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Working in the professional services space, you’re constantly needing to manage multiple clients, projects and team members. Luckily, there are software solutions specifically designed for businesses like yours that center on client work. Two of the most popular are Accelo and Scoro.
Both are loved by agencies, consultants, accounting firms and more for their ability to improve output, productivity and ultimately profitability. The tools provide similar offerings but each does bring unique features and capabilities. There are also differences when it comes to client support and overall business acumen.
Scoro is a SaaS solution for professional and creative services. The all-in-one business management software combines a project management tool with time and team management, sales, billing and professional services automation. Scoro enables you to streamline work, automate routine tasks and ensure a business runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
Scoro’s basic plan starts at $26 per user per month and requires at least five users, making the lowest cost option $130 monthly. This plan lacks a lot of valuable features important for professional services businesses, including tracking billable time, utilization reporting and pipeline reporting that’s useful for sales teams. The recommended Pro plan, with a breadth of features, starts at $63 per user per month and requires at least five users, meaning it starts at $315 monthly.
Like Accelo, Scoro integrates with many of your most critical business applications. Some of the most popular include:
Scoro also offers integrations with additional tools for time management and productivity, like Asana, Trello, Basecamp and Harvest, if users prefer their capabilities over Scoro’s offerings.
Scoro's custom dashboards offer insights into company data (Image from Scoro.com)
Overall, G2 reviewers gave Scoro a positive rating, scoring higher than average on ease of use and quality of support — with an 8.7 in both. Reviews cite Scoro for being helpful with managing projects, daily task management and facilitating team collaboration, with one user referring to Scoro as an “all-singing, all-dancing project management tool.”
There was also a review that called out the platform’s lack of features and attention to detail, specifically mentioning automations and integrations. The reviewer also felt that limitations with user accessibility made it difficult to assign tasks to freelancers, which could prove a significant shortcoming for agencies trying to use the platform.
Another user found that the platform was missing some key components, saying “Software is missing some fundamental features (e.g., the ability to print or export reports, and more) that are critical to agency management.”
When looking for project management tools, and specifically an alternative to Scoro, it’s worth exploring Accelo. Scoro is a powerful and effective software with a wide range of features to help manage client work, and many G2 users found Scoro easier to use, set up and administer than Accelo. However, reviewers preferred doing business with Accelo overall, citing that Accelo meets the needs of their business better than Scoro.
Accelo is preferred when comparing the quality of ongoing product support and being a good partner in doing business. This preference is reflected in Accelo having earned G2’s Best Relationship badge in Professional Services Automation for three consecutive quarters. Given that technology is ever-changing and your business needs may evolve over time, having ongoing support is critical and ensures that you're getting the greatest ongoing value from your software investment.
Let’s go through some popular business needs and how Accelo offers solutions.
When comparing Scoro and Accelo, many users found Accelo to have a better understanding of client work. A crucial component of this is the importance of visibility into client communications, along with the ability to share across your internal team with shareable dashboards. One of the most popular and useful features in Accelo is the Activity Stream. Through email syncing, the stream allows all client correspondence and activity to appear together in an easily accessible list — eliminating the need to sift through endless email threads or track down updates with colleagues.
Accelo’s syncing capabilities also extend to calendars and automated activity creation. Having these connections creates an overall seamless experience and better communications with clients.
Accelo’s automatic time tracking proves to be a very unique feature when compared to popular project management platforms like Scoro. Accelo automatically tracks all time spent on projects, meetings, tasks and activities in detail. For professional services businesses like marketing agencies, time tracking is essential for billing.
Automatic time tracking eliminates human error or inaccuracies and enables users to know exactly how much time was spent on client projects, issues and tasks. This is extremely helpful to make sure you’re accurately billing and also that you're budgeting your team’s time correctly. Timers within Accelo are the fastest, easiest and smartest way to keep track of your employees, time and money.
Workflows can be a godsend in client management work by making it faster and easier to launch your most common, repetitive business processes. Both Scoro and Accelo allow you to automate some of your most time-consuming tasks.
Within Accelo, the workflow can start as soon as a quote is accepted and go through the entire project. For instance, if a user adds service items to a quote, those services then feed into projects and invoices without any additional clicks or setup. This is especially helpful to prevent any delays, as tasks for a new client can flow seamlessly from the sale through to billing and account management. Accelo brings automation and robust workflows to make client work as efficient as possible.
One of the most important capabilities when it comes to choosing a client work management platform is reporting. You need to be able to access all of your important client and project information when you need it and trust that the information is accurate. Because Accelo is the only true client work management platform designed specifically for professional services, it has all the reporting needed to run your business as efficiently and profitably as possible. While Scoro offers reporting capabilities, the platform doesn’t allow you to handle all components of client work in a single system without needed complex setup and integrations.
Accelo shows your client work and business holistically, with both pre-built and customizable real-time intelligence reports. Working with accurate and complete information is the only way to gain better business insights and make informed decisions.
Accelo has a lot to offer when it comes to professional services automation, and it would be worthwhile to schedule a demo to test out the platform yourself. You can explore Accelo’s more standout features like the tickets module or see its brandable client portal that allows clients to view project status and billing.
