Manage your projects with PSA software to deliver quality results
Manage your projects with PSA software to deliver quality results
Worldwide, most businesses use different professional services to support their operations. These professional services firms offer businesses their time, effort, and knowledge. However, these third-party services can be made more effective and efficient using Professional Services Automation (PSA) software.
Need for PSA software
Enterprises in the services sector need a solution to deliver exceptional client services. One of the ways is to make their service delivery faster. Another way is to use the customer information they have collected to develop insights into customer behavior. These insights will help enhance service quality and customize the offerings to meet the expected deliverables in time.
These enterprises are also looking for techniques for managing their projects efficiently while ensuring client satisfaction and top-notch service standards. So, firms must find inventive ways to provide cost-effective and quality services.
It is where Professional Services Automation (PSA) software plays a crucial role. Project managers must manage multiple responsibilities, including:
- Defining project goals
- Determining the quantifiable deliverables
- Identifying tasks, sub-tasks, and activities
- Allocating resources
- Determining timelines
- Preparing a schedule for each task and activity
- Creating budget
- Measuring performance
The PSA software helps you manage all these. It helps execute projects on time, within budget, and as per the set goals. It saves you from the manual work of planning, data entry, and correcting errors. It gives you an outlook on your project operations to keep you updated on its progress.
In a way, the PSA system gives you all information on one platform; you need not go to different platforms for different information. You get all your answers on the project from your PSA software.
Types of PSA users
PSA solutions automate your project-related operational and managerial tasks to improve your functional capabilities. The software:
- Automates manual processes
- Integrates functional operations
- Creates a centralized database for exchanging information among different projects
All these capabilities ensure standardized operations, reducing risks and improving service delivery. Thus, the PSA solution conforms to timelines, reduces costs, and expands margins while focusing on the client’s deliverables.
With the help of PSA software, organizations can plan their projects, allocate resources, prepare schedules, and comply with the set targets. It facilitates collaboration between team members to optimize the business processes.
It is an all-in-one solution for all your project management needs, such as:
- Time tracking
- Analytics and business intelligence
- Resource allocation and performance measurement
- Collaboration with teams
- Invoicing and budgeting
- Client engagement
Thus, the PSA system manages all your tasks throughout the project lifecycle. You can plan the project, manage its execution, and measure its progress.
Users of PSA software
Various industries requiring PSA software solutions include:
- IT, software, and IT-enabled services
- Architecture, construction, and engineering
- Digital marketing and advertising
- Accounting and financial services
- Business Consulting
- Lawyers and legal professionals
The project management teams need this solution to manage their projects – resources, timelines, and deliverables effectively. Different team members who use this solution include:
- Project managers for managing time, costs, resources, and tasks.
- Finance managers for tracking project expenses and revenues.
- The sales team for scoping project phases to ensure timely delivery.
- Human resource team to track resources’ tasks, timelines, hiring needs, overtime, and bonuses.
- Senior management to track project execution and its impact on the company’s revenues.
Features of PSA software
Accounting and Budgeting for projects
Managing expenses, recognizing revenues, and budgeting are challenging tasks. You must record each detail of money coming in and going out for any project. You also need to track payments made or received or any delays. PSA software helps you with all these and more.
A centralized, automated invoicing system allows you to generate accurate and fully-detailed invoices for projects. You can also set an approval process on bills to ensure compliance and authenticity. You can create individual tasks and relevant budgets for each, edit them, and manage them.
You can also recognize revenue based on your own-created rules and schedules, including fixed value, labor-based, or percent complete. The solution facilitates separate revenue recognition and project billing. You can drill down your revenues to the last detail or track the summarized version as per senior management’s needs.
You can identify all different costs and categorize them under relevant projects. You can segment the costs as billable and non-billable costs for better understanding. Based on cost allocation, you can prepare project budgets.
You can forecast costs and expenses for each future activity and calculate project profitability. It helps you compare forecast versus actual to improve project execution in the future. You can assess your project performance in detail to understand where you went wrong.
Allocating and handling resources
It is crucial to allocate resources and define roles and responsibilities whenever a project starts. If these definitions are unclear, project execution becomes a messy situation where some skill requirements are missing, or some could be doing duplicate work.
Thus, businesses need PSA software with resource-handling capabilities to manage the project resources well. The first and foremost feature that PSA software helps with is creating a single pool of resources.
As per project needs, you can create a list of skills required. Now, you can check your pool of resources to find the most appropriate resources. You must base your selection on experience, required skills, and project timelines. You must define the workflow for resource requests and the approval process to ensure relevant resources are placed in a particular project.
Based on this, you can allocate them work and create optimal project teams for the best results. You can also track the performance of resources for their appraisal. You can track allocated hours, worked hours, meeting hours, etc., of resources to keep projects on track.
The PSA software also helps with resource forecasts. You can forecast future project resource needs to control the staffing requirements, hiring, and training. Furthermore, you can also plan assets requirement based on the number of resources and record relevant costs.
