CFOs in professional services organizations have to go beyond accounting tools and be equipped with the right technologies to monitor finances, assess project profitability, and drive growth.
This Wednesday afternoon, you came out of the business review meeting mighty pleased—the business won another project—the fifth since the start of the week. It is a healthy sign in today’s time to hear about a string of wins. To you – the CFO of an IT Services company –this means promising revenues, and if margins are good, high profitability too.
But as you go through the project details, you realize how it is more complex in scope and execution than the last. In fact, you are beginning to realize how increasing project complexity is a growing trend, just as rising resource costs. Yet your clients expect ‘competitive pricing’!
As the CFO of an IT Services company, we understand you spend long hours in business planning, budgeting, forecasting and negotiations. But the success of your goals is closely influenced by your colleagues in the project management department.
Every project manager of your company is in the middle of allocating, forecasting, and assigning costs to their projects. They monitor expenses so that no overspending derails their project progress, or the financial goals set by you for a particular project or business quarter. Therefore, project teams are constantly anxious about overstepping the designated budget while also anticipating the success of a project and determine its ROI.
Amidst these thoughts day in and day out, you wonder, “How can I support my project teams better, so they can deliver optimum value to clients while safeguarding the margins?”
Killing two birds with one stone
The answer to your question lies in financial management systems that help monitor costs as well as improve margins. Such a system can determine the probability of the project’s success, help monitor finances, and support the project team with accurate pricing based on current and future execution parameters to create a competitive edge.
Given that you are a stickler for compliance, the system should also help you reduce the cost of compliance in financial reporting. It should accommodate complex and variable billing arrangements to streamline billing by generating accurate, timely invoices in coordination with the delivery teams across varied billing models.
But what kind of solution can bring both finance and project execution on the same platform, offering end-to-end project visibility to all stakeholders?
The answer: A Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution!
Project Service Automation: the ultimate solution for CFOs in IT Services Companies
A PSA solution can serve as the technology platform that delivers a single source of the truth across the value chain. This enables your organization to respond quickly to business opportunities, manage client relationships, and reduce operating costs. And for you, it facilitates collaboration with the departments on investments that translate to profitability.
Powered by collaboration tools and analytics, a PSA solution such as evergreen + empower can enable CFOs like you in several ways. To begin with, the evergreen + empower family of applications can help you understand data better by slicing and dicing the captured financial information to identify strategic investment opportunities for growth. As it fosters information visibility across the organization, the solution helps make well-founded decisions, maintain project budgets to actuals, and eliminate overruns. This power-packed PSA solution facilitates real-time access to inventory, work-in-process, sales, purchasing, and financial information from across multiple locations.
You will treasure a PSA solution such as evergreen + empower as it helps you improve the efficiency of invoicing and collections. It can offer a highly flexible billing capability, supporting varied billing models to invoice clients in the format of their choice. To top it all, the solution can reduce the regulatory burden by meeting compliance protocols and improving the timeliness and accuracy of accounting procedures.
empower + evergreen, the next-gen, cloud-based PSA solution built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, can change the way your IT Services company works. A family of applications, evergreen + empower connects individuals, teams, and business processes.
To know how evergreen + empower can enable your finance function for reporting, billing, analytics, and collaboration, click here.
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