Managing projects and resources from start to finish is no easy feat. In many companies, departments are working in siloes or entering data into disconnected spreadsheets and solutions, and business leaders don’t know the best way to fix these issues.
Our clients are often looking for scalable solutions that address these challenges and assist with current or forecasted growth in their professional services departments. The 3 most common pain points we hear about are inefficient project handoff, poor resource management, and revenue leakage from unbilled or underbilled services and products.
How can FinancialForce PSA help you overcome these challenges? In today’s blog, we’re covering how adding FinancialForce to your Salesforce platform can alleviate these pain points in your business.
1. FinancialForce improves project handoff.
Miscommunication is inevitable when departments are working in siloes or using solutions that don’t communicate with one another. This pain point comes up a lot in our conversations with clients in the services industry.
Because FinancialForce is an application built on Salesforce, your business can manage service projects on a single, cloud-based platform with FinancialForce Professional Service Automation (PSA). This minimizes errors and tightens project handoff after your sales team wins and closes an opportunity.
We’ve written a lot about how FinancialForce is the missing link you need between your front and back office. If you only have Salesforce, you’re likely using a PSA system that doesn’t sync or communicate with Salesforce very well (if at all!) or requires cumbersome code or customizations. With FinancialForce PSA, you’re able to gain the visibility you need between sales and services to see the financial health of your business and make decisions about the future.
2. FinancialForce helps you resource projects easily and effectively.
Your team isn’t reaching its full potential without the right project management system. Some of your employees might be overworked while others have the bandwidth for additional projects. Some might not be the best fit for the resource request they’re assigned. Others may have skills and certifications better suited for the needs of the project.
A common challenge for resource managers is finding resources who best fit the criteria of a resource request. Finding a resource who matches all the project criteria can turn up few or no results. In many solutions, the resource manager must remove certain filter values to return resources in the displayed list.
FinancialForce PSA offers many ways to enhance resource management in your organization. For example, the application’s intelligent staffing feature helps you make quicker, more informed decisions by automating a lot of your project staffing process.
Released in 2021, this feature “instantly evaluates skills and availability across regions, practices and groups, and produces a stack-ranked result set,” according to FinancialForce. This removes a lot of guesswork for your resource managers; all they have to do is select their project teams accordingly.
3. FinancialForce stops revenue leakage.
Poor project management is a major source of margin erosion and revenue leakage.
Revenue leakage stems from unbilled or underbilled services or products delivered to your clients. Common reasons are improper scope planning, loss of control over budgets, or gaps between client expectations and key deliverables.
FinancialForce PSA gives you a clear picture of a project’s “burndown,” which predicts if a project is trending correctly or going over budget. What’s even better? Retrieving a project burndown report takes only seconds with FinancialForce. You’ll be able to see a project’s hours budgeted, charged, planned, and unplanned.
Automating processes with FinancialForce PSA is another great way to stem revenue leakage. Automation ensures growth in profit margin and billable utilization and gives time back to your team for more complex, revenue-generating initiatives. We wrote a blog about the positive impact automation can have on your team here if you want to learn more!
Do these pain points resonate with you? We’ve seen how implementing and optimizing FinancialForce for our clients has helped them address these problems and prepare their business for growth.
If you’re also ready to tackle these challenges, schedule a call today to talk to one of our mentors about your business goals. We’ll share how our team can help your organization get the most out of FinancialForce so you can make decisions about your current and future growth with confidence.