PSA Software Archives

5 Ways a PSA Software Can Help You Track Your Client Billables More Efficiently

PSA systems can be a game-changer for professional services organizations that sell billable hours as a service – right from automating billable hours tracking to template-based invoicing.

Learn how you can effectively use a PSA software to increase your client billables

Introduction

The professional services industry is growing at a rapid pace today, attracting a large number of new players to enter the segment. To successfully navigate such a growing market, professional services firms, including consultants, engineering services, and project management, are in constant need of tools to grow their business and rise above the competition.

This is where professional services automation (PSA) software comes into the picture.

What Is PSA And How Can It Help With Increasing Billable Hours?

Professional services automation (PSA) is a critical tool designed as a project management software and a resource management software rolled into one simple platform.

It is essentially an enterprise resource management tool designed for firms within the service industry. For example, a good PSA software offers multiple benefits, including invoice management, time tracking, expense tracking, document management, and more to assist the operations of a professional services firm.

How Does PSA Software Help in Billables Utilization?

For any service-based business, one of the top concerns is staying on top of billable resources to make sure that all billable hours are tracked and invoiced in a hassle-free manner.

PSA systems can be a game-changer for professional services organizations that sell billable hours as a service. Right from automating billable hours tracking to template-based invoicing, PSA software can ensure that you get it right every time.

Further, increased accuracy in the billing leads to more satisfied clients and reduced human-related errors, thus making the billing cycles more accurate and transparent.

5 Tips to Efficiently Track Your Client Billables Using PSA

Here are some of the ways you can use a PSA system to help your firm increase the number of client billable hours –

1. Automated Time Tracking

Automated time tracking using professional services automation software can be a great solution to get more billable hours as it ensures that none of your hard work is wasted, while accurately accounting for all the work that you’ve completed.

It also saves you from the hassle of filling cumbersome and lengthy timesheets at the end of the week with all the tasks you’ve completed. It is a tedious and challenging task to estimate the amount of time you spent on drafting client emails, recalling the number of meetings you’ve attended, and compiling all the data into a concise timesheet.

2. Capture All The Time Spent – Billable or Not

In a professional setup, time should be accounted the same way as organizations account for the money. By keeping an account of where all the time is being spent or how it is spent using a PSA software, top management can make appropriate decisions and changes to realize more of the clients’ billable time.

3. Tracking and Invoice Automation

Using a good PSA system, organizations can accurately log and automatically charge the clients’ next invoice once they perform an hour of work against a project. The best part is that all of this happens automatically, without anyone having to consolidate various reports to make it happen.

This becomes possible because PSA reduces the amount of coordination and manual reporting that is pretty common in service organizations. With fewer non-billable projects to worry about, your team can actually focus on work that is profitable.

4. Allocate Resources More Proactively

Proactive resource allocation to ensure that the maximum amount of time is spent working for clients requires a lot of work and detailed planning. A high-quality PSA software allows you to have better visibility of the entire resource pool available, giving you the power to allocate time better and increase your billable hours. This way, you can get the right resources in front of the right customers.

5. Effective Delivery

One of the benefits of PSA is its ability to easily and accurately collect data about the working hours that people are actually putting in, instead of just giving a weekly total. Further, it also helps to ensure that all your proposals are in better sync with how the work will be delivered, making the billable utilization and realization rates more accurate.

Conclusion

PSA systems carry immense value due to their ability to help organizations deliver profitable and successful client engagements. One of the other effective ways that a PSA helps professional service organizations is by realizing the maximum value of the available resource time, also known as billable utilization.

Choosing the right PSA system, such as Juntrax allows your firm to create significant positive results for both your clients and your company in the long run. Juntrax offers excellent PSA solutions specifically designed to support various stages of the professional services delivery lifecycle.

4 Ways A PSA Solution Can Help Reduce Security Risks For Your Engineering Services Firm

Professional services automation software can be of immense use in solving various problems including the security risks that exist in the organizations.

Professional services automation or PSA refers to a full-scale software suite specifically developed to assist employees in service and project-oriented businesses such as engineering services, software development, IT consulting, creative agencies, and more.

The market size of the PSA software industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.7% and is predicted to reach over $16 billion by 2025. More and more companies are using PSA software as it gives them the necessary tools to track several KPIs for their business and helps them accumulate insights in a way that assists in allocating resources intelligently for increased profitability and reduced costs.

The main objective of PSA software is to churn data and offer the service professionals with real-time updates of the entire business, allowing them to scale systematically. This is primarily achieved by developing various metrics across the entire business to help professionals evaluate basic business processes.

For engineering services firms, specifically, the professional services automation software can be of immense use and is flexible enough to offer solutions to various challenges, including the security risks that exist in these organizations.

