Professional services firms like yours face a constant challenge that is too easy to overlook – managing a wealth of financial and operational reporting that can quickly become buried under different silos. Inertia and lack of communication between departments, time lags between offices and field teams, and especially fragmentated software systems will obfuscate your ability to keep track of project data. This in turn affects your profitability, preventing you from capturing visibility into your processes and forcing your team to take manual action to piece together critical information.
The good news is that implementing a comprehensive cloud ERP can help alleviate these pain points and allow your firm to concentrate on running your business over handling each minute detail. Continue reading below to learn more about how silos can drain your resources in professional services, and how the right enterprise system will help:
The Hidden Impact of Disconnected Systems
How your technology ecosystem “plays together” affects your operations more than you may realize, and disconnected applications often create more work – and cost more money – over time as they force you to make up for the gaps and limitations. If you rely on QuickBooks, for example, then you probably already have to enter your reporting for your accounting separately from your project management system, CRM (customer relationship management) software and other solutions in a consolidated batch of spreadsheets. The amount of time you waste on this alone is already costly, but the inefficiencies and errors that you might miss because of how siloed your data is can become even more disruptive and expensive as a result.
Using separate systems for your payroll, time and billing, field service appointments, invoice processing, credit card payments, etc. will take hours of your day to migrate data, which can quickly extend into weeks of managing separate reports. Most importantly, you are still paying for each disconnected application in your stack, just to also eat the compounding costs from the inefficient data synchronization.
Project Visibility Challenges Drain Profitability
Details will vary from project to project, yet most will always have different moving parts, conditions and other factors that will affect performance and ultimately profitability. A lack of insight into all of these pieces, especially as they are occurring, creates exponential opportunities to disrupt your margins as well as limiting your decision-making until well after processes are already finished or have been forced to stop in their tracks. Poor utilization and resource allocation are obviously going to be resource drains, but you could be losing more than you realize without the ability to track any of these factors as well as with your data languishing in different disconnected silos until someone finally copies them to spreadsheet somewhere.
However, one of the biggest financial risks that lacking consistent visibility into your ongoing projects creates is being able to catch scope creep until you are already going overbudget. Without being able to capture clear and reliable insight into your operations, you will always face the possibility of sinking time and money into a project that is going nowhere fast and no alarm bells to warn you a course correction is needed before it is too late.
True Costs of Manual Integration
If you have already run into the problems caused by disconnected silos, then you also most likely already have tried to resolve them however you can. Manual data transfer, double entry and even software customization are all viable solutions for the short-term, but these are hardly scalable methods and will create their own challenges – and cost sinks – as your business grows and expands your operations with new activities. The quick fixes of yesterday will just as quickly become the new pain points of tomorrow when it comes to technology, leaving you to find more ways to address the mounting issues.
The trouble with relying on disconnected systems is that there will always be manual work required to unify your information from each process, whether you simply transfer it by hand or turn to creating custom integrations between your disparate applications. While customization can help you bridge this gap and get more use out of your software, maintenance will be required any time anything changes in your ecosystem such as an update if you still use on-premise solutions. This limits your ability to scale your technology stack with your growth and means you will likely need an implementation consultant to help troubleshoot these issues regularly.
How Cloud ERP Helps Professional Services Knock Down Silos
SaaS (Software as a Service) is a cloud delivery model that means a system is built in a web-based architecture and deployed from a remote data center, like any browser you use to access a website on the Internet or an app via your smartphone. Cloud-based ERP enables you to eliminate many of the traditional challenges of on-premise software and knock down the walls between your data silos, allowing for information to pass more easily – yet securely – between your teams, including at up to real-time speeds. Advancements in digital technology also ensure that you have access to more intuitive reporting for your users, along with improved automation for individual and connected workflows that streamline how employees are able to perform tasks.
Perhaps most importantly, SaaS also supports easier integrations between separate web-based applications, leveraging open APIs to create more seamless connections. This allows you to synchronize data from each system bidirectionally without having to build a custom connector from scratch, ensuring that information passes between every database, team and department without hurdles.
Acumatica Professional Services Edition
Acumatica Cloud ERP is a modern enterprise accounting and business management system, leveraging native SaaS functionality to create a flexible, scalable and user-friendly ecosystem of applications for various operational and industry-specific demands. Acumatica Professional Services Edition (PSE) is a dedicated suite of modules designed for service-based companies requiring an all-in-one solution for project management and related activities, combining core financial management features with built-in CRM, field reporting, resource management, time and billing management, payment automations and more.
PSE bridges the gap between your operational silos, connecting teams and their data seamlessly whether they are spread across multiple offices or in the field with clients. With unlimited user seats, a robust mobile app and role-based dashboards that deliver information in real-time, this solution grants you the tools you need to unify your reporting across different projects and activities.
Acumatica was born in the cloud and benefits from a native web-based architecture, as well as a uniquely scalable pricing model that eschews the legacy costing approach of other ERP products. Customers are expensed by resource usage as opposed to seat licenses, allowing you to include as many users as you want and match your price with the volume of transactions you process in the system.
Get Started with the Top Acumatica Partner
SWK Technologies will help you get the most out of Acumatica Professional Services Edition and ensure that your technology works for you, eliminating your data silos and empowering your business success. As a 4-time Acumatica Partner of the Year with thousands of successful ERP implementations, SWK brings the expertise your team needs to tailor your software for your needs and guarantee your ROI.
Contact SWK here to learn more about Acumatica and discover how this modern solution will grant you the visibility and automation you need to succeed.