Professional Services Automation Software to Increase Resources Utilization and Projects Profitability

Consulting, development, and other project-based service businesses (tech firms, marketing agencies, engineering consultancies, and staffing firms) often manage multiple ongoing projects with varying levels of resource utilization (full-time, part-time, etc.). Effective resource management (staff, time, and costs) is critical to their profitability. 

Organizations looking to boost their profit margins need to regularly assess their operational efficiency, employee utilization, and project profitability to make sure resources are fully utilized and non-billable time is minimized. Leads of departments such as project managers, resource managers, and heads of finance in companies with large, diverse teams need to efficiently allocate staff and manage project workloads. 

Various project management tools like Jira, ClickUp, or similar platforms track individual tasks and time spent on projects, but they do not answer the question whether each project is optimized in terms of resource usage or if staffing adjustments are necessary.

Financial Module with Access Control

A financial module provides a series of dashboards.

The top-level dashboards aggregate general information on Contribution Profit, Operating Profit, and Net Profit for top management to assess the overall direction and trends of the company. These dashboards consolidate metrics from all company projects over a selected period. Each stakeholder can focus on the data most relevant to their interests.

For analytical purposes, reports can be generated in a tabular form, filtered by clients, projects, and delivery