What is Professional Services Automation (PSA) Software?
Professional services automation (PSA) is software designed to assist professional services organizations (PSOs) like creative agencies, law firms, consultancies, IT firms, and architecture agencies with project and resource management as well as business insights.?
PSA software is used as a unified solution in place of separate resource planning, billing, time tracking, business insights, project management, and resource utilization tools. The advantages of using a unified PSA software to replace several disparate software solutions are detailed below.
PSA software is designed to track and manage the entire lifecycle of a project, from the moment the sales opportunity is identified, through the pitching and sales process, and the allocation and management of resources to complete the project. The final stages of the project include invoicing, payment collection, and detailed reporting and tracking of the entire cycle.
PSA software aims to bring automation, repeatability and consistency to the different stages of the project. By unifying, automating and centralizing business processes and data, services can be delivered in a more predictable manner, while repetitive manual processes that occupy employees' time can be automated and streamlined.?
PSA software contains the following elements:
Who uses PSA software?
Businesses who operate by selling billable skills as a service use PSA software to be more productive, efficient and profitable.?
These PSOs generally don’t sell a product, but instead sell skills or knowledge on a project basis to clients.
For these professional service firms, PSA solutions offer vital visibility into key performance metrics such as cost, utilization rates, profit margins, revenue forecast, and business expenses by creating a centralized storage of all project data, throughout the entire lifecycle of each project.
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Companies who are in the process of scaling employee numbers in order to attain more profitability generally benefit the most from implementing a PSA solution as the software assists in maintaining or increasing profitability by making all business processes repeatable and trackable.
What are the benefits of using PSA software?
PSA software empowers those responsible for business performance and outputs to measure, track and manage service delivery at scale.
The reporting features of good PSA software supply insight and visibility to resource managers in order to help them identify business trends and efficiently allocate resources.
Businesses often adopt PSA software when they increase the size of their organization or grow the range of services offered to meet client needs. As projects, timelines and deadlines become more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage everything manually.
PSA software has been proven to:
Conclusion
Organizations that use multiple project management, workflow tools, or separate systems are at a disadvantage to those using a single PSA software to create one inarguable business ‘truth’.
Software like Scoro brings vastly improved visibility by unifying core business processes into a single operating system. This informational infrastructure establishes the central knowledge hub of an organization in one place to improve processes, drive productivity, and automate repeatable tasks to place businesses at the forefront of the professional services economy.