Accelo Products Powerfully Support Professional Services Teams

Your business is complex. At Accelo, we understand it can be hard to articulate exactly what you need from a platform because there are so many nuances in client work. 

Our founders have been in your shoes, and they knew it didn’t make sense to use limited, single-function software tools for a multidimensional business. 

What Features Does Accelo Have?

Accelo is a client work management platform with a range of features to support your team and clients — from quote to payment and beyond. Comprised of six interconnected products, Accelo centralizes your communication, operational data, project work and more. 

To understand what makes Accelo unique and why users in all types of service industries love the platform, let’s dig into its capabilities.

Accelo Products for Client Work Management

Discover the details you need to know about each Accelo product:

• Sales
• Projects
• Tickets
• Billing
• Retainers
• Reports

Sales

Your first conversations with a prospect set the tone for your entire relationship. You need a platform that can facilitate a quick sales cycle and help you accurately perform the steps required to successfully convert leads.

Here are some of the features users love about managing sales in Accelo:

• Automation, rules and triggers: Eliminate the administrative time and effort of working sales opportunities with automated tasks, notifications and reminders to move through the sales cycle quicker.
• Performance monitoring: Sales dashboards and configurable reporting provide readily available insights into sales team performance, types of opportunities in the pipeline and win/loss metrics.
• Pipeline management: With built-in predicted value, probability to close and due dates, your sales team can close opportunities faster, leverage real-time insights and monitor the sales pipeline.
• Quotes and proposals: Create beautifully designed quote and proposal templates with custom branding, preset content, budgets, costs and time estimates with one-click approval. Here’s what real users have to say about using Accelo for quotes.
• Quote-to-project conversion: Facilitate a seamless handoff from sales to client services with automatic quote-to-project conversion — transfer over milestones, tasks, budgets, time estimates and more.
• Sales activity tracking: Automatic time tracking and a centralized activity stream of client communications allow you to easily view the time and effort to close each sale.
• Status progressions: Set up your team’s specialized sales process with customizable workflows and status progressions unique to your sales requirements or service types.
• Weighted pipeline forecasting: Forecast future business revenue weighted by probability to close and enable your sales team to focus their efforts on the strongest opportunities.

Find out more about Accelo Sales.

Projects

It’s crucial to have efficient processes in place to ensure the highest-quality client work delivery possible. Look for a platform that can handle all facets of project management, including task tracking, resourcing and cost management.

Project-based teams love Accelo Projects because of its: 

• Automation, rules and triggers: Automate many administrative or repetitive project management tasks with automatic email reminders, status updates and task creation based on triggers and rules.
• Interactive Gantt charts: Better visualize projects with an interactive Gantt chart allowing you to plan or modify due dates, durations, dependencies and more.
• Material and expense management: Track additional project costs like licenses, subscriptions, ad spend or transport and accommodation expenses — and see how these costs tie into profitability.
• Notifications and updates: Update team members as soon as tasks become ready, dependent tasks are complete, project statuses change or budgets progress with custom and pre-built notifications.
• Project templates: Quickly and easily create new projects using project templates that allow you to set milestones, tasks, dependencies and time and cost budgets for your most common work.
• Real-time project insights: Track and monitor projects, progressions, earned and forecasted values and profitability metrics that adjust as work is completed.
• Resource scheduling: View your team’s capacity, instantly assign ownership of tasks and schedule or commit time based on a team member’s schedule and workload.
• Status progressions: Establish customized workflows and status progressions aligned with your team’s process — everything from planning to activation to complete and ready for billing.

Find out more about Accelo Projects.

Tickets

No matter what kind of service you offer, you likely get all kinds of ongoing requests from clients. Prioritizing and responding to them in a timely manner can be time-consuming, frustrating and costly. Having tickets connected to a client’s complete history can make this responsibility many times more efficient.

It’s easy to manage client requests or support tickets with Accelo because the Tickets product offers:

• Automation, rules and triggers: Reduce time spent manually processing tickets by using automations, rules and triggers to email status updates, request additional details or amend rates based on SLAs.
• Automatic triage: Automatically triage tickets, prioritize by urgency and assign to appropriate team members based on set rules and built-in automations.
• Categories and resolutions: Set custom ticket categories to gain insight into volume, time and effort to resolve by category. Then add resolutions to note how/why a ticket was closed.
• Dedicated email addresses: Use a single email address such as [email protected] to receive requests and send a response for a consistent experience across team members.
• Processing and progressions: Automatically prioritize, assign and process tickets by custom type to reduce administrative work for employees, resolve issues faster and prevent oversight of client requests.
• Request management: Make managing ad-hoc requests easier on your team with dedicated request inboxes, ticket queues and seamless processing plans.
• Revenue for ad-hoc work: Get paid for out-of-scope requests or added billable work with seamless billing that allows for individual or combined invoicing.
• Role-based billable rates: Adjust billable rates for tickets based on the complexity of the request, effort required and level of experience and training of the team member assigned.

Find out more about Accelo Tickets.

Billing

Accurate client billing is vital to the health of your business, but it can be hard to know where to begin setting up better billing processes. Accelo’s Billing product takes the stress away.

