Good All-In-One Solution For Simple Requirements - Not So Much For Large and/or Complex
August 29, 2019
Good All-In-One Solution For Simple Requirements - Not So Much For Large and/or Complex
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ConnectWise Manage
We use ConnectWise in Sales, Professional Services, and Support. Accounting/Biz Ops is just starting to use it for invoicing. It gives us a way to track and manage opportunities, projects, service/support tickets and support agreements - including time and expenses.
- Time and expense tracking is very good as is companies and contacts.
- It is relatively low maintenance and we have not had any major issues.
- The user interface is very good and has a lot of search and sort features.
- Project management is very basic and not well suited for companies who manage large complex projects with long durations.
- The scheduling/dispatch is probably great if you roll trucks to fix printers. Trying to schedule anything more than a 2 hour job is a nightmare which only gets worse if/when the schedule changes.
- The customer portal is abysmal. You can't tailor it beyond putting your logo on it and it lacks basic functionality like enabling you to publish something like your support handbook to all your customers (you can do it customer by customer via custom reports). It looks old and dated - definitely not modern - and I'm honestly embarrassed by it.
- SLAs - if you have a need to track SLAs on different priority tickets on different schedules, avoid ConnectWise. You cannot have 24 hour SLA tracking on emergencies and business hours SLAs on low priority tickets - but ConnectWise is happy to explain to you that you are not running your business according to their best practices.
- Relatively low cost software has enabled us to run or organization.
- We have had to develop extensive custom reporting and spend a lot of time exporting and analyzing because the canned reports are too simple and basic for our needs.
- Compiling SLA reports for our customers is entirely manual because we can't have emergencies tracked 24x7 and low priority tickets 5x12. We've had to not comply with RFP requirements because of our inability to effectively manage, track, and report on SLAs.
We selected ConnectWise when we were a much smaller company with more basic needs. It was fine for that. We've outgrown it but are now basically stuck with it. I keep hoping for some major improvements. If I had the opportunity to replace it, I would - I would look at solutions like Right Now, Salesforce, and others with robust project/portfolio management and resource scheduling and forecasting.
ConnectWise PSA Feature Ratings
ConnectWise Manage Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Knowledgeable team Immediate help available | Poor followup Problems left unsolved Need to explain problems multiple times Support doesn't seem to care |
No - No need to pay extra to be told it doesn't work the way we need it to because there is something wrong with how we run our business, not the software.
Yes - The UI couldn't display project budgets greater than 9,999 hours or more than $9m - it just showed #### where numbers were supposed to be. Took forever (it felt like) to get fixed but it did get fixed eventually.
No. I'd have given them 5 bonus points a couple of questions ago if I could.