Best ERP for Consulting Firms: 2024 Review

ERP for consulting firms can support all aspects of your business performance.

We’ve complied a list of the best enterprise resource planning tools for service providers, so keep reading to find out what they’re best for.

Productive is a software solution that helps service providers manage their entire business operations, from managing potential clients to successfully delivering projects.

It’s designed specifically to support the workflows of professional services firms, such as consulting firms, while delivering in-depth business data on profitability, utilization, and revenue.

Learn how Productive helps a consulting company manage business requirements.

Let’s explore Productive’s key features in more detail:

Productive’s Resource Planning can provide a consulting business with a way to plan out their capacity and forecast needs for long periods of time.

With the resource planner, you can schedule employees by taking into account their working hours, availability (with integrated Time Off Management), and cost rates.

While creating a booking for an employee, you’ll also be able to view how many hours have already been booked, and how many are left to account for.

You can use the capacity indicators for workload balancing. These are color-coded representations of resource capacity, which indicate if employees are overbooked (red) or underbooked (half-filled).

To forecast your needs for upcoming periods, you can visualize and forecast utilization through the resource planner (by using the Scheduled / Available time field), or with Productive’s Reporting.

This helps forecast resource gaps and manage future human resource demand.

Within the resource planner, you can also set schedules for unconfirmed projects or to-be-hired employees, with tentative bookings and placeholders, respectively.

Learn how to create your ideal capacity planning template in more detail.

Productive’s financial management features include: rate card managment, project budgeting, overhead and expense management, client billing, and financial forecasting.

To start off, with Productive’s Budgeting, you can set up your employee details and bundle them into rate cards.

Productive supports different types of budgets: fixed-price, hourly, retainer, and hybrid.

You can also split up complex budgets into multiple phases for easier billing and cash flow management.

You can monitor your budgeting and even forecast it (more on this in the next section).

For Billing, Productive pulls budgeting data and lets project managers create brand-friendly invoices and send them from the platform.

You can also finalize the process through Xero or QuickBooks with Productive’s built-in integrations.

With Productive’s Budgeting and Profitability charts, you can visualize and even forecast your financial performance.

Forecasting works by taking into account your resource scheduling and predicting profit margins, revenue, and budget burn accordingly.

This helps project managers get more control over their current business processes and optimize resource management.

Overhead and expenses insights can also be included for a more accurate overview of your profitability. There are also Purchase Orders for formalizing your buying intent.

Productive includes an integrated Sales CRM module for streamlined customer relationship management.

This includes an overview of your sales pipeline with customizable stages.

Each deal within your funnel can be managed like a task, with assignees, deadlines, comment fields, to-dos, and more.

To centralize your client communications, you can forward emails to Productive’s Inbox.

CRM is also connected to your budgeting, so you can use your rate card data to create and send proposals/quotes.

Once a deal is won, you can convert it to a project and continue managing it from there.

You can also access a wide range of insights into key sales analytics, such as sales team performance, utilization, forecasted potential revenue, and more.

Productive’s Project Management feature includes customizable project views and task management.

For project views, project managers can organize tasks within a Kanban board, List, Calendar, Gantt, Workload view, and more.

Task management offers all the capabilities you need to manage client communication and project timelines.

This includes:

You can also invite clients to your projects free of charge and collaborate with them on tasks, or even give them access to time tracking and financial information.

You can also create a set of custom permissions with the Permission Builder.

Finally, Reporting uses data from all of the features mentioned above to deliver real-time, customizable reports.

You can create reports by using one of the 50+ templates, or you can create your own from scratch.

Productive includes options such as data filtering, grouping, custom fields, and even custom formulas.

To share your reports, you can create dashboards and add your reports with widgets, or you can automate your sending to Slack or email with Productive’s Pulse.

Additional features include: Docs, Productive AI, Revenue Recognition

Productive offers various integrations with HR, accounting, and collaboration tools.

Integrations include Slack, Google Calendar, and Outlook for scheduling and updates; Xero and QuickBooks for accounting; BambooHR, Breathe, Humaans.io for HRM; Memtime for time tracking; and more.

Epicor is one of the leading providers in the ERP space, but it might not be the best pick for professional services firms.

