The Access Group Reviews 

We received People Planner finance training from Andrea Ranalli at Access. The training was well presented and clear to understand. Andrea was extremely knowledgeable and was able to answer all our queries instantly. I would recommend the training provided by Access (and Andrea especially)

Dimensions v3 Upgrade - October 2023
Dennis - Nicolae Lazar was extremely supportive throughout the month of October 2023.
It's been a long month. Dennis was always available - nothing was too much trouble.
Kind Regards Peter Sutton - Finance Director
WSG Property (Holdings) Ltd

I have been attempting to contact the finance department for PeopleHR, part of Access Group, to speak to somebody for months now. We have unresolved billing issues and unpaid credit notes. Service is terrible, slow, and I am no closer to resolving the issue or regaining stated and confirmed refunds.

We are currently changing our finance system within the university of Nottingham and need new file exports and testing formats. Garry Taylor-Collins is extremely knowledgeable and helpful in every aspect and any question that the development team have been putting forward to him. Garry is very quick to response and will make his availability to join any last minute calls to assist with the project.

We have worked with Access for a number of years. Recently we upgraded our software and signed a new agreement. Since then we have effectively been unable to produce management information for our Board. Our Finance Team are paralysed and are now far behind with their work. Today we have had to explain our lack of MI to our auditors and our bank. Access have been 'trying' to resolve the issue of their doing for 6 weeks - and that tells you that they are either chronically under-resourced, or just don't care once they've made the sale.
We can't find anyone in their company who will take ownership of the issue, it's always 'being escalated' - not resolved.

Met up with Dave Young our customer success Manager for Access Education Finance and Budgets yesterday and have to say the support and products continue to be marvellous! Both products used by our Trust since its inception in 2018 - keep up the great work.

We use Access Finance and Budgets and from implementation to now in our fourth year we have had no problems at all. The support has been brilliant when needed and Dave Young our Customer Success Manager is amazing. Nothing is ever too much for Dave.

As a small MAT in our 5th year of using Education Finance, we have been supported exceptionally well by Dave Young, our Premier Customer Manager. He helps us through the Year End procedure and always responds quickly and efficiently on how to resolve any questions about the software.

The system is great and works really well and cant fault that.
Given 3 stars as we have been having issues with invoices that have been issued to us when they shouldn't have, we have had this confirmed in an email. I have been emailing and calling for months now and I am not getting a response from anyone.

We have the integrated system as we use PeopleHR and were advised at the sale that we would get extra training and help with this because of it. When it came to the on boarding the wrong information was sent over and that the extra items we were advised were no longer available but we managed to get that sorted.
If the admin/finance side of the business was better and someone would come back to me about our invoices I would give 5 stars.

Do not buy any software from Access. Having spent years putting in new IT systems including SAP and SAP business 1 during my career I decided to take a gamble on the Access group as we already ran two of their modules. Unfortunately due to Covid we were unable to do reference visits as we would never have gone ahead if we had. The customer care received is non existent once you hit problems. The Factory master module cannot take financials over to the finance system and the staff cant understand why you would want too, which is even more worrying. Despite reaching out to their Senior Sales team No one is interested in helping at all. Having rung another customer they have received exactly the same level of shocking customer service and like us have a system that does not work . Don't touch the Access system trust me its an absolute waste of money and you will regret it

Update 31/8/22
So Customer service reach out and tell you they want to help but the reality is they are in no position to help you. The decisions are taken well above their head and I'm now informed they do not intend to fix a fundamental issue with their product. I would love to hear from any customer who has Factory master and Dimensions as I am told non of you want the system to do basic financials. Give me a call at Armcon Limited would be great to have a chat

A truly shocking business who treat their customers like dirt. We've had Access Dimensions for many years and have numerous examples of just how incompetent Access are, their complete lack of user support, inability to communicate internally and their aggressive 1 way traffic approach to charging customers more every year and delivering even less - if that were even possible. Imagine how horrified we were when Access acquired 2 of our other products (PeopleHR and Volcanic) and have now proceeded to kill the life out of them too. I have dealt with many companies over the last 30yrs working in finance and this I can honestly say is up there as one of the worst.

Training on Access Finance very useful, comprehensive and also flexible enough to go through specific queries. Thank you.

The Access Group are a very good company to work with. I have always found their customer service to be very good, always helpful. The Finance system is excellent and very user friendly, so assistance is very rarely required but when it is they always sort out any queries we have.

Nina was very helpful. She went out of her way to find me useful training videos/webinars on Payroll and Analytics which I have shared with my Finance colleagues.

* This review has been edited as we were contacted by Access & asked to remove the first name of their Head of Digital Sales. We were not requested to remove the names of any staff who had acted professionally. At this point we are unable to say whether or not our issues will be rectified as the removal of the name seemed top priority. We have already got a meeting booked next week so hopefully we can get some resolution and usable software or even an apology!