Billing is straightforward in Accelo because this product features:

• Bulk company invoicing: Significantly reduce your finance team’s end-of-month billing from days to only minutes with bulk invoicing that also consolidates and sends all work yet to be billed. Real users love how convenient it is to bill clients from Accelo.
• Credit card processing: Integrate with Stripe, PayPal or Authorize.net for direct credit card processing and include a unique link on invoices for the encrypted client payment portal. Or, try out the new Accelo Payments to get paid even faster!
• Custom billable rates: Structure your billable rates based on your unique billing by the assigned team member, a blended rate or the rate card of that specific work object.
• Custom invoice templates: Create beautifully designed invoice templates with line item breakdowns of work planned or completed, costs, taxes, totals, terms, payment methods, expenses and more.
• Invoicing by work object: Manually create an invoice against projects, tickets or retainers — whether collecting payment before work, at completion or at milestones throughout.
• Payment statuses: Monitor when an invoice is overdue without payment or a new payment is received in your accounting platform with invoice status syncing and visibility in Accelo.
• Seamless accounting integrations: Sync your client work directly with your accounting platforms such as QuickBooks Online and Xero to better manage your billing with less administrative work and fewer clerical errors.
• Syncing through service items: Automatically sync all service items, account ledgers and tax codes from your accounting platform and have the ability to assign to work objects, milestones, tasks or invoices.

Find out more about Accelo Billing.

Retainers

A favorite feature of teams that manage recurring work, Accelo Retainers is a unique product among client work management platforms. Instead of simply setting up recurring tasks, Accelo generates retainers that work for your preferred pay structure and time period and automatically bills clients for work performed.

Here’s what you can expect when you manage retainers with Accelo:

• Automation, rules and triggers: Make retainers run smoothly with rules and triggers: alert managers if exceeding allocated time/budget, send a renewal email before the contract expires and more.
• Automatic invoice generation: Automatically bill clients that have ongoing retainers with repeated payments through auto-generated invoices that automatically send.
• Insights and reporting: Track progress, costs, profit and expected revenue of client retainers with financial summaries and customizable reports.
• Link related work: Better manage billing cycles by capturing accrued values from linked work like tickets and projects and having all time logged and value attributed to the active retainer period.
• Prepaid and postpaid structures: Set your unique retainer pay structure — whether you’re paid monthly before rendering service or quarterly post-service completion.
• Recurring task templates: Pre-set tasks with start and due dates, time estimates, budgets, assignees and checklists for each new period based on the retainer structure.
• Set work periods: Have retainer periods — weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually — automatically set based on the retainer agreement and established start date.
• Status progressions: Customize the stages of a retainer with status progressions and workflows which map directly to your business processes and configure everything from planning to in-progress, paused to completed.

Find out more about Accelo Retainers.

Reports

Even if you know how your business is doing, you have to be able to prove it to stakeholders. But good, reliable data can be tough to acquire — if you don’t have a platform like Accelo.

Rely on Accelo Reports for accurate numbers related to:

• Client management: Get a better understanding of the clients at the core of your business and how they’re impacting profitability, revenue and your team’s ability to efficiently do their work.
• Finance and accounting: Better manage your business costs and revenue streams critical for growth and longevity with financial reporting and insights on all your business finances.
• Project management: Keep projects on time and within budget using real-time reporting of time, costs, budget utilization, task deadlines and projections.
• Retainers and recurring work: Track retainer revenue, performance, budget, time utilization and forecasted value to create more recurring work and stable revenue.
• Sales and pipeline: Analyze deals, sales opportunities, team member activity, pipeline value, time to close and more with real-time sales dashboards and reports.
• Task management: Get tools designed to monitor and oversee tasks in planning, in progress, completed, overdue and in need of immediate action or attention for better overall project management.
• Tickets and service: Report on the tickets and client requests received by your team, including open items, overdue, resolved and response and close times.
• Time and expenses: Capture and curate detailed reports based on automatic time tracking of your team, so you can identify what they’re working on, how long it is taking and where the inefficiencies are.

Find out more about Accelo Reports.

➡️ All of Accelo’s robust features combined can generate powerful results. See what users have to say about what the platform has done for their businesses.

How Much Does Accelo Cost?

Accelo offers all the solutions you need to plan projects, track results and deliver client work. Schedule a demo to tour the platform, learn how Accelo will help your business and determine what pricing tier best fits your needs.

Next Steps: Accelo Demo or Trial 

If you’re intrigued by the range of features Accelo offers and feel ready to liberate your team from the mundane, non-billable work that distracts them, it’s time to interact with the platform yourself. 

Learn what to expect from a demo and schedule a time here, or explore all six Accelo products in a free trial.

About the Author

Chelsea Williams is Senior Copywriter at Accelo, where she shares unique insights with service professionals and tells user stories via blogs, eBooks, industry reports and more. She has over 15 years of B2B and B2C writing experience — primarily in tech, sales, education and healthcare. Chelsea is an AWAI-certified Master Copywriter trained in brand storytelling and microcopy.