In order to build a profitable business, productivity has to remain consistent. If your business offers a service, and you are having a hard time managing all its moving parts, professional services automation (PSA) software may be right for you. Today, we will give a quick overview of what exactly a PSA is, and how it can serve as an extremely useful tool for businesses who operate in the professional services space.

What are Professional Services?
Does your company offer customized, knowledge-based services? Typically, vocations such as lawyer, accountant, auditor, as well as consultants of all types would be labeled professional services. Professional services, up until recently, have been invoiced on a billable hours basis, but more and more vendors, like 415 IT, have moved to a fixed price model to provide more value.

What is Professional Services Automation?
Being able to successfully automate tasks has become a major point of emphasis for nearly every business over the past few years. After all, the faster and more reliably you can do the important, but tedious tasks that every professional services company has to do, the more effective the service is to clients. Professional services automation software allows companies to oversee and manage projects, schedule and manage resources, handle expenses and invoicing. Most importantly the PSA will track time. Since time will either be used to bill your customers, or be used to create products that will drive operational effectiveness, tracking time is essential.

The PSA
There are different types of PSA tools. Some are hosted on your company’s in-house infrastructure, while some are made available through a hosted cloud server. Typically, SaaS is the way most companies use it to give their resources remote capabilities (since most professional services firms don’t necessarily have the technology resources that other organizations might have).

The three main functions of any PSA are:

• Resource management
• Project management
• Time and expense management

Tracking time efficiently is an important part of the PSA’s job, so being able to know that resources are providing reliable time figures provides a company to set its service rates.

Automation
You may be wondering what exactly the PSA automates? Traditionally, project management, managing resources, and tracking time and expenses are detailed processes with a lot of moving parts. By simplifying these tasks though the automation of some of their most tedious parts, projects move forward seamlessly by tracking time and expenses, rather than tracking variables separately.

The main benefit of the PSA is that it gives project managers a comprehensive tool for auditing ongoing or completed projects. They can quickly ascertain what went right, what went wrong, and where their company can improve to be as effective and efficient as possible.

To run the best version of your business, you’ll want to know how to improve it. At 415 IT, we can help any professional services firm find the software it needs to be the best version of itself. Call us today at (415) 295-4898 to learn how our IT professionals can help you build your best business.