According to a recent professional services report by Mavenlink, a whopping 85% of service businesses acknowledge that client expectations are increasing!
More specifically, expectations are increasing in ?
- Quality of work (51%)
- Speed of service delivery (50%)
- Cost of work (48%)
- Transparency (37%)
- Accountability (37%)
(Mavenlink)
So by looking at these stats and comparing them to the current challenges of the service industry, you can easily tell that a professional services automation software can solve at least 90% of these problems.
Here are the most common challenges in the professional services industry:
- Lack of visibility on project information. Having a hard time accessing project information or sharing it with the management team.
- Difficulty to track resource occupation rates. Finding it hard to schedule the right people, with the right skills, for the right projects at the right time.
- Keeping budgets in line. Struggling to keep projects on task, budgets in line, and all stakeholders informed.
So, what is a professional services automation software?
The PSA in PSA technology stands for “professional services automation.”
This technology helps professional services organizations handle time tracking, contracts, project management, invoicing and billing, and more.
Migrating from manual processes to automated workflows has allowed professional services organizations, including small ones, to experience greater overall efficiency, lower overhead costs, and faster growth.
The top technological challenges faced by service businesses include a lack of clarity between systems, data accuracy issues, and manual work
(Mavenlink).
What does it do for your organization?
Top benefits?
Eliminates endless and repetitive tasks
Professional service automation tools are designed to weed out work-intensive processes and reduce unnecessary data entry points.
This is done through automating different time-consuming processes, such as:
- Project planning and scheduling
- Financial reporting
- Workflow management
This is all about how much time you’re saving without having to spend hours crunching numbers or doing other administrative tasks.
Create a single source of truth for everyone
Professional services automation software gives you one source of the truth. The information is real-time. It’s updated daily or more frequently by people who are doing the work.
So it isn’t possible to create multiple reports that each say something slightly different. Which means, no more confusion and waste of time!
Everyone sees the same data and there is full transparency across all levels of the organization.
With this level of visibility, business leaders can truly understand the variations in performance. They are armed with the data and information they need to take decisions about client viability, project performance, and more.
Keep an eye on project financials
Without a PSA solution, you may have visibility into certain financial data, such as bookings, invoices, and basic costs, but without a complete view, you can’t know exactly where a project stands, which impacts the customer experience and your business.
Using a Professional Services Automation solution, you have complete visibility over the following financial aspects of a project.
Take a look at this list and compare it to your current processes and data ?
Financial Health. Quickly view critical financial health data and make swift adjustments as needed. You’ll be able to track profitability and keep projects on budget.
Billing and Invoicing. Keep administrative costs low and deliver a better customer experience by handling tedious pricing and billing processes through your PSA solution. Automated billing and flexible configurations eliminate human error and save you time and costs.
Project Margins. Know whether a project meets profit targets before it even begins. Grow your project margins with simple tracking of revenue, profit, and expenses at any time.
Revenue Recognition. Easily manage revenue recognition as projects progress by connecting directly to milestones or project completion percentages.
Project Budgeting. Track time and expenses in real-time for each project, and compare estimates with actuals to make more accurate future projections and keep projects on track.
Reduce revenue leakage
For many businesses, managing employee time and expenses not only itself requires time and expense but can uncover glaring gaps in your process for tracking activities.
Employees work quickly and often move between projects with some overlap.
And these types of work schedules often result in incorrect time and expense reporting.
That’s because a shift in focus to a different project for any period of time can easily be forgotten and later go unaccounted for, which ultimately costs your business money.
With Professional Services Automation, you can better capture and track time and expenses, ultimately reducing revenue leakage.
And even more importantly…
When your employees aren’t spending time performing administrative tasks, they can focus more on the customer.
Remove cross-departmental silos
Sales shouldn’t be siloed, and yet in many organizations, the sales team operates almost independently, with limited data-sharing with other departments.
This type of process is detrimental considering the amount of customer information sales teams collect that could inform work in other departments, and, conversely, the information other departments have that could empower sales.
By bringing your sales teams into the fold,
The immediate benefits are clear:
- Increase cross-departmental collaboration.
- Provide services teams with visibility into the sales pipeline to help them plan better
- Fewer errors because all won opportunity data can be visible on a single platform to all teams