Is Productive the Best Professional Services Automation Software For Your Business?

Running a professional services business is delicate work.

There’s the global competition, the constant pitching for new deals. There’s balancing out work for your teammates. And you’re always striving to keep all your stakeholders happy. To oversimplify some more—you’re doing all of this while aiming to keep projects profitable and business booming.

Nowadays, the answer to tackling many of those complex challenges is pretty simple: with technology. Because the right technology gives you consolidated business data, and having data at your fingertips lets you make informed decisions to lead your next steps.

If you’re in the business of providing professional services, you need—in lack of a simpler term—a professional services automation software.

Now that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? (We found alternatives, more on that below.)

First let’s break this down.

Professional services are any type of service you provide professionally, as a business. Those services can be creative, technological, legal, educational, etc.

A professional services automation software is a tool or platform in which you run all your business processes. Those processes will fall into one of the following categories:

To satisfy the “automation” part of the term “professional services automation software”, the platform should be a single, core operational tool for successfully delivering your work.

Related: Top 25 Mavenlink Alternatives for Agencies

Professional services automation software (or short: PSA software) is made for a number of different types of companies. you should consider using a PSA software if you run an IT service or business consulting company, a digital agency (marketing, software development, branding), or a company that offers specialized services (think architecture, finance, engineering, construction).

To understand what your professional services business needs when choosing the right PSA software, consider the following questions:

Usually, a professional services automation software will (or should) include the following features:

Productive is a professional service automation software for agencies and professional service providers. Using it as a professional services business, you benefit from an all-in-one platform that gives you a real-time overview of your business performance.

Productive arms service providers with consolidated data reporting that’s linked with time tracking, budgets, projects, expenses, sales and resource management, time off management and invoicing. 

Set your sales pipeline up to push deals towards closure. After winning a new deal, you can easily convert it into a project and retain all the data from your initial proposal.

In Productive, you can build and manage any type of budget (be it fixed-price or hourly, out-of-pocket expenses, etc.). If you’re managing complex, long-term projects, you can split budgets up into separate phases and pull up invoices as you complete each phase.

To manage work for employees and effectively deliver work, use Productive’s Scheduling. The feature is made for creating schedules and assigning people to services. With time off management embedded in the tool, you can easily do business forecasting.

Filling out timesheets can be done through daily or weekly time tacking, using the Calendar view or the Desktop timer in Productive, or by track time directly in Tasks. You can also save your teammates’ time by booking their time in advance using Automatic time tracking.

In Productive, you can easily streamline projects and tasks. To learn all about it, check out our webinar below.

To help move projects forward, you can use workflows as customizable task statuses. The goal of workflows is to make it easier to manage and organize project information. 

Productive’s powerful insights let you monitor the state of your budgets, profit margins, and amounts left for invoicing in real time. You can choose from over 50 ready-made reports linked to utilization, profit, revenue, growth, and more—or build your own reports to get the data your professional services business needs.

Check out how DotControl increased their forecasted utilization below.

Invoice building in Productive saves time by converting fees, tracked time and expenses into invoices in a couple of clicks. You can choose from billing an entire project, a part of it, or using recurring budgets to manage retainer invoicing.

Connect other work management apps like JIRA, Slack, QuickBooks, and using Productive Integrations.

Last, but not least: alternative names for professional services automation software. For you not to get confused with all the terms out there, here’s a list of alternative names for PSA software:

If you’re using a toolstack that doesn’t offer you consolidated business data at all times, the answer is: yes, you should try Productive as a PSA software. Navigating your business’ future gets much easier with valuable data at your fingertips.

Book a demo and start your free trial today.