Managing a project’s ecosystem from bid to bill is an essential part of any successful professional services company. With PSA software, you can automate the many manual processes inside your organisation and gain access to accurate insights into how your projects are being managed.
The benefits of PSA software in improving financial management can be split into four key areas:
- Simplified project planning
- Improved project accounting
- Automated invoicing
- Advanced reporting and analytics
1. Simplified project planning
The idea of project management is to simplify the lifecycle of initiating, executing, monitoring and closing a project. From project estimation to scheduling the right resources, every detail has to be planned to ensure your project is a success.
Having disparate solutions for each function is time-consuming and creates silos. By investing in PSA software, you can eliminate the need for multiple tools and provide one unified solution. This is because:
- PSA software makes it easier to manage and view all resources across your organisation, ensuring the right resources are being assigned to the right projects at the right times
- You gain full visibility of resource implementation and employee skills analysis
- You can identify and focus in on the metrics that matter to your business (for example, hours worked on a certain project)
Plus, you can maximise revenue and enhance profitability by creating task-specific timelines. This ensures a project’s progress remains on track and is reached in the given cost and time to avoid incurring any loss.
2. Improved project accounting
Often, project financials are overlooked so a project can stay on course for its originally planned timeline. But the consequences of this means you’ll see a reduction in profitability. For example, not tracking the day-to-day revenues, expenses, costs and profits of your projects makes it harder to identify where it’s earning/burning money.
With PSA software, you can manage, react and report on real-time project costs and expenses which helps you stay ahead of the curve. For example, extensive timesheet functionality allows you to create ‘forecasted vs actual’ reports, making it easy to view the differences between allocated/actual hours logged by project resources. This helps tell you what billing loss/profit has occurred.
Lastly, PSA software gives you the required flexibility to regulate project costs in real-time and protect the financial health of your project.
3. Automated invoicing
When it comes to invoicing clients, collaboration is key. Sending information manually between teams when trying to build an invoice can be laborious and increases the chances of human error. For example, an outstanding invoice might have fallen through the cracks and not have been entered into your company’s spreadsheet, stopping your business from getting paid on time.
Using PSA software, you can better manage your invoicing cycle with:
- Streamlined billing options to automatically send invoices on time
- Added functionality to follow up outstanding payments
- Ability to escalate non-payment issues when needed
Plus, integrated timesheets make it possible to send automated emails to employees when timesheets haven’t been completed. Provide clients with different type of invoices depending on their needs, from a one line description right through to detailed task line descriptions and itemised billing.
4. Advanced reporting and analytics
To give management and customers the types of reports they need, the right PSA software will provide your decision makers with real-time insights into critical project figures.
For example, key reports on project budgets, foresights into resource utilisation and the ability to identify gaps between demand and capacity allow for better planning and avoids unnecessary hiring/firing costs.
This data can then be visualised using customisable dashboards and reports to get the bigger picture. With full visibility of all your projects, you can take better strategic decisions to improve your overall revenue thanks to:
- Early warnings on budget overruns which helps you take of control project expenses well before it becomes an issue
- Built-in drag and drop functionality that allows you to schedule resources and meet the changing resource demands
- Single source of truth and enterprise-wide visibility allows you to move highly skilled resources to billable tasks and re-assign non-billable tasks to lower-cost resources. This also helps to close the demand gap and maximise billability
Futureproof your business with PSA software
Implementing an integrated PSA solution will help you manage, automate, collaborate and report in real-time to enhance project management. Plus, you’ll benefit from greater financial insights into not only how projects are being managed but also the overall profitability of your business.
With so many PSA solutions on the market, it can be hard to pick the best one for your business. In our guide, we share tips on what to consider when looking for PSA software, discuss when the best time to invest is and what features the perfect solution should offer.
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