OfficeTools

Vorteile

Can add To Do's in program for reminders to do several things.
Keep track of appointments easily.
Documents are easy to find.
Can add notes about clients.
Can track status of projects and set due dates.
Can send documents out for esignatures securely and its easy for clients to sign and return.

Nachteile

Wip and A/R balances don't match from end of month to beginning of next month.
When adding Wip to invoices, system writes off balance to zero instead of showing profit if billed amount is still over the amount of WIP on bill.
Documents for business clients is harder to sort, employees like to have folders.

Vorteile

There are a lot of things I love about this software and it was a vast improvement 3 years ago over what I was using. Love: Project tracking, although not as complete as we would like - we have actually left for one that has a more Kan Ban style visual approach, with the ability to tag colored status tags on a project as it moves through the process. Love: Billing: select all time entries related to a project to mark up and bill, or bill all out marked up for a monthly subscription client. Love: ability to link charge card processing both to portal and to invoice. Love - time reports for easy payroll processing. My clients love the portals.

Nachteile

Hate: document management presentation - must specifically look for emails or notes related to a project: have since moved to a product that has a chat-style interface perfect for a remote workforce. Hate: could never get project reports to print everything I needed. Matter of filters. I will give them the benefit and say perhaps I didn't learn that part well enough. Hate: tech support used to be terrible before they were bought out, has improved but still not great. I may now be really spoiled by the product I moved to - response sometimes within minutes. Hate: BEWARE: their contract has auto renewal without positive confirmation from user. I left them because I spent countless hours with their tech support, and many many $$ in tech support, and by their own admission, it was an issue they were aware of, and nothing to be done about . Now they want to charge me for the entire year and not let me out of it, unless I spend countless more time and $$ to try to resolve the issue that they already know they could not resolve. We have been receiving an error message when logging in for months. They know about it.
Yes, you can just click through it and log in, but it is another annoyance that they are aware of yet still want to charge me for an entire year when I have limped through the last several like a dedicated customer. The ability to link my calendar in exchange to that in Office Tools was a deal maker/breaker for me.

Vorteile

It has all in one capabilities such as client management, time tracking, billing and payment, reports, scheduling, and document storage.

The platform layout is clean and user friendly.

The learning curve to its features is low to mid-range which can be credited to it's design functionality.

It does utilize some integrations well such as the Dymo label printer and Drop Folders.

Overall, calls to Customer Support have been adequate with at least 90% problem resolution. I do have to knock the Customer Support to 2 stars because they do not have any early morning east coast support hours. If I have an issue with Office Tools I have to wait 4 hours to reach anybody on the phone. Half of my day is now gone.

Nachteile

Communication from Office Tools to its software owners is horrible. Known disruptions in services was communicated after the fact.

Software updates are non-existent. As of this review, 10/19/17, there has only been 1 public release update to the software in all of 2017 (v2017.019) and that was in January. That is unacceptable.

The Contact Screen has a narrow scope in what it allows for user input. I believe there are only 5 open variable fields that we can alter to collect data specific to our practice. The rest of it is dead white space underneath of it.

Software only allows one taxpayer's information to be displayed on the main Contacts screen with the spouse relegated to a "More Contacts" tab. It is more efficient to have all contacts displayed on one screen.

Client portal only allows for 1 contact email address.

The portal is not a responsive web design and certainly not friendly to mobile devices. There are buttons in the portal that are only seen when scrolled over (Pay Now buttons on invoice tab).

Payments made via a portal invoice do not sync down to the billing screen.

Downloading multiple documents from the portal is inefficient. There is no "Download All" button.

E-signing process is convoluted to the signer and has bugs which have not been fixed.

Form letters do not give you access to all collected data variables.

No user community to introduce or vote on feature requests. LinkedIn or Facebook aren't the solution.

Vorteile

OfficeTools creators have thought of every aspect of the business and that's what we loved. Any questions that we had "can we do this or can we do that" the answer was yes. You can create projects, assignments, To Do and have it set-up anyway that works for your team. You can use it for marketing emails with groups, etc. Very well designed.

Nachteile

It has glitches and it takes some time to learn how to use it. For instance, I don't need to use Lacerte, but I had to have it installed so I could use OfficeTools, otherwise, I kept getting error messages. And then, you have to make sure you are logged in to Lacerte every morning or the program won't work properly and the only way you realize that is when you are looking for an assignment or a document and you don't see it - then you inquire from your team and they say "Oh, it's there, I can see it..." then you realize you need to log back in for the software to refresh and show you everything. It doesn't notify you that Lacerte has been logged off.
Also, the training module and how it works was a bit confusing for us.

Vorteile

Firm has been using for 4-5 years. It has served us well and we use most of the functionality.

Nachteile

Lack of technology development. When it was announced there was a QB online integration we were very excited and converted. Our 150 clients are on QBO, however we remain on the desktop version due to Office Tools. We then learned it does not integrate with QBO Accountant. We then had to convert back to QB desktop version as it was our only option. We patiently stuck with Office Tools on the belief that the software would continue to be developed and evolve. At this point we wished we had not signed our last 3 year contract. With the signing of the 3 year contract we were given/comped 3 hours for training. When we went to use them we were told those hours had to be used in the first year - WHICH WAS NOT TOLD TO US. I had our sales rep check into it and the "board" advised the hours were expired. WOW was I shocked. I had never been given something from a company that was complimentary to then not advise me that the hours had to be used in the first year. Who ever made this decision just made our final decision for us. We will NOT be renewing our software when the contract ends. Too many disappointments.