MSPNetworks Blog

Consultation is something that can save businesses a considerable amount of time and resources. After all, you can’t expect a business professional to know everything there is to know about everything. Professional services, like those of lawyers, financial consultants, accountants, advisers, and marketing specialists, are required by just about all businesses to at least some extent. Suffice to say that each of these specialists has dedicated software and IT solutions that are needed for success.

Software as a Service
The cloud has created a revolution in professional service acquisition, making it easier than ever before to leverage software applications. Software as a Service, or SaaS, is the delivery of software applications through the cloud for a monthly fee. SaaS solutions are typically billed by the user, and they include services like Office 365 and G Suite. Software developers have built services that can be deployed through the cloud, making them much more accessible and flexible according to the business’ specific needs.

Mobile Solutions
Mobility can put businesses in a favorable position, and from a professional services standpoint, it can also create a lot of complications. For example, professional service providers need to consider the federal, state, and industry regulations that might entail implementing more layers of security for sending and receiving certain data. Mobility might create more opportunities to be productive, but it also means that data is being exposed to more threats, meaning that those in professional services industries need to be careful about how it is utilized.

A virtual private network, or VPN, is the easiest way to solve this dilemma, as it provides a layer of encryption that gives your employees the ability to keep data secure while it’s in transit. Furthermore, this frees providers from bringing paper documents with them all over the place, meaning that there is less opportunity to lose physical documents.

Document Management
Access to information is one of the most important parts of running a professional services business. This is true both in and out of the office. A document management system is critical to guaranteeing access to a digital database rather than a filing cabinet, opening up lots of opportunities for accessibility and convenience. You can store files as PDFs in a secure database, and a relational database management system will provide an end user with the ability to search the system for keywords in these documents. All the user needs is an Internet connection.

MSPNetworks can equip your organization with all of the above tools. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

In order to build a profitable business, productivity has to remain consistent. If your business offers a service, and you are having a hard time managing all its moving parts, professional services automation (PSA) software may be right for you. Today, we will give a quick overview of what exactly a PSA is, and how it can serve as an extremely useful tool for businesses who operate in the professional services space.

What are Professional Services?
Does your company offer customized, knowledge-based services? Typically, vocations such as lawyer, accountant, auditor, as well as consultants of all types would be labeled professional services. Professional services, up until recently, have been invoiced on a billable hours basis, but more and more vendors, like MSPNetworks, have moved to a fixed price model to provide more value.

What is Professional Services Automation?
Being able to successfully automate tasks has become a major point of emphasis for nearly every business over the past few years. After all, the faster and more reliably you can do the important, but tedious tasks that every professional services company has to do, the more effective the service is to clients. Professional services automation software allows companies to oversee and manage projects, schedule and manage resources, handle expenses and invoicing. Most importantly the PSA will track time. Since time will either be used to bill your customers, or be used to create products that will drive operational effectiveness, tracking time is essential.

The PSA
There are different types of PSA tools. Some are hosted on your company’s in-house infrastructure, while some are made available through a hosted cloud server. Typically, SaaS is the way most companies use it to give their resources remote capabilities (since most professional services firms don’t necessarily have the technology resources that other organizations might have).

The three main functions of any PSA are:

• Resource management
• Project management
• Time and expense management

Tracking time efficiently is an important part of the PSA’s job, so being able to know that resources are providing reliable time figures provides a company to set its service rates.

Automation
You may be wondering what exactly the PSA automates? Traditionally, project management, managing resources, and tracking time and expenses are detailed processes with a lot of moving parts. By simplifying these tasks though the automation of some of their most tedious parts, projects move forward seamlessly by tracking time and expenses, rather than tracking variables separately.

The main benefit of the PSA is that it gives project managers a comprehensive tool for auditing ongoing or completed projects. They can quickly ascertain what went right, what went wrong, and where their company can improve to be as effective and efficient as possible.

To run the best version of your business, you’ll want to know how to improve it. At MSPNetworks, we can help any professional services firm find the software it needs to be the best version of itself. Call us today at (516) 403-9001 to learn how our IT professionals can help you build your best business.