Managing expenses
Project execution is a continuous process requiring daily expenses for managing different aspects of the project. With the PSA software, you can track all project expenses during its lifecycle. You can create alerts for unpaid expenses, expenses that exceed a particular limit, or others. It helps you charge your clients accordingly and maintain transparency with them.
You can collect details of expenses and prepare reports on a per-project basis or a consolidated number. You can also drill down the expenses into tasks for detailed report preparation and expense analysis. You can enter details of each expense comprehensively by adding receipt images, approvals, and amounts.
Furthermore, you can manage different payment milestones with the PSA software. You can add different payment methods and track them for expense payments.
Project scheduling and timelines management
Tracking project timing is essential to deliver it on time. Also, based on the time employees spend on each task, you can bill the project accordingly. The PSA software allows you to manage the project timelines better to avoid delays.
You can make entries for employees’ time in and out to monitor their performance. The logs of time spent on each task results in time calculation for the entire project. You can also create the process for timesheet approvals and rejections and track it through dashboards.
The PSA platform also helps in time forecasts. You can forecast the time required for tasks and sub-tasks for each project to calculate the total project time. Later, you can compare forecasted versus actual to know the reasons for the difference.
The PSA software tracks your project timings. It gives you visibility of employees’ hours spent on the project and has control over their performance.
Project reporting and analytics
A single change in the project plan can affect the project delivery, timelines, or costs. So, it is critical for the project manager to have visibility of the entire project execution. Since the different project aspects are interdependent, you must be on your toes to manage every small action and reaction. PSA software helps you with all these.
The PSA software lets you track your project performance through frequent health checks. You can monitor KPIs such as:
- Project milestones
- Percent of project completion
- Project costs
- Historical and Forecast reports
- Billing data
- Overdue tasks
- Completed projects
Also, you can monitor task scheduling to see if there are any backlogs and complete them before moving ahead. You can do a skill-capabilities match to check the suitability of human resources and its impact on project profitability. The software also helps compare the budgeted figures with the actuals to make future decisions.
The PSA software is effective considering the feature of customizable dashboards providing real-time insights based on your project roles and can help in performance analysis. You can generate graphs and reports to track relevant project data, such as profitability metrics.
Project management
Every project manager aims to streamline the project operations. Streamlined processes lead to better quality results and the achievement of goals.
Generally, PSA software systems have in-built project templates to help you plan the project. Thus, you save time setting up projects and working on them as you have standardized templates.
The software also provides customized or in-built dashboards to assess your project status in real time. You can look at the Gantt charts, project plans, performance measures, and other analytics. Managers can get a summarized view of their project from the project center to facilitate stakeholder collaboration.
Thus, you can manage all the project information in one place to facilitate accessible communication with clients. It also makes collaboration within the team and different project functions smoother.
Benefits of PSA software
With these features, PSA software provides the following benefits:
- Since the software automates your project processes, you do not have to do monotonous, repetitive work, saving time.
- Planning the project with charts, checklists, best practices, and in-built templates makes it more manageable.
- You are always well-informed about your project status, with clear visibility of its execution and alert generation when anything goes wrong.
- It helps you keep a database of past projects to help you with learnings and best practices for future projects.
- It aligns your sales, finance, and delivery teams to ensure the delivery of valuable services on time within the agreed costs.
- It helps you with a smoother lifecycle of projects, starting from initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure.
Factors to consider while buying PSA software
All these features are essential in any Netsuite PSA solution to ensure a project’s success. The PSA software must have the capabilities of time tracking, invoicing, reporting, and resource management. Besides the features, you must also consider the following factors while deciding on a PSA solution:
- The solution’s flexibility and integrability are critical factors. Without changing workflows, you must check its possible integrations with other applications and tools.
- The solution must be easy to understand, learn, and use. You must check how much training your employees will need and whether it is available with the vendor.
- Pricing is the key factor while buying any new technology since you are looking for maximum ROI. You must check the additional costs such as implementation, subscription, training, post-implementation support, etc.
- The solution’s scalability is a vital consideration because you must be able to use the software in the future when your projects’ count increases or the number of users rises.
And the NetSuite Professional Services Automation (PSA) software satisfies all these aspects. It has all the features and functionalities to run your projects successfully from start to finish. The NetSuite PSA solution is the correct tick mark on all the above factors. NetSuite solutions are scalable and flexible to take care of the evolving nature of company requirements.
Cloudiotech can help you implement, integrate, and customize the PSA system. We also train your employees to use the solution to its maximum capability. Our effective services ensure success in your projects with the help of the NetSuite PSA software.
Cloudiotech is a leading provider of NetSuite solutions and services to clients. We are a top-ranked NetSuite partner in the US and the UAE. We help our clients with all support services for NetSuite solutions to make their solution implementation and usage a smoother process.
Transform your project management with Cloudiotech’s NetSuite PSA software.
Contact our team for a demo.
