PSA Software: The Ultimate Buyers Guide For 2020!
In this blog, we created a unique buyers guide to help simplify our reader's journey into PSA Software!
What Is PSA Software?
Professional services automation (PSA) is a process where routine tasks and procedures in the professional services industry are automated through a software application or an IT system. Professional services automation involves the creation, termination, and management of a set of processes.
PSA is typically used by project managers, consultants, and other service-oriented professionals/businesses. Professional services automation enables professional workers to manage and execute most tasks associated with their jobs. PSA software is designed for a services industry that relies on the management of knowledge and information in order to provide services to clients or other businesses. Some industries that benefit from the implementation of professional services automation software include management consultancy, marketing services, architecture, computer software services, engineering, accountancy, and advertising.
Core Modules in PSA Software:
Time & Expense Tracking – You will gain the ability to see the time and expenses associated with any project. Track time across teams, projects, and individual employees for real-time profitability and resource allocation insight.
Resource Allocation – With PSA software, you have a central dashboard with a view of your entire organization’s resources, you can better plan for and bid on future projects, make staffing decisions on current tasks, and ensure that everything is done on-time and within budget.
Billing & Invoicing – Integrated time tracking and invoicing. You can create automated invoices within one solution and connect with multiple accounting solutions like Quickbooks and more!
Project Management – PSA software provides real-time access to project statuses to keep you in the loop and eliminate the exhausting task of chasing down updates after updates from team members.
CRM – You can track and manage the entire sales pipeline and customer relationship, analyze sales performance across the organization, and keep everything needed for a single client account on a single unified solution.
The professional services industry is growing rapidly, and with this growth comes the need for a PSA solution to help automate the overwhelming workload. According to researchandmarkets.com "The Global Professional Service Automation (PSA) Market is poised to grow at a CAGR of around 10% over the next decade to reach approximately $17.33 billion by 2025".
What is the Business Value of PSA Software? Let's Keep It Simple!
Money-Saving - this is the most tangible and direct consequence of implementing a modern PSA solution.
Eliminating revenue leakage - a good PSA tool will ensure you bill everything you should. This prevents the possibility of doing work for free or overcharging a client.
Efficiency - PSA enables you to optimize the delivery of the business and ensure you don’t miss any opportunities, slightly harder and less tangible, but very real nevertheless.
The combination of these three values should both reduce your costs and increase your revenue while allowing you to become more efficient and streamline processes along the way.
How Does PSA Software Streamline Business?
Everyone who is in the market for PSA software wants the answer. So, how can PSA software save time, money, and grow my business? We listed 5 ways we believe PSA software can help your business grow by saving you time and money:
Using one solution to manage everything - Think about how many solutions your business uses to manage its day to day operations. This ranges from individual solutions for CRM, resource management, time tracking, project management, financials, and more! Calculate how much you are spending on license fees for each solution and the time you spend re-keying data from one solution to another. PSA software contains all your information in one unified solution.
Reducing human error - Constantly re-keying data on a daily basis is guaranteed to introduce some level of errors, some may be costly, other ones just take time to fix. One unified solution where data is only entered once may not completely eliminate errors, but it will eliminate transcription errors.
Optimize your resource utilization - A PSA solution gives you insights on what your team is working on throughout each day. You can use this feature to quickly identify who is working on what, is it billable or non-billable, allowing you to close the gap in revenue leakage. Normally you may wait until meetings or a weekly/monthly analysis before you know what's going on, with PSA your resources tasks can be updated daily for review by stakeholders. Think about the amount of time you could save with this ability.
Focusing on your best clients - Using a PSA solution that shows all your revenue and cost in real-time, without any data noise, broken down by clients and projects, without any manual processing or spreadsheets, you will quickly see which clients are your cash cows and which ones are draining resources time.
Automatic invoicing and insights - Using PSA solution that automatically generates your invoices based on client projects will save you a substantial amount of time and improve the accuracy, timeliness, and speed of your invoicing process. PSA will help you notice outstanding invoices associated with clients and help you chase payments before you proceed with projects. You will no longer need to think, "Did we invoice John Doe for xyc". All your financial data is available in one solution in real-time.
