Finally a feature rich value for money business platform that is actually built to help run a wide variety of business categories.
Rating: 7 out of 10
July 28, 2015
DH
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
- 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.
- Provides visibility on the cost and time effort of winning new business.
- Financial dashboards give a clear view of the business financials.
- CRM platform provides a clear picture of how our company interacts with the outside world.
- Basic Accounting makes life easier for our accountant.
- It is relatively easy to configure and implement provided your admin has previous experience with similar apps..
- Apptivo,WORKetc CRM,Norada Solve360,AffinityLive,Insightly
Sellsy is the most complete offering on the market today. It has its strengths and weaknesses but I believe it is on track to cover all of our needs with updates and fixes that are coming soon. Some of the products we tried before have superior integration with Google apps and Office 365 but do not offer the overall spectrum of features that Sellsy provides to us in a modular pay only for what you use model license model.
2
Management and Sales
1
General all round understanding of business software and how to apply it to the specific needs of the business.
- Invoice, estimates and purchase order management
- CRM
- Time and Expense tracking
- Recurring Invoicing
- Billable Hours
- We use custom fields to link folders in Google Drive. This helps link important documentation the correct company, contact, opportunity or supplier within Sellsy.
- Project Management
- Helpdesk
Yes
We previously used AffinityLive but it only partially covered our needs. AffinityLive markets itself as a PSA app and as such is not comparable to wide variety of features available within Sellsy.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
The over feature set was the most important factor for us.
The evaluation and selection process of these types of apps is a continually evolving process. You simply cannot apply conditions today and expect them to match the changes in technology that will be available in the coming six months. Anyone considering these types of applications needs to invest time every month to see what is new in the market. This information allows your business to be on the cutting edge and to stay ahead of the competition.
- Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
We have experience using many different CRM and business management apps. So moving to Sellsy was not a big issue for us.
- Configuration of staff accounts cannot be performed by admin user after the account is assigned to the user. This configuration can be done prior to applying the account to a staff member but there is no documentation describing the process.
- Admin cannot manually set a password to access a staff member account once it has been allocated to a user email. Admin cannot assume the identity of a staff memeber to adjust their configuration such as signature on email etc.
- There is no documentation explaining how Google Sync and Google Drive integration works. We had to reach out to support to understand the feature set of the integration.
- Cannot view the client portal as the client which makes it super difficult to manage.
- Self-taught
Sellsy is relatively easy to learn provided you have previous experience of similar applications. However there is a huge amount to learn for users interacting with it for the first time and training is highly recommended in this situation.
Yes
We have submitted a number of bugs and while some are still outstanding at the time of writing the ones that could be fixed quickly did get fixed in a timely manner by the Sellsy development team. We are satisfied with sellsy when it comes to squashing big items but are disappointed that they fail to fix small items months after we submitted. (updated july 2015)
To date I don't have any instances of where we have received what we would consider exceptional support. It should also be noted we have not been in the position where we have required it also.
- Adding new data into the crm
- Creating estimates and invoices
- Configuring data for export
- Creating opportunities
- Tracking time
- Importing data via CSV
- Sending simple emails with attachments from your computer
- Calendar event management
- Document management (non sales related docs as these are managed really well)
- Gmail widget
- Tracking emails sent to clients / customers
- Dealing with multi-currency
Yes
Overall it functions reasonably well but looks dated and really requires a facelift. Also it does not integrate with phone features in any way! You cannot log a call into the crm by calling a number from within the app. There is no contact sync or any type of sync with the phone. Competitors offer these types of functions.