Deskera is a beast.

If you imagine that hench multi-tool your pops kept in a leather case that occasionally appeared when you went fishing or camping, featuring the essentials to survive. Steak slicer, check, squirrel catcher, check, bottle opener check....

I was skeptical at first because I'm an avid Zoho user which probably doesn't help my street cred, and I know how long it took those guys to evolve it into a worthy beast(it was terrible back in the day.) So I took Deskera for a spin with that in mind and a very skeptical hat on.

I'm in the UK and right now, Deskera doesn't have much on Xero for my accounting, payroll needs but the stock/inventory management side of things is great. It's quite clear that Europe wasn't the market they were aiming at but I'm not the type to complain about the lack of presents I received at someone else's birthday party - I'm sure it will be a focus at some point.

The CRM is reasonably pretty and functional, I like how you can have a call come in and fill out the 'deal' details and end up creating a deal, an account and a contact from the one small effort, minimising the work.

The HR side of things isn't something I'll use for now but functionally it's pretty good and one day, maybe I'll need it?

My main beef with Deskera is the duplication of efforts across apps. It's sold as one platform but it's really 3 apps and they're not very well connected so you can end up doing more work than necessary...admin Fridays are not the one for me.

I can't for the life of me find a way to create my own dashboards either, which is important to me. Rather than revenue and the usual, I prefer to slice it up and look at what revenue and from where, what profit from which projects and what industry, really getting into the important details to help me make business decisions on where to go next.

Things I'd like to see from Deskera:

1) Apps that are joined up to remove the duplication of efforts between sales, HR and accounting. It should be pretty seamless.
2) UI, I keep getting lost in the labyrinth.
3) More integrations, ideally with website plugins and platforms for sales, lead gen etc.
4) Dashboards as described above that join the dots between apps.

This is 5 tacos because it's a bargain, you're getting a beast of a platform for less than a single, annual licence for ZOHO....let alone your accounting software etc. I'm currently spending about £100 a month on that stuff and Deskera will hopefully replace it.

It's a reasonably solid platform and even if you just used it for the CRM functionality, $149 is a bargain with unlimited users on a mature, yet developing system.

Also - they're listening to SumoLing feedback which is always a huge plus.

I'm hoping to fully stack it to 10, so some of my customers can make use of it under my watchful eye but I'll have to smash open the piggy bank and see if I can.