What is Professional Services Automation software?
Professional Services Automation (PSA) software is designed to make life easier for specialists in project and service oriented businesses, such as consultants, architects, accountants, lawyers, and agencies.
PSAs are all-in-one platforms that serve as the central hub for your entire business, improving operational effectiveness, employee value, and performance analysis.
Many professional services providers start out with a small set of applications and tools to run their operations. They add to the mix as they grow, typically ending up with a plethora of point solutions spread across various vendors.
In the early stages, this is often a perfectly viable solution - it’s cheap and gets the job done, allowing them to focus on their core business. But at some point, they typically find themselves in a situation where they spend more time managing their solutions than growing their business.
And while hiring someone to develop custom integrations between your applications could be a potential remedy, it usually carries a significant cost that can be very hard to justify, especially for a smaller business.
The benefits of using a PSA solution
Enter the world of professional services automation. With a PSA, the different subsystems are already integrated out of the box, with a coherent look and feel.
There are many different PSA systems out there, targeting different sizes of businesses and sectors. But most of them share these common capabilities:
- Project management
- Time and expense tracking
- Resource management
- Finance and invoicing
- Business intelligence
- Collaboration tools
- API for integrations
The actual functionality they offer varies greatly as well. A platform targeting enterprise customers is typically more feature-rich than smaller solutions — but also inherently more complex and rigid to use.
Flowmine belongs to the latter category and helps you with every aspect of your day-to-day work, regardless of your role. Acting as the hub of your entire business, it enables you to manage your entire service lifecycle — all in one place.