Choosing the right PSA software for your organization is an important decision because you’re not just buying PSA software for what it does today, but also for how it’s likely to evolve over the next 10 years. You need to ensure your chosen solution is built on modern technologies, cloud-based, and capable of evolving with your business and your needs increase.
What is the Best Deployment Type?
With the significant growth of the internet, more web-based software companies are cleverly designing and offering low-cost solutions based entirely in the cloud. The three cloud-based delivery methods are SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. All three methods allow users to leverage
powerful business technology solutions without an upfront investment in on-premise hardware, which reduces the cost significantly. SaaS is the most popular method used today.
SaaS providers use the internet to deliver software to the end-user. Usage is generally
subscription-based, with a monthly or annual fee. SaaS users typically undertake costly or lengthy upgrades to the solutions. Since they are cloud-based, upgrades are typically managed by the solution provider.
In a nutshell, when evaluating a PSA Software, you should first narrow it down to SaaS-based solutions if you want to save time and costs.
What Signs Show That You Need PSA Software?
You're having trouble utilizing resources - To minimize bench time and get the right people on the right projects, you need to be able to track them. That’s going to require PSA software. Consider this, if you get one more billable hour out of your
consultants every week for a year, you could significantly increase your bottom line revenue. SPI Research found that larger organizations increased billable utilization from 71% to over 75% with PSA, meaning roughly 80 additional billable hours annually per consultant. More importantly, PSA has helped increase profitability per consultant by over 200%!
You’re still operating on spreadsheets - Even in 2019, many businesses are managing most of their processes via spreadsheets. This technique may work well for a small business with 4 to 5 users. However, once you go above 5 users and want to operate professionally, traceability and effectively managing resources becomes impractical, messy and unprofessional without a PSA solution in place.
Lack of resource insights - Once a service business grows and expands, keeping track of who has what skills can be a monumental burden without an automation solution designed specifically for that task. Often, those businesses without it find themselves relying on external contractors to fill in the gaps, which increases costs while keeping revenue flat. With a PSA solution, your business has a central dashboard view of your entire organization’s resources at the touch of a button. This allows for more effective planning and bids on future projects, making staffing decisions on current tasks, and ensure that everything is done on-time and within budget.
You’re over-servicing clients - As a service business, your main goal is to ensure client success and satisfaction. Frequently, businesses can spend up to double their quoted time on a project in order to make sure it’s completed correctly and in a timely manner. This is not only a huge cost overrun, but it’s a lost opportunity for people that could be doing billable work on other projects. With PSA software, businesses can track not only how much a client is spending but how much work they are putting into it down to the finest details.
If you can relate to the issues above, then it's time to consider PSA software. Regardless of the complexity of your business or the basic tools you currently use to get by, PSA software will help you streamline as a business.
Why not try a Free 14-day Trial...
CrossConcept Continuum goes beyond traditional PSA solutions available today by incorporating cutting-edge UI technology making the solution more user-friendly, resulting in fewer clicks within the solution and time spent logging data. CrossConcept Continuum has been built from the ground up to integrate with all major accounting systems to seamlessly synchronize projects and accounting within one unified system. Our innovative PSA solution allows organizations to maximize profitability by
integrating connecting projects and financial accounting, enabling you to manage all stages of your project from conception to completion and deliver on your promises.
CrossConcept has decades of experience helping service organizations automate their processes. Clients have ranged in size from a handful of people to over thirty thousand. The founder's and team’s real-world experience is what drove and shaped the creation of CrossConcept Continuum.
Our solution is a simple, yet powerful PSA solution built with the end-user in mind - fast, flexible, powerful and user-friendly! We are offering all new clients a free 2-week trial with no contract obligations. This is a great opportunity for any business to try out the solution and decide if PSA software is for you!
To book a free 15-minute consultation, email: marketing@crossconceptinc.com or call: 1-888-528-3898 x110.