It provides modules for processes such as:

Pros: Users find that Epicor can be a great database for businesses from a range of industries, with extensive customizability options.

Cons: While Epicor is often listed as one of the top ERPs for consulting service providers, its website lists the software’s focus as the building suply, distribution, and manufacturing industry.

Users also mention some other issues with the software, such as upkeep, user friendliness, and the overall implementation process.

Source: Reddit

We also covered Epicor in our article of the top ERP software examples.

Netsuite offers robust financial managementfeatures, but smaller businesses in the professional services industry might want to consider some streamlined alternatives to Netsuite.

Key features:

Pros: Customer reviews often praise Netsuite as a great solution for accounting teams especially: “We are able to speed up our billing and revenue recognition processes. We are able to customize the experience to our entity’s need” (G2).

Cons: Netsuite is a complex solution, and many users recommend hiring consultants to help with the implementation process. When you factor in the cost of licensing to this, Netsuite can get quite pricey.

We also have a more in-depth exploration of Netsuite that you can check out: Netsuite vs QuickBooks.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be a good customizable option for businesses with unique needs, but it can be difficult to implement and work in UI/UX-wise.

It includes modules for:

Pros: Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows users to combine multiple product modules to create a flexible solution for their business requirements.

Cons: However, some users state that these modules “don’t necessarily talk to each other the way you would expect” (Capterra). Additionally, as with other enterprise resource planning tools, there are difficulties in implementation, usability, and pricing tiers.

Kantata, previously known as Mavenlink, is a good sofware solution for professional services firms, but isn’t ideal for complex reporting needs.

Key features:

Pros: Kantata is a good option for professional services providers, as it offers all of the key features necessary to manage professional services workflows.

Cons: Mavenlink isn’t the best option for business intelligence, as users state that it takes the software as many as “30-40min to refresh data” (Capterra). In comparison, Mavenlink alternatives such as Productive let you customize your reports in real time.

Bitrix24 is a Russian-based CRM project management software with a solid range of tools for sales teams, but it misses the mark in usability and customer support.

Key features:

Pros: In comparison to Productive, Bitrix24 is more focused on its CRM features, which might benefit companies with gaps in their sales process.

Cons: On the other hand, Bitrix24 is not the best reviewed software. Users frequently report issues with the platform’s performance, general usability, and customer support.

Source: Capterra

You can also check out some of the top competitors to Bitrix24.

Scoro is a good work management software for professional services companies, but lacks some advanced features for comprehensive financial management.

Key features:

Pros: Like Mavenlink or Productive, Scoro offers a useful range of features for managing professional services firms.

Cons: In comparison to some Scoro alternatives, Scoro doesn’t offer advanced financial management features such as calculating overhead per hour or revenue recognition. This impacts the complexity of insights you can get with this tool.

Sage Intacct is an accounting platform with advanced financial management and reporting options, but the pricing models can opaque and inaccessible to businesses on a budget.

Key features:

Pros: Sage Intacct provides advanced financial management and accounting capabilities that can support mid-sized to larger consulting companies.

Cons: If you’re looking for a tool that can manage your resource planning, projects, and accounting, it might be best to invest in a PSA solution that integrates with project accounting software.

Source: Reddit

ERP consulting software refers to a type of software solution that integrates core business processes into a single platform. These usually include: client relationships, human resources, project management, and financials.

ERP for consulting firms should also include collaboration features, a team workspace for viewing project progress, and a way for clients to access key data for easier feedback, monitoring, and improved customer satisfaction.

You can also check out our list of the best CRMs for consultants or general consulting software across a variety of categories.

Some of the main benefits of ERP include:

During the selection process, the most important factors to consider are:

However, you’ll also need to consider additional factors such as usability, customer service, and scalability.

Usability and customer service are important for driving adoption to your new ERP software for consulting, and ensuring that you can get the most out of your investment.

Scalability means that the software is being upgraded with quality of life features and new capabilities.

We’ve reviewed some great enterprise resource planning solutions for professional services firms. To summarize:

In comparison to other software solutions on this list, Productive is a user-friendly option that’s available at different price ranges.

It has a range of features for financial and human resources management, including real-time reports, utilization forecasting, revenue and overhead management, and much more.

Book a demo with Productive today to learn more.