We had used RDB Pronet at our previous agency and was promised by Access' salespeople that Access Recruitment CRM was even better but had all the features we had liked about RDB and more. We had to sign a 24 month contract but felt that it would be worth the risk because surely a salesperson wouldn't lie that much and anyway who would remove great features from a product... Regrettably Access Recruitment CRM bears little resemblance to RDB Pronet and we are unable to use it for what we wanted. In fact, we are left with a CRM that is unfit for purpose for 24 months. Access do not care and have the most useless, unresponsive account managers I've ever come across. Our first Account Manager did more complaining about the company himself rather than trying to ever resolve anything...

The whole experience had been an utter shambles. Firstly Access made a complete mess of our migration and didn't even realise for months even though we had been having constant issues. That along with poor training and almost non-existent initial project management made us concerned within our first month. Our second major issue was being over charged slightly every month. This took 5 months for them to resolve despite 5 people claiming it was fixed. They then got the invoice correct for one month before starting to overcharge again... Out of frustration, we had to go onto LinkedIn and work out all the senior finance people & service delivery managers possibly relevant and send a group email to get a resolution. I kid you not!!

Technical Support are mostly completely inefficient and close cases without resolution. We've even been given advice for the wrong product which wasted our time as it obviously didn't work and the instructions did not make sense. Andy in Support is an absolute gem but that's the only good thing we'd say about Access.

We've had a Product Manager say he'd arrange a call with us then ghost us completely. Our Account Manager ignored us for months after promising to do things. We've even had the Head of Digital Sales call us unprompted and shout at us down the phone (he was so aggressive that he was put on speaker phone so the whole office could hear). Absolutely would not let us speak and bombarded us without even questioning why a customer was so unhappy with his inept account team. We believe he had an audience to show off to on the other end of the phone as we cannot understand why a customer would be spoken to in such a fashion, under any circumstance, for merely querying poor service. We tried to speak but were told to "stop screaming"! As female recruiters we especially enjoyed the casual misogyny...

We find the product glitchy and constantly not working properly. It looks awful and is not at all intuitive. You also waste most of your time having to start whatever you're doing again and again as the back feature is not great and returns you to where you were before you went into the record you're in... However, by far the worst feature is the candidate search function. It's so appalling that we do not really use it thus making the whole point of us having a CRM null & void.

Access are only concerned with getting your money or getting lots more of it. Once you've signed on the dotted line that's it for them.

I signed up with Access Education a few months ago to use budgets/finance/HR/payroll as I thought buying all our support products from the same company would be much smoother. I was hoping I would be able to give a glowing review but I am being slowly sent round the bend by a glitchy product that constantly crashes and kicks me out - and I'll I'm trying to do is enter the budget! The product suite has the potential to be really good but without some serious work on the software development side I am concerned I have made a costly mistake.

I had an idea of where to look for the report I needed for year end but couldn't find a way of 'drilling down into' the data to ascertain exactly what I wanted. I rang the helpdesk and spoke to Matt who talked me through the process and explained in detail the steps I needed to follow. Excellent knowledge of HCSS finance package reports and instant professional rapport was established.

I am experiencing a repeat of a problem with the SEND and budgeting software. My governors and the Local Authority are waiting for a budget yet I cannot import the SEND data into budgetting. I would amend budgetting manually but the Section 251 area of budgetting has lost some of it's data and the edit buttons have disappeared. I was today promised a call back from a Line Manager as I escalated an issue and i've heard nothing. We have HR, Finance, Budgetting and SEND software, all of which fail regularly. The company have no idea how important the financial information is and don't seem interested in resolving my issues. The developers have already dealt with this issue once so I would assume they know the root cause!

We have had a very poor experience with Access's Support Team. Over six months has passed since we raised a ticket flagging our inability to access a key part of the functionality of Access Financials - uploading project budgets for budgetholders to review. The issue has not been resolved and the consultant assigned to the ticket has repeatedly told us that he has not had time to look at the problem, even though Access have been aware for months of the significant impact on BV's budgetholders.

The Customer Success team have also been very slow to respond on this and other issues, and the member of the sales team who sold us the product stopped responding to emails months ago. I have repeatedly asked for this complaint to be escalated, though as far as I am aware this has not happened.

The software itself is pretty good, and our implementation manager was brilliant, though I am astonished at the poor level of service we have received in the last 6 months. Had I known this would be the case when we implemented Access Financials in 2019, I would have chosen an alternative supplier. Even though we now need additional functionality (timesheets) that could be provided by Access, I no longer trust them to deliver it effectively.

Max Glazer-Munck
Finance Director, Blue Ventures

We bought into this system at a care show in London and I have to say it has been the worst software we have used.

The company sells its product as a complete solution and you get bought into the fact that you would only deal with one company. The trouble is that one company is probably the worst company to deal with. Customer services has been virtually non existence and they make up charges as they go along. They over charged by thousands and we cant get to speak to anyone about it. Finance never respond to emails and account managers simple dont care. The system does not work on a mobile device and they want extra to be able to access the system via an app.

We finally ended our contract at the end of August 2020 yet they continue to charge us until November and we are still awaiting for a refund.

Our advise would be to stay well away! there are many cheaper and more affective solutions out there who actually care about your business!