PSA software for consulting firms — complete guide
Everything you need to know about Professional Services Automation: the dedicated platform, in-depth articles, and key glossary terms. Starting point for consulting firms with 10 to 500 consultants.
What a PSA platform solves, and what it does not
The useful scope of a professional services automation platform is four chained journeys: from opportunity to project, from role requirement to assignment, from delivered work to approved hour, and from approved hour to billable amount. Whenever any of the four breaks, a parallel spreadsheet appears to plug the gap.
Everything outside those four is better solved with integrations than by widening the scope. Accounting, payroll and electronic signature are mature systems with their own legal obligations and their own release cycles, and absorbing them into the operational layer adds complexity without improving a single decision.
- Pipeline with demand data delivery can actually use
- Capacity, skills and assignments in one shared view
- Time entry and approval connected to the contract
- Billing data ready for the accounting system
How to evaluate, and in what order to roll out
Feature lists resemble each other because they are written to. What distinguishes products is their behaviour in the exceptions: a consultant changing mid-project, an hour booked outside the contract, a client with special terms, a project that mixes time and fixed price.
For the rollout, the lowest-risk order starts with the project-and-hours pair, because that is where the economic data is born and where the improvement shows at the first month-end. Capacity and assignments follow, then the pipeline with demand fields, and last the processes with the most accumulated history.
- Your own scenario, with the firm's real exceptions
- A permissions test with one user from each role
- A complete month-end run inside the pilot
- A written criterion for switching off the old system
