned to more than one person
Notifications are not sent when tasks are updated, so you have to leave comments and tag people each time
More proactive and empowering role in merchant fee's and alternative processors. Transparency is challenging in understanding Paysimple's role and relationship to the processors.
Identifying areas for further value to clients.
More targeted small to mid-size business perspective to anticipate growth challenges and prevent blocks on funds for legitimate sales and growth.
We have not required support for ActiveCollab as it works pretty seamlessly. We didn't have any issues with using the platform or with any billing issues. The self-service aspect of the platform is robust and easy to navigate so we have not encountered any errors that required assistance from the support team.
ActiveCollab is easier to use and simpler in its setup. It has the right mix of features and simplicity. It's also project-oriented which is important for our workflow. Other tools are often too task-oriented, making it hard to track projects. Overall, ActiveCollab has a great mix of simplicity with good features.
Authorize.net and a handful of other merchant processors and gateways. Most payment gateways (online portals to process payments) are rudimentary and not extremely intuitive. PaySimple is not and they are constantly coming up with new ways to improve upon an already very impressive platform.
Because we've got a really awesome rate with them it's definitely a positive ROI. I can't say what that figure is but it's pretty good. Also, our customers have a huge ROI over their prior way of getting payment from their customers.
