Item: Accelo
Rating: 7
Author: Chris Osterhout

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Accelo to run our client portal, ticket system, project management system, retainer system and our billing system. It works well in many areas to give us organizational insights that we did not have historically.

Pros and Cons

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

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

We used Workfront prior to using Accelo, mainly for project management and retainer management. There is no comparison between the two as Accelo blows it away.

Other Software Used

Basecamp, JIRA Software

Likelihood to Recommend

It is really well suited for organizations that need to have a lot of tools but don't want a bunch of data silos.

Our organization uses HubSpot as our CRM so we don't necessarily use the CRM portion of Accelo the way it is designed. Mainly because it isn't as agile as HubSpot from a CRM perspective.

Accelo - A great solution for SMB

Overall Satisfaction with Accelo