4 Ways PSA Solutions Can Help Minimize Security Risks For Engineering Services Firms

Here is how engineering services firms can tackle security risks better using PSA solutions –

1. Minimize the Cost and Risk of Running Your Own Servers

Using a good PSA software in engineering services firms translates to seamless cloud adoption that eliminates the costs associated with buying and maintaining your own servers, database software, and operating systems.

Further, it also removes the hassle of regular system updates, security threat mitigation, and patch management. Thus, empowering the engineering teams to solely focus on supporting the core business goals of their organization.

2. Data Security

PSA applications for engineering services firms ensure that all the data is protected within data centers that are certified by the highest industry standards for data security, operational reliability, and privacy control.

A well-made PSA software is designed in a way that is controlled via a common security model, giving teams centralized control of access and much higher visibility to data at a granular level.

Additionally, single sign-on enables engineering services teams to access all platform applications, reducing the risk of a security breach from managing multiple usernames/passwords.

5 Reasons Your Organization Needs a PSA Software

3. Better Performance

Leveraging a professional service automation solutions platform offers clear transparency to both service availability and performance via a real-time view of system status. It allows the engineering services firms to minimize various security risks by demonstrating a clear track record of a trusted and scalable service, supporting multiple transactions done by the users.

4. Effectively Dealing With Sensitive Information

A good PSA software allows you to implement more efficient methods for delivering project sensitive information to all your stakeholders. This leads to multiple benefits, including timely project delivery, reduced security risks, and maximized profitability at the same time.

Further, sorting out the operational side of delivery streamlines the accounting of projects and gives you real-time visibility into your costs, including earned revenue and orders. This allows you to systematically track new levels of accountability from the people charged with the delivery of your projects.

Bottom Line

With an increasing number of engineering services firms struggling to adapt to the demands of customers, your firm can capitalize on new revenue models and appropriately respond to disruptive new technologies. PSA offers an excellent solution to help professional services companies streamline operations, optimize efficiency, and attain greater profitability.

Engineering services firms can use the framework offered by the PSA system to build a predictable service-based business and minimize the security risks to a great extent. The ability of PSA software to see demand early, utilize resources optimally, and accurately track project delivery helps in creating the necessary conditions for confident forecasts. This kind of improved predictability not only leads to better decision making but also helps to build the confidence of stakeholders, including investors and senior leadership.

If you’ve been looking for a powerful, secure, and intuitive PSA software, Juntrax is a leading name that specializes in cloud-based solutions specifically for the project and service-focused organizations.

PSA Software: A Complete Guide For Understanding, Evaluating And Implementing Professional Services Automation Software

Professional services automation is a platform that improves business operations through the seamless automation of multiple business activities.

Tracing it back to its origin, professional services automation originally surfaced as a small piece of project accounting software. From there, PSA has become a fundamental fragment of project-based engineering and other professional services.

Although businesses today are already well-acquainted with other software categories such as customer relationship management and financial management, professional services automation is comparatively new and unfamiliar, but imperative.

This article will introduce you to features of PSA and how you can approach its enablement for your business.

Features of PSA Software

Professional services automation is a platform that improves business operations through the seamless automation of multiple business activities. It is essentially a predominant alternative for your multi-vendor solutions for project management, employee management, time tracking, billing, etc.

It is obvious that the PSA tool works on the efficient idea of having a single, strong, and valuable foundation (read: aspects automation) instead of multiple disoriented systems.

PSA software is specifically beneficial for organizations that deliver managed or billable services such as engineering services companies. Simply put, the primary customer of PSA is an organization that provides chargeable assignments as their principal source of income.

Considering this, let’s analyze the key features that PSA can offer to a managed or billable services organization.

Project Management

PSA contains a bracket of modules for advanced project lifecycle management. Here’s how you can realize project margins and cost with PSA:

Proposals during the sales cycle for reduced errors improved project plan and decreased probability of any delay.
Configuration of contract terms to ensure adherence to policies. This includes systematic adherence to purchase order policy, experience reimbursement, and other rules related to client approvals.
Efficient project governance for risk tracking and early mitigation of issues
Management and tracking of changed orders after analyzing the comprehensive impact of financials and timelines

Employee Management

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PSA tools are equipped to match the project demands with the right available resources. With PSA by your side, you can achieve the following:

Allocation of resources based on skill-set
Allocation of resources after considering cross-project requirements
User-based permissions

It helps in proactive planning – leaving no room for last-minute challenges.

Expense Management

If you wish to track assigned tasks, analyze performance forecasts, and record recurring expenses, PSA is your destination. Most of the PSA tools support on-site or online data entry for regular entry of expenses. This helps in the predictive forecast of expenses on a category basis.

