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PSA Software Buyer's Guide
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Professional services create management and leadership challenges designed to help streamline a solution provider's business operations. Professional service provider organization provide their solutions for different industries, including lawyers, advertising professionals, architects, accountants, financial advisers, engineers, and consultants, etc. Typically, they are the organization or profession that offers customized, knowledge-based services to clients. To provide such customized services to maximize the profitability of clients, Professional Service Automation (PSA) Software is designed and evolving as most of the products are adopting a cloud-based model.
» What is Professional Services Automation Software?
Professional Services Automation (PSA) software is a service provider designed to offer professional services to professionals, such as lawyers, auditors, and IT consultants. The PSA system is developed to automate and manage business tasks. The main aim of this system is to ensure on-time project delivery, well within the budget, and as per customer’s requirements and specifications. Professional services automation solution is a kind of project management assistance that includes resource management, time tracking, business intelligence, collaboration tools, documentation, invoicing, management of billable staff, etc.
PSA system works in integration with accounting, CRM systems, and payroll systems to provide more efficient results in all the operations of the organization. PSA tools enable the integration of industry-suitable metrics for a better understanding of operations in order to improve efficiency and profitability. This is especially helpful for the organization as they grow, the complexity of their projects tends to increase as well. PSA system is used to provide visibility into mid-project profitability. Professional Services Automation tools work consistently throughout the project lifecycle from planning to managing to evaluating the performance at every stage. By centralizing the organization’s processes, data and PSA solutions, it is easy to maintain and deliver services more accurately and efficiently, and also by streamlining or automating the repetitive manual processes.
» What are the features of Professional Services Automation Software?
PSA tools were basically designed for providing professional services to consultants, lawyers, professional service teams, and others. But now, the PSA system is wide earning its popularity in all the industries, such as Information Technology (IT), Marketing and Communications, Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC), Business Consulting, etc.
Some of the common features of professional services automation (PSA) software include:
› PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Professional services automation system is capable of handling all the activities that are necessary to manage projects, right from bidding to contract management, cost management, bid comparison, conceptual estimates. PSA tools also provide project templates, automated resource allocation, provision for collaboration for robust project planning. PSA tool is designed to handle everything from time and expense capture to client invoicing. PSA system also allows clients to use this portal for information and collaboration.
› RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
PSA tool is designed to help manage resources within the organization. This PSA feature helps to effectively utilize available resources. The Professional services automation system has centralized tools to provide visibility of the resources ad their usage and demand along with the forecasts. Through resource management feature, it provides a clear awareness of the resource utilization to make better decisions for more efficient work and higher customer satisfaction. Allocating resources based on their skill sets, forecasting the resource requirements, timesheets, cross-project resource allocation, skill management, capacity planning are some of the features of resource management.
› ACCOUNTING
PSA system is capable of handling everything from time and expense capture to client invoicing. This feature helps organizations to maintain their accounts accurately. PSA accounting functionality varies from one system to another depending on the vendors. Some of the premium PSA solutions provide accounting features such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll processing, budgeting and forecasting, tax compliance and even support multi-currency in some of the advanced systems. Altogether, these combined data provides a financial overview and accounting structure of the organization.
› SCHEDULING
Scheduling is one of the most important features the best professional services automation software can provide. These include notifications about due dates and deadlines along with managing attendance, appointments, and calendar. PSA tools provide features that include automated email alerts as per schedule to keep everyone updated, manages timelines and resources, also export and import of data.
› REPORTING
Reporting feature provides the organization with clear visibility of the performance and delivery operations. PSA tools are featured to track performances of all key areas. Custom reporting, sales reporting, resource reporting, dashboards help to get a clear insight into the performances. Accurate reporting features of PSA software helps project managers to make smart business decisions.
› INVOICING
With this PSA feature, it’s easy to process transactions and generate bills using tracking features, accept digital payments to receive dues on time, also create invoices and deliver them to clients effortlessly. This feature also includes automated billing, automated transactions, processing credit cards, and invoice generation and delivery.
» What are the benefits of Professional Services Automation Software?
In simple words, a professional services automation solution is designed to improve the organization’s overall performance and profitability by providing services like improving workflows in all areas, decreased project cancellation rates, on-time project delivery by utilizing the resources efficiently, thus improving the project margins.
› PROJECT AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
The best professional services automation software is featured to track the project’s workflow from bidding until the signing of the last invoice, benefiting in managing projects. PSA system is helpful in the management of the available resources and productive usage of them without idle time, thus, optimizing resource usage.
› CENTRALIZING
PSA tools are beneficial in keeping the organization’s data and information organized in a centralized location for easy access and maintenance. It is also helpful in delivering services more accurately and efficiently by automating repetitive manual processes
› REPORTS
With the help of the centralized data, it’s easy to track and collect data from all key areas to generate real-time reports. With the help of these analytical and customizable reports, business decisions can be made effortlessly based on accurate data to drive stronger and larger margins.
› EASY DEPLOYMENT
The latest PSA tools are designed for easy configuration, quick integration, fast deployment, and low implementations and maintenance cost.
» What can be the cost of Professional Services Automation Software?
PSA software is one of the most essential tools for service organizations. It seems quite challenging to understand the implementation cost of a PSA solution without a proper reviewing of the tool as prices aren’t openly published. There are many PSA service providers in the market that comes up with different fees and implementation costs. The average cost of PSA software yearly cost per user is around $852, which is significantly lower than the improvements in profitability that are around $20,000 per user, that organizations were able to realize by implementing a PSA solution. Additionally, one-time implementation costs may cost you around $700 per user. But these amounts will vary depending on the organization’s needs, the PSA tool you select, and the complexity of your implementation and deployment.
» Conclusion
With the service automation tool in hand, an organization tends to grow significantly. Irrespective of the size of your business and its complexity, regardless of the tools you have used to get by, PSA solution will provide you with the service that will fit your needs. Invest in implementing one now will really help in magnificent growth, empowering the workforce, and eventually, pay for itself many times over.