What is Professional Services Automation?

To increase efficiency of your organization, internal processes can be integrated with accounting systems such as SAP, Netsuite and Sage Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning, giving you the ability to connect different systems together and to determine the overall picture.

Professional Services Automation (PSA) software is designed to support professionals such as attorneys, auditors, IT consultants, project management, resource management, customer projects, utilization rate management and billing personnel. The PSA software not only provides you with the tools needed to track your company's key performance indicators, but also gathers insights in a way that helps you deploy resources to increase profitability and reduce costs. It is designed for service-oriented organizations that need to automate and streamline their processes, including service management and delivery of new business generations.

The software in the PSA category is designed to help organizations meet milestones and schedules for projects, allocate resources to projects, optimize workforce usage and track employees time spent on expenses and billing. Other automation modules for professional services include CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to keep sales opportunities up-to-date, helpdesk and service desk software with reporting and dashboard functions. The PSA software is designed to help companies deliver projects and services, such as services that are the primary revenue drivers, in order to get a real-time overview of the workload, manage it and monitor the health of the company.

This post provides an introduction to Professional Services Automation (PSA) software and provides resources for organizations considering integrating software solutions to manage project deployment. PSA is a true project-based CRM that helps project-oriented professional service organizations understand their market, identify, manage, track, forecast and capture opportunities. The PSA Software offers an alternative to the tools used by many project teams for separate project management, time tracking, invoices, resource planning, business intelligence and collaboration.

Primary functions that help to manage most of an organization’s day-to-day operations include project management, documentation, time tracking, billing, reporting, workload and customer relationship management. Resource management gives companies the tools to track and plan human resources and to plan people for projects that correspond to their knowledge and skills best. Features include support for managers in streamlining personnel allocation, customizable databases that provide detailed profiles of professionals, and project availability and qualifications.

Professional service companies that provide specific services to their customers typically deploy project management tools, time, cost, profitability, revenue tracking, and more, as well as specific software tools if necessary. When you choose a professional service automation tool, you should know your project, resource and financial management requirements for the organization and how to merge your requirements across multiple applications.

When choosing software to automate professional services (PSA), PSA applications advertise similar skills in accounting, resource planning, and project collaboration, but differ in the depth of those skills. Understand the industry or sector your organization focuses on when looking for a suitable PSA application. For managers to have access to a real-time view of their work, highlight burn-out, free up time in their teams, and find company-wide expertise, a PSA app should have resource requirements features and a system that suggests the best person or team at a given time to work with.

A typical PSA software function combines work automation, project management, resource management, time tracking, finance, billing, team collaboration and reporting. If professional services make up a large part of your products and services, or if your company is large, the teams that manage these services need tools that connect their data so that they can collaborate not only with each other but also with their customers. Your PSA should have a solution that is good at managing customer information, contacts, attachments, contacts and passwords, devices and more.

Their modular solutions from PSA provide decision makers and scattered teams with insight into the entire lifecycle from tendering to billing. The primary purpose of PSA software from a data perspective is to provide executives with real-time truth for the entire organization as they scale and achieve a higher level of sustainability. Software manifestations can be as simple as a project management timetable or as robust as an enterprise suite of integrations for CRM, helpdesk and accounting.

A major advantage of PSA solutions is that transactions are tied to three things: the organization's accounts, the people and teams that do the work, the projects and products / services that are delivered to customers, and the source of billing and revenue. A single solution enables management to see in real time where projects are located, affecting organizations "ability to respond quickly and effectively. More than 70% of the actual work that is done in the service of corporate management, task management, communication, teamwork and working with customers and subcontractors is done within the PSA solution.

As the name implies, PSA is a system used by service providers. Professional Services Automation consists of architectural and engineering firms, construction companies, CPA, accountants, IT consultancies, advertising and media companies, lawyers and organisations that are service-oriented and sell time to people. PSAs are a generation of software designed to make professional service operations more efficient, to make their resources more productive and to deliver the most important services not via a widget or app but via their time.

When you refer to professional service software as professional services automation (PSA), service resource management (ERP) or Professional Services Project Portfolio Management (PPM) when discussing it. The software is analogous to the ERP software (Enterprise Resource Planning) and is often simply referred to as ERP for service companies. SAP and Netsuite serve more than 1,500 customers and have the highest market share among leading PSA providers at 21 percent, providing automation and intelligence tools and services based on business requirements to manage operations throughout the customer's life cycle.