Top 3 Ways Professional Services Organizations Can Exceed Goals in 2022 and Beyond

The business landscape is constantly changing and leaders at professional service organizations are facing new challenges in 2022 that pose a direct threat to their business success and profitability. It feels like no matter where you turn, businesses are closing their doors or limiting services due to a variety of reasons. Professional service organizations, including consulting firms, software publishers, and system integrators, are not immune from these impacts. In fact, many are facing shortages of experienced resources, increased competition, and rising overhead.  

The most successful professional service organizations are finding ways to overcome today’s unique challenges to outpace the competition and grow profit margin.  

Retain valuable resources by reducing manual data entry 

Your services are only as good as the resources delivering them. In order to both attract and retain valuable resources, leading Proserv organizations are putting technology in place to streamline processes and increase efficiencies, which in turn increases employee satisfaction and productivity. Eliminating manual processes and tasks eliminates headaches for both your internal team and external constituents.  

Ask any billable resource what the biggest area of inefficiency is in their job and the majority will bring up tracking billable hours to jobs or customers. The powerful business applications platform built by Microsoft – Dynamics 365, includes functionality specific to professional services organizations, including a robust time entry user interface.  

Within Dynamics 365, your users can easily reduce the amount of time spent tracking billable time with quick keyboard shortcuts that makes entering time and assigning it to a project or customer faster than ever. Shortcuts allow users to add new items, copy rows, edit entries, and more – all with quick key combinations.   

No matter where your employees are working – whether that be in the office, at home, or at a customer site, they have the ability to enter time from any browser or mobile device.  

Additionally, Dynamics 365 simplifies expense management by allowing users to submit expenses on the same mobile app as they submit time, automatically creating expense lines directly from uploaded receipt images. Automated workflows route time and expense reports to the correct approver for a fast turn around process.  

Gain More Control Over Revenue  

Managing your budget, overall revenue, and cash flow can be complicated. Dynamics 365 allows you to drive your business performance through streamlined project financials.  

• On time and accurate revenue recognition
  

Dynamics 365 allows you to adhere to accounting standards and practices, including compliance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

• Invoice customers faster and improve cash flow
  • By customizing invoices, you can speed up your review and reconciliation timeframes. Additionally, you have the ability to add in any ad-hoc transactions to invoices to streamline the invoicing process to include all charges.

• Manage your project accounting with higher accuracy
  • Set accounting rules for cost and revenue, accruals, and postings specific to your company.

• Set up pay-when-paid terms
  • Automatically withhold payments to vendors until your customer pays you for project. For example, when a customer pays an amount on a project invoice, you release some or all of the vendor invoice amount. You can also release partial payment if you receive a partial payment from the customer.
• Manage recurring contract billing
  • Gain greater control over billing per item and contract, automate renewals, implement flexible pricing models, and improve your insight into recurring billing with Dynamics 365.
• Control your projects with project forecasts and project budgets
  • If your company focuses on revenues and costs derived from specific transitions, project forecasting should be used. If your organization focused more on the financial amounts, use project budgeting.
  • Both project forecasts and project budgets use forecast models to hold the projected transaction amounts.

Make informed business decisions with Advanced Business Intelligence

No matter if you’re focused on closing business and increasing sales, planning upcoming projects, or managing resource utilization, the advanced business intelligence features built into Dynamics 365 and Power BI will help you better understand your current state of business and make the best choices to reach your goals.

Accelerating sales depends on your ability to interact with the right potential customers at the right time. Sales insights uses intelligent pipeline management capabilities and machine learning to direct your sellers time to the best opportunities likely to convert or close as won.

Learn how Velosio can help Professional Service and Project Driven Firms reach their organization goals.

Report on any data within your single platform solution with advanced KPI reporting capabilities, allowing department leaders to understand how they’re stacking up against set goals and historical trends.

Power BI provides graphs and charts to visualize your information, drill down to get additional details, generate reports that include data from a variety of sources, and much more.