Clearpoint

SaaS PSA Tools

Posted by Phil on 29 June 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: Business Direction, PSA, SaaS

• At ClearPoint we have a lot of experience at managing professional services (PS) firms, specifically in the IT consulting, business consulting and management advisory space. There a class of software tools, which are designed to provide the information PS managers require and to help automate the management of PS firms known as PSA – professional services automation. Over time, we have evaluated many PSA systems, have implemented several and we love 1, namely OpenAir. We selected and are in the process of implementing OpenAir to replace our current system to support and automate several areas of our business, including:
• Timesheeting – time entry, approval workflows
• Projects – project management, task management and control
• Expenses – entry and reimbursement tracking
• Invoicing – we run “pre-billing” in OpenAir and export the information to our accounting system for invoice production and distribution.
• Resourcing – in my experience the most thorny issue of PSA and we look forward to seeing just how useable and effective OpenAir is for this tricky area. Excellence in resourcing is central to any PS firm and no doubt will be the feature of many discussions to come.

So what are the typical criteria most organisations need to consider to select a PSA system? For us the key ones are:

1. SaaS. Well, we currently have no IT infrastructure at all. We use Google Apps for email, intranet/wiki, web-based document sharing, website hosting etc etc. And it’s free for up to 100 users. So we need a hosted option.
2. Per Month cost. It’s based the on number of active users each month so you can expand and contract as projects demand. And it eases our cashflow requirements.
3. New features. I guess at ClearPoint we know a lot about PS management and OpenAir have been very “open” to our suggestions for new requirements, and they have promised add our new features into future roll outs. Of course being SaaS based, we don’t have to do anything to install new features – they simply appear and we can use them.
4. Integration. Primarily with our SaaS based accounting system called Xero. We are starting with a simple export/import integration mechanism and plan to fully automate the integration over time.

We’ll share our experience of the implementation over time and we are interested in the view and experiences of both PS firms and corporates in this space.