As a professional services business, you’re always looking for better ways to manage costs across multiple projects. With the right PSA software, you can professionally track and report your costs (including daily expenses you might think aren’t important) to stop you from blowing the budget.
Let’s look at some of the cost tracking features you should be looking out for in a PSA solution:
- Better control over your project costs
- Easily track the status of your projects
- Increased project collaboration
- Boost project productivity
- Instant visibility of your expenses
- Meet customer demand with flexible invoicing
1. Better control over your project costs
The right PSA software will let you track, view and analyse costs and revenues for individual projects that are still in progress. You’ll also be able to predict/control margins and easily view future expenses without waiting until the end of an accounting period.
2. Easily track the status of your projects
Managing your projects in several disparate sources such as Excel spreadsheets hinders the performance of your business. This is because:
- Manual data entry can be arduous and time-consuming for your employees, which increases the chances of human error if they lose focus when inputting facts and figures
- Siloed data across planning, estimation, budgeting and control makes it tricky to consistently monitor performance and make swift, proactive responses
- Not having a complete view of your budgets hampers your ability to track planned vs actual spend and pinpoint where you’re earning/burning money
By investing in the right PSA software, you can easily manage these variables and simplify your processes. For example, predefined and customisable stop lighting helps you monitor what’s important to your business and avert problems before they begin.
3. Increased project collaboration
One area that can get missed is the financial status of a project. Increased collaboration provides your accountants and project managers with a single solution that helps them use the same set of data for improved analysis and project accountability. Project data can then be presented to your project managers in a way that’s easy for them to understand and use.
4. Boost project productivity
If all your projects are consistent in their setup, KPIs (key performance indicators) can be created, reported against and relied upon as there’s only one set of data. Also, features like flexible project structures and billing rates help you run your projects more efficiently.
Costs can then be collected and charged to individual projects within a single integrated solution.
5. Instant visibility of your expenses
Create realistic project budgets by taking known or expected expenses into account within projects. Record expenses like subcontractor, purchasing and labour charges as commitments as soon as they’re entered to allow for the future cost. This also increases your visibility of expected expense costs.
6. Meet customer demand with flexible invoicing
Some of your customers might not be able to pay for your services all at once. That’s why it’s important you provide billing flexibility (e.g. payment plans and date options) where customers can be charged at a future date. By showing your customers you’re willing to work with them when it comes to their bills, you can attract more prospects and increase customer loyalty.
With the right PSA software, you’ll get the flexibility needed to assign various billing methods, rate structures and mark-up rules for each project or for a specific invoice. Tools like group invoices by WBS (work breakdown structure) can help increase your chances of getting paid on time, every time without the extra effort.
It’s not enough to innovate your business alone…
Implementing new software isn’t just an IT project - it’s a business project because it will change or transform your organisation. For your transformation/change initiative to be a success, you need to create the right mindset and culture where your new technology will thrive.
One of the values you’ve identified from your change will probably be improved profitability, but there are also non-financial factors your business can benefit from like:
- Optimised processes
- Increased employee morale
- Enhanced customer satisfaction
You need your teams to be bought into the reasons for change and what’s needed for it to go ahead. Be prepared to answer the following questions from your staff:
- What’s the change about?
- What’s in it for me?
- What will I have to do?
You can read more about creating an effective digital transformation strategy by downloading our guide below.
Helping you choose the right PSA tool
With so many PSA solutions on the market, it can be difficult to find the one best suited to your needs. In our guide, we cover everything you need to know when it comes to choosing a PSA tool.
From knowing when’s the right time to invest in PSA software to what main processes a PSA system supports, grab your copy now by clicking on the button below.