I used ACCA practice manager for 2 years. It stengths was that it was clearly planned for the accountancy market, but its weakness was that it was planned for larger practices with multiple partners/staff. It was very cumbersome to use and it used up a lot of my time to keep it updated as it was far too detailed and far too hard to customise for the smaller practice that doesn't need all the functionality. It had no facilities for email nor electronic storage of documents - basically it assumed that you printed everything off to put into a paper file.
As for price, considering that VT produce an accounts prep system for £200 p.a., Moneysoft produce payroll for £100 p.a. and you can buy tax software for £300-£600 p.a. all including updates and support, I'd say that a practice management system should be priced well below £500 p.a. to include updates and support.
I'd ideally be looking for a web based system with functionality for sending and receiving emails as part of the program, which are stored within the program, also inputting of scanned documents and ability to create pdf documents to email or print. It needs a directory structure so that everything is stored in separate "client" folders with subdirectories for tax, accounts, payroll, permanent, etc. to keep things simple.
The job and work flow control is the most important aspect. It needs to be very customisable and easy to customise as each practice will have its own ways of doing things - it needs to be condensable for a sole trader or expandable for several staff where supervision and reporting is needed. You need to be able to set up job templates, such as annual accounts prep, monthly payroll, quarterly VAT return, which can be "picked" for relevant clients, these "jobs" need to be automatically repeatable every week, month, quarter or year, so that the system automatically generates a new "job" at a predetermined time before the relevant date so that pre-planning can be done, and then various customisable time intervals for each user-defined stage, culminating in deadlines.
It is this job/work control that is the problem and the reason why "off the shelf" CRM packages don't work for accountants. Most alternatives don't have the built in ability for automatic repeat or don't facilitate the copying of one "job" to other clients. Basically, most systems assume jobs are unique and expect you to set up a personalised job for each new customer or contract. Accountancy is different - it has a few "jobs" which are repeated year after year and repeated over multiple clients.
I'd also say that time and fees is irrelevant - too many accountancy practice manager type systems place too much emphasis on these aspects - time billing is less popular especially for smaller practices and time & fees is integral to most decent book-keeping software so replicating it to accountants CRM is a bit pointless - although you may want to add it as an optional extra!
Just to say that since scrapping ACCA practice manager, I've been looking for something for a couple of years now, and found absolutely nothing except for IRIS and its like which I won't go for as I am happy with my other software, i.e. VT, Drummohr and Moneysoft - I don't want to scrap those systems which work very well for a one man band just to get a workable CRM system. I've had countless trials etc but nothing does the job. Similar comments are posted all other similar forums by accountants, so the person who makes a CRM product for the VT, Moneysoft and Drummohr type of practice will have a ready market.
