What is Professional Services Automation?
Professional services automation is a technology platform that helps professionals offering their services make it easier to perform projects and plan their resources.
PSA software is used by lawyers, auditors, accountants, IT service providers, consultants, creative firms, and marketing account managers, among other service-based jobs.
Businesses can better handle and keep track of their customers, resources (like people and money), projects, and finances, such as billing and invoicing, with the help of PSA software.
It takes care of tasks that used to be done by hand, like making smart contracts, keeping track of time, making predictions, making cost reports, making proposals, and talking to clients.
Real-time visibility and more control over operations are the end goals for professional service groups, which don’t always have a formal structure.
Synonyms
- PSA software: Service-based workers use this software to keep track of their clients, projects, and resources.
- Services automation: This type of process automation is only used by professional services firms.
Problems that professional services firms face in doing business
Companies that provide professional services have problems that most other businesses don’t have to deal with.
- Allocating and using resources in the best way possible
- Handling the needs of a wide range of clients
- Keeping an accurate financial picture
- Ensuring high-quality service delivery
- Making the most money possible
- Hiring and keeping the best employees
Pros of automating professional services
PSA software helps businesses deal with the problems listed above by fixing their main practical problems. Ultimately, this leads to higher profits because it improves speed, makes critical performance indicators (KPIs) more accessible, and makes customers happier.
Higher rates of keeping employees
How well a company can give its employees structure and worth is a big part of how long they stay with it. If messy project management and a lack of efficient processes make them tired, they’ll leave.
A study from the University of California found that six things cause stress.
Two problems—too much demand and insufficient control—are immediately fixed by automating professional services.
PSA software has project and resource management features that help teams make the best use of their time, prioritize tasks, and meet goals while letting them work alone as they see fit.
Better project delivery
It takes a lot of planning and accuracy to ensure that all clients, jobs, and needs are met with the same level of quality, especially when projects need to be done quickly (like taxes or legal contracts).
But every customer has different short-term and long-term needs.
Because service work is uncertain and has many aspects, it’s hard to make processes that work the same way across the company.
In real-time, workers and management can talk through PSA software. Tasks are tracked and logged, and events are planned weeks in advance.
Correct billing and charging
60% of the time, clients pay their bills an average of 4.3 days late.
Billing mistakes are not only rude but also make it less likely that professional service companies will get paid.
If you have an automation system that handles your funds, you can easily avoid making mistakes like sending out wrong invoices, reminding people they are late on payments, and charging too much.
PSA software ensures clients are billed correctly and on time by making accurate estimates and automating the dunning process.
It’s also different for service-based businesses to determine how to record income because payments and services don’t always happen in the same month.
With tools like tracking deferred revenue, recurring billing, and integrated payments, PSA software helps businesses handle this complicated process.
Lower rates of project cancellation
Customers like pros who are honest and open about their services, prices, and contract terms.
Pricing regarding SaaS, market goods, and other goods with set prices is easy to understand.
However, professional services contracts are complex for customers to understand because they are vague and complicated.
More costs complicate pricing, especially when they aren’t shared quickly.
PSA platforms keep track of time and handle tasks automatically so clients can see the whole picture. When a client spends more money, the program will show that in the financial overview.
When customers see their projects and service providers are honest about extra costs, customer unhappiness, and project cancellation rates decrease. These are two of the main reasons why service companies lose money.
Less money going missing
Often, when service providers are busy with client work, they don’t have time to manage expenses, bill and invoice clients, look at internal finances, or do other administrative financial chores.
Revenue loss happens when mistakes in these processes are not fixed. This problem can cost a business up to 5% of its revenue.
PSA software fixes this problem in several ways:
- Automated time tracking keeps workers from charging too little for their work.
- Real-time data and seeing their finances help businesses find problems quickly.
- Customizable processes make it easy to follow up on late payments, stop payments from being sent twice, and more.
Higher rates of using resources
Most service companies find it hard to keep everyone involved while ensuring that the right people work on suitable projects.
Finding the right balance is essential to avoid delays, burnout, and unhappy clients when you have a lot of jobs to work on and tight deadlines.
PSA software lets project managers put the right person on each job, monitor costs in real-time, and change plans to use resources best.
Better project margins
Bottom-line growth is what happens when PSA software is put into use.
These advantages add to more significant gains over time and make a service business run more smoothly.
Automation Solutions for Professional Services
Professional services automation software is made to work with certain types of businesses, sizes of businesses, and funds.
Things to Look for in a PSA Service
The following should be part of your PSA solution:
- Account management and customer relationship management (CRM)
- Sales automation
- Service ticketing
- Expense management
- Proposal and quote management
- Project management
- Contract management
- Accounting integrations
- Real-time tracking of time and assets
- Dashboard reporting and analytics
- Mobile and desktop apps
- Setup and ongoing support
PSA software has different features based on the niche and the provider, but these features should help you begin your search.
Parts of PSA Solutions automate the tracking of time and expenses
The best PSA software platforms keep track of costs by letting you set up approval processes, reimburse employees, and connect to payroll systems so that payments are processed automatically.
They also keep track of billable hours, downtime, and travel time. This helps workers and employees accurately manage their time, keep track of their goals, and keep track of projects.
Professional services automation needs to streamline the abovementioned things and work with accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero. This software measures financial performance.
With accounting integrations, business data, and advanced analytics, PSA software checks real-time financial health.
Software users can keep track of project prices and income streams from a single dashboard and look at complicated financial processes.
Predicting the lifecycle
Choose a platform that collects customer information from bills, project values, and upcoming plans to make project lifecycle predictions and determine the customer lifetime value (CLV).
A PSA should have automated renewal tools and the ability to predict income for businesses that use a recurring revenue model.
Integration of Professional Services Automation
Besides having built-in features, PSA software should work with the other technologies that a business already has.
Integration of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
When you integrate CRM, all your data is in one place, so you only have to deal with one source of truth. You can also see the customer journey, from the first interaction to the final bill.
As the status of a job changes in PSA, it should also change in the CRM.
For instance, when a company finishes a project phase for a client, it should send the information to the CRM and add it to that user’s profile.
Integration of CPQ
When they integrate the two, groups can use CPQ for sales and a PSA tool for operations.
CPQ software handles the price and quoting parts of the sales process without problems.
PSA software can make offers and keep an eye on the business’s finances, but it needs to connect with CPQ’s sales configurator to work at its best.
Putting both processes on the same site makes them more useful by connecting them.
For example, a record can be made when a certain point in the sales cycle is reached or when there is a certain amount of trust in the possible close date of an opportunity.
The operations team can use this record to make predictions several months in advance without doing anything else.
This ensures the operations team knows about any work that might come in.
Integration of Subscription Management
For retainer-based services and productized products, subscription management is critical.
The right PSA software should be able to handle subscription payments, show you why customers leave, and help you guess how much money you’ll make in the future.
These features, such as branding, SEO, and advertising, are most valuable for digital agencies.
It’s still essential for businesses to keep track of revenue measures and link them to specific projects, even if they use success-based pricing.
Adding a billing platform
Because of these things, you should switch to a different payment software.
- To work with accounting tools
- To handle payments from people outside of the customer’s country
- To accept more than one currency
PSA usually handles billing, but it should be able to connect to a business’s third-party billing tool also to handle billing and processing payments.
