Insightly - Good but not quite there for me.

My experience with LessAnnoyingCRM helped me to hone in quickly on things I was looking for in the other options which has been a big time-saver.

I won't go in to massive detail on each of the systems as I stopped trialling / playing with each of them as soon as I encounter a must have that they don't have. So sorry these remarks are not a full review of each system just my thoughts and how they relate to my needs.

Insightly

Insightly don't offer a free trial instead they steer you towards their free account which lacks a few features such as mailchimp and Google integration. Not a great start, but I opened the free account to have a little play around, one thing I noted very quickly - the 'live' system filled with fake contacts LessAnnoyingCRM offer is much more useful than a trial or account for evaluation purposes, as I am unwilling to load in client data until I am committed to a system.

After keying in a handful of fake clients the first things I noticed were a couple of features that I think most Financial Adviser will find very useful indeed;
  1. Key dates
  2. Tags
Key dates allows you to record a custom reminder against a client straight from the contact page, i.e. review date, end of tie in periods etc. Unfortunately while you can set an event to be annually recurring you can't set shorter or more complex recurring criteria. I checked out the tasks and event options to and recurrence is not available there either.

Tags, as I've discussed earlier client segmentation and the ability to have clients in multiple segments is really important to me my mindset was that custom fields would be necessary but with Insightly you can tag clients with custom tags and use those tags for quick lookups which I would think could be just as effective, ideally I would like dynamic tagging - i.e. clients tagged based on other entered criteria but it certainly isn't  a make or break feature for me.

What is make or break is what you can do with a lookup once you have made one and the answer with Insightly as with LessAnnoyingCRM seems to be very little. The options you have are;

  • Add a Tag
  • Add a Link
  • Bulk Edit
  • Delete
  • Export (csv)
It just isn't enough for me I want to be able to send a mail merged email, and maybe even produce a mail merged letter as a minimum. I know I could take the .csv and export it then load it in to another service do as I wish with it but honestly it's just too much work for me - I want smooth simple integration so Insightly is not for me. The free account is almost as useful as LessAnnoyingCRM so if you thought LessAnnoyingCRM could be for you you may want to have a look at Insightly is for you and maybe save a few quid a month.


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