The categorization further empowers approvals for expense claims, which are immediately updated for the approver and submitter without delay.

Client Billables Management

The PSA application is frequently integrated with the core accounting software of the organization, and as a result, it offers specific features such as profitability analysis and billing. Additionally, PSA efficiently tracks invoices of customers to mitigate revenue leakage.

These invoices are often created through a batch automated process and dispatched to the client with relevant information. Of course, the user has the power to configure invoice formats such as local tax policies, language-specific changes, etc.

Project Cash Flow Management

As discussed above, due to PSA’s in-built capabilities of automating bills and invoicing, cash flow automatically improves. Factors that contribute to this are:

Timely invoicing and billing
Reduced customer disputes
Improved accuracy of billing

Together these factors contribute to the cash flow of the organization.

Reporting and Analysis

When you are dealing with services, it is not possible to quantify the service units sold. You can’t put a number to this statistic. Hence, performance management becomes complicated.

This is why the PSA software is pre-equipped with reporting potentials. Utilizing industry-specific KPIs and metrics, it is possible to gauge the performance of the business.

Conclusion

Since you have gained significant knowledge of the professional services automation features, it is the right time to start implementation. We at Juntrax can help you in your PSA implementation journey by understanding the basic requirements of your SME or startup and then move forward. From there, we can help you deploy and utilize the PSA software. Schedule a demo right away.

5 Reasons Your Organization Needs a PSA Software

Here are five ground-breaking reasons how a PSA can transform your organization, and give it the much-needed push.

Automation is no longer a luxury but, in fact, a necessity that is fuelling organizational growth. Sensing this opportunity, several professional services organizations (PSOs) are turning to professional services automation (PSA) platforms to make their tasks easier. But is it all mere hype, or is PSA a genuine trendsetter that will revolutionize the future of the industry?

Here are five ground-breaking ways a PSA can transform your organization, and give it the much-needed push.

1. Project Management at lightening fast speed

Even the most basic PSA systems help in the efficient planning, management, and execution of projects. Engineering services firms can use it to gain a holistic overview of any project, its progress, and its status. Executives can evaluate the projects that are in the pipeline and predict their resource requirements or cashflows accordingly. At the same time, Project Managers can build a workforce that will suit the project and prepare a repository of crucial data to lay a solid foundation for the project.

Most importantly, it establishes closed-loop channels so that different teams, members, and leaders within the SMEs can effortlessly communicate with each other.

2. Gives You Full Control of Project Cash Flow

PSA software can keep a tab on the project costs at a granular level, which eliminates the need for accounting or ledger maintenance services. In addition to project cashflow management, it also keeps a minute-by-minute track of the time spent on the project and other ancillary costs. Thus, small and medium businesses can gain a comprehensive insight into every form of investment involved.

At the same time, a PSA also allows you to compare the planned budget with the actual expenditure.

3. Helps Streamline The Project Lifecycle

A suitable PSA platform can automatically manage all stages in the lifecycle of a project, right from assignment to execution. As a result, an engineering services firm can focus on various qualitative measures to deliver an unparalleled service experience to clients.

Several PSA platforms can seamlessly integrate with other automation tools, such as CRM or accounting software. Thus, the introduction of PSA eliminates the need for any manual intervention.

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4. Enhances Resource Allocation And Utilization

As stated previously, PSA can offer the Project Manager a snapshot of the projects in the pipeline. Based on these inputs, executives can gauge future demands and schedule and allocate resources accordingly.

With a robust PSA tool, your company can assign the right talent for the right project at the right billing rate. Even if the team comprises of members scattered across the company, PSA acts as a unifying collaborative platform for them to work together.

Furthermore, you can locate the underutilized resources and take appropriate action accordingly.

5. Supports Real-Time Data Visibility And Decision-Making

Through the centralization of all service processes, PSA offers a bird’s eye view of the entire company and its resources. As a result, it overcomes the issue of information silos, data redundancy, and inaccuracies. PSA software acts as a single source of truth, where every action or process of information is systematically recorded in real-time.

All data related to resource availability, project status, and employee productivity helps in making data-driven decisions that will benefit your business.

It’s A Wrap

Professional Services Automation (PSA) simplifies administrative tasks, aiding PSOs in efficient project management and timely payments.

Streamlining work processes and ensuring timely payments isn’t something anyone complains about. It elevates employee and customer satisfaction, laying the groundwork for business success.

Happy employees foster a positive work environment, while satisfied clients pave the way for stronger business connections—key ingredients for organizational growth!

For an all-encompassing PSA solution with compatible HR modules, opt for Juntrax!