Five Signs That Your Business Needs Professional Services Automation Software

We've put together a handy, five-point checklist to help you make the decision to start using PSA software for your business.

So, your professional services business has successfully navigated the early stages. You’re a few years in, you’ve got some robust processes, and you’ve even started automating some of them.

But you still find that things are disappearing through invisible cracks. Even if you have a unified data set to work from (which is certainly not a given), it still takes lots of human effort and elbow grease to pull it all together. This problem is especially acute when different business units use different tools, meaning sales are briefing operations, who are briefing finance, customer service, etc.

On top of all this, you’re producing masses of information that ends up sitting on a server or, in most cases, in a folder or software that only one person uses, with no easy way for you to develop actionable plans through data utilization quickly.

For example, we had one Scoro customer who spent 15% of all their available time getting reports from accounting to create overviews, as several business units and types of billing had to be compared manually after being set in a framework. With good PSA software, this is an easy report to set up once and then have access to at the click of a button.

And last but far the worst, forecasting is proving unreliable at best, as you have no single way of looking at an entire project overview, from initial contact to getting paid.

If this sounds painfully familiar, your business is ready for Professional Services Automation (PSA) software.

What is PSA software, and how can you tell if you need it?

Professional Services Automation (PSA) software was created to help professional services organizations (PSO) like creative agencies, law firms, consultancies, IT firms, and architecture agencies with project and resource management and business insights. PSA software is a unified solution in place of separate resource planning, billing, time tracking, business insights, project management, and resource utilization tools.

We’ve put together the five-point checklist below to help you gauge whether your business is ready to take the next step in its evolution.

1. You’re using multiple platforms that don’t talk to each other.

Only a very small number of Professional Service Organizations (PSOs) get to the mid-market level (80-200 employees) without some form of automation. In most cases, tools are implemented as the company grows and evolves, and teams get familiar and comfortable with them. Your sales team might use a sales CRM to manage leads and track deals, while your operations team is most likely using some work-management or time-tracking tool.?

But the problems set in when rapid growth outstrips the ability of these tools. For example, your quoting tool does not create projects, while your time-tracking tool may not automatically create invoices. This creates silos of automation without a centralized, single ‘truth’ to work from.

This diffuse approach to automation is costing you time and efficiency, hours that could be billed to a client are spent migrating data from one system to the next.

Scoro features integrations with almost every other work automation software you can imagine, which means it is the ideal solution to bring structure and visibility to your entire business process without abandoning systems that may work perfectly well for individual departments.

2. Resource planning is challenging or chaotic.

By their very nature, professional services businesses have quite varied periods of workload. If you find that your team is massively overworked some weeks, while on others, you’re paying them to sit around and do very little, you have a problem.

Being over- or under-worked is toxic to staff morale, while it also brings variability into the quality of work delivered that may cost you, clients.

It’s also never a great look for your sales team to sell a client service only for your operations team to realize that you have no available capacity and then have to renegotiate deadlines or project delivery dates.

Having a 360 view of available resources is one of the great benefits of implementing a central PSA software solution.

Scoro’s Planner feature lets project managers allocate duties manually or automatically, ensuring all resources are perfectly optimized while your entire team can have an overview of availability during planning and pitching preparations.

3. There’s a lack of synergy between sales and execution teams.

This point follows naturally from point two and is often the ignition event for what resembles open warfare in many companies, especially ones that offer consulting services.

If your sales team’s CRM doesn’t automatically move deal information to the system used by the project team, you can have a breakdown in communication and some miserable customers. Exporting (or, heaven forbid, printing) files and then manually re-entering data into a new system is a time suck and creates a human-error minefield.

Whatever CRM platform your business uses, ensure it integrates with your project management software. Or better yet, use one central tool like Scoro that takes care of both aspects.

4. Your competitors are leaving you behind.

Maintaining the status quo is often the path of least resistance. We understand that change management can range from difficult to truly traumatic, but using outdated systems rather than best-in-class software will be more damaging in the long run.

It may be time to switch if you’re losing out on deals because of operational inertia. For instance, if it takes you a few days to send a quote while a competitor is delivering theirs on the same day as the pitch, or you have trouble explaining your cost projections in detail, you’ll lose out sooner rather than later.

So sure, your team is very comfortable using Excel to generate invoices or scheduling lengthy meetings for the sales team to brief the project team on what has been agreed with a prospect, but remember that comfort is the enemy of progress.

And in any case, adopting a new PSA software should not be a daunting task. At Scoro, our onboarding team are experts at analyzing business needs and helping new users get up to speed in record time.?

5. Revenue is going up, but profit is lagging.

This is a classic dilemma for growing businesses. You have more clients and work, your employees are busier than ever, and your pipeline looks healthy. Revenue numbers are excellent, but profit is simply not growing in parallel.

Maybe you’re under-quoting, as you have no easy way to see what individuals are working on and how long it takes them to do specific tasks. Or you may sell several services, but only a few are profitable, while some may cost you money.?

The importance of understanding where your business makes money, right down to an individual project and task level, cannot be overstated.

A quality PSA tool will give you the insight needed to make vital revenue decisions in real-time rather than after the fact when you have already lost money.

Get in touch and arrange a free demo to see how Scoro can power your business, bring total visibility to all stages of your operations, and set you up for a profitable future.

About Scoro:

Scoro is an award-winning Professional Services Automation software for collaborative teams. Thousands of businesses in 60+ countries trust Scoro as a scalable solution for increasing margins and data-driven decision-making across all areas of work – from projects and sales to billing and reporting. Founded in 2013 by Fred Krieger, Scoro now has offices in the UK, US and Estonia. Scoro has been listed in both the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and Inc. 5000 and has been selected as one of the top software companies in EMEA by G2. For more information, visit Scoro.com