Replicon Polaris PSA is a professional services automation platform containing project management, expense tracking, and billing features, from Replicon headquartered in Redwood City, California.
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Scoro
Score 8.2 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Scoro is a comprehensive work management solution for creative and professional services. It helps to streamline work and eliminate routine tasks to ensure a business runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible – from sales right through to billing. Scoro’s project management tools allow users to create project budgets, allocate non-billable and billable work, manage meetings, tasks, invoices, expenses, files, and more. All project information can be managed in a single…
It is perfect for inputing time sheets, time offs and expenses. It is hosted on the cloud, so accessible from anywhere, and even from mobile. It should nonetheless do just that, as it is not suited to track the work that you are doing or details about it. It is completely useless in that case.
Scoro would be ideal for a larger business who is truly interested in developing a stronger and more efficient workflow. I honestly would have recommended it had it not been for the cost, the hidden fees, and the fact that I'd have to upgrade to an even more expensive plan if I wanted to get the most of the program for our level. We only needed one item, so would have ended up paying much more to not use a great deal of additional features. So, if you want to increase your workflow and have the funds, use them - absolutely. You will not regret it. But I cannot recommend it to someone who is on a tight budget
Though the technical support staff are always very nice, sometimes they don't seem to understand exactly what the issue is based on our explanation. There have been several times when I've ended up solving the issue on my own without their assistance, despite numerous emails and phone calls. Could be a language barrier issue, perhaps they could receive more training in how companies are actually using the software on a daily basis.
Employee time sheets have to be approved by project managers and supervisors prior to my final approval. However, when viewing the time sheets in list form, there is no way for me to tell whether a time sheet has been approved by everyone else. I have to manually open each one and hover over the approver link. It would be helpful if there was a column in the list showing which approvers still need to approve it.
There have been a few times when time sheets were accidentally deleted by approvers. In order to retrieve them, we've had to contact Replicon support and have a backup instance of the information created. It would be great if perhaps there was some sort of archive or recently deleted section that could be accessed right away without having to go through Replicon support, a folder or something that would hold on to recently deleted files for a few days or a week just in case they needed to be retrieved.
Some of our projects have more than one project manager. Replicon currently allows for co-managers to be assigned to a project, but this status does not seem to include that co-manager in the approval of time sheets and expenses. We have had to manually create an approval path to include that second manager. It would be nice if co-managers would automatically be included in those approval paths.
Cost. I ended up not recommending this product simply because of the cost alone. There are hidden costs you will not know about until it is too late. Their pricing model is geared for bigger businesses, and can cripple smaller ones. The pricing is by user. If you get the most basic of plans (with a 900 onboarding charge), you will realize that all the things you actually need to make the program effective are on the next tier up...
Quickbooks. At the time I was exploring this, Quickbooks was not very well integrated. If you wanted to include billing (which they do show promise for), then you will have issues here.
We used to track time on JIRA on the tickets. This was good enough for time tracking, but didn't integrate efficiently with accounting software, so accountants had to replicate manually the data from JIRA to their software in order to bill clients. Using Replicon made things much easier for them.
Scoro could have had a wonderful impact on the workflow of the business. It allows for integrations most programs don't, including accounting and time tracking, and could have easily eliminated the need for an FTE through the streamlining of tasks alone.
If we had implemented this program, we would have saved time, but all of the gains would have gone to pay for Scoro. It would not have balanced out, especially if they ever were to raise their rates.
