Finally a feature rich value for money business platform that is actually built to help run a wide variety of business categories.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We have been searching for a true business platform to run our small B2B company on for years. Our requirements are typical of any small B2B. Many SaaS companies tout themselves as being a business platform to run your business on but never actually say in their marketing which types of business they are actually referring to.
Estimates, Invoices, Expenses, Accounting, Purchases and Margins, Time Tracking, Help Desk, Marketing, Recurring invoices, Multi currency and Stock Control are all essentials for businesses like ours. Sellsy performs well in these tasks overall.
Pros
- CRM
- Estimates
- Invoicing
- Time tracking
- Accounting
- Purchase Orders
- Margin tracking and job costing
- Inventory Management
- Recurring Invoices
- Online payments
- Project Management
- Expense Tracking
- Support
- Custom Fields
Cons
- Email: Cannot reply to all. A very basic email feature which in most cases forces the user to reply to email in their main email client. This of course means that sellsy is unable to track the email which in turn renders the entire email facility as flawed.
- Delivery tracking of emails received and opened does not report the correct time. It is reporting wildly inaccurate times at the time of writing. (We reported this months ago and nothing has been fixed)
- Calendar Sync: In Sellsy you cannot create a meeting event and invite people from your contacts as is normal in Office 365 and Google Apps. Events created in your Google or Office 365 calendar cannot be edited or linked to time tracking or any module within Sellsy.
- Gmail Widget: Is still mostly in French language. But it also has some issues. We cannot get it to show our suppliers when we want to add a new contact. It has been like this for months.
- Sellsy started out as a purely French language product and unfortunately there are still many sections of the app that appear in French. This is of course is very confusing for non French speaking users. Update (July 2015) We have submitted many instances of incorrect english or French words appearing in sellsy. Sellsy has very poor Quality control in this area and it makes the product look unfinished to native english speakers. Sellsy should not rely on its customers to highlight translation errors.
- Some business owners / managers might take exception with the way that Sellsy markets itself within the paid version of the app. On the main menu in each user account Sellsy has a big share the love button that when pressed asks your staff members to enter their contacts to promote Sellsy. Currently this cannot be removed but they have promised to put it as a removal option in the near future. To be fair Sellsy has an excellent referral program and for some companies they can actually recoup the cost over even turn a profit by having your staff market Sellsy through their contacts. (update: July 2015) Sellsy also puts itself right on the homepage of your customer portal. We pay sellsy to offer our customers a portal so that customers can do business with us without being subjected to 3rd party advertising. I believe it makes us look cheap to our clients that we need 3rd party advertising to support our billing system and as such refuse to use the portal with our clients.
- Google Drive: Integration here is weak as it only makes a copy of your sales docs (invoices etc) in Gdrive for only 1 user. All other docs stored on sellsy do not sync in anyway. We created a work around where we added a custom field to input the link for a client related folder stored on google drive.
- Google Single Sign on doesn't work for us and still months later does not work.
- Multi-currency needs be improved but to take it beyond its current level will be a big project for them to implement. I imagine this will become a priority for them after they launch their e-commerce module.
Likelihood to Recommend
We like sellsy. Its not perfect and as other users have pointed out, there is and always will be, room for improvement.
If you require deep integration with Google apps and Microsoft Office 365, then Sellsy may not be for you. Sellsy just about manages to work with google in so far that it can sync contacts, calendar, sales docs and incoming email with google. There is currently no way to make sent email appear in the sent items section of sellsy unless you compose the email within the sellsy app. The O365 integration is not nearly as powerful as sellsy does not sync sellsy contacts or calendar with microsoft (in its current form).
I believe that one of the primary functions of any business management app should be the capability to centrally manage all of a company's business clients, contacts etc. and sync this data to all employee accounts with the 2 biggest players for business email (Microsoft and Google) as a minimum. This data should never be an island stored only on 1 application. The Discovery that sellsy does not currently sync contacts and calendars with O365 was a disappointment. If Sellsy started supporting exchange sync for Microsoft Office 365 we would immediately dump google and switch over. In fact Sellsy is the only reason we continue to use Gapps as we need our contacts and calendars synced to our mobile devices.
We have built up a list of small little things that do not work as expected since we started using sellsy and continually pass them on to the development team. Many are small trivial things from an engineering perspective but are still annoying nonetheless, especially to users who wish to get the job done. Employees are easily frustrated if they have to fight with software to do certain tasks. Annoyances in the user experience (no matter how small) can lead to lost productivity which in turn costs money in the business world. However based on our experience with Sellsy support we believe that they do listen carefully to their customers concerns and are on the path to deliver a quality experience to their customers through the process of frequent updates to the software. You can easily establish how good a SAAS provider is by measuring their ability to fix problems soon after they are initially reported.
In simple terms Sellsy is an incredibly feature rich application and is way ahead of the competition. It represents good value for money and is backed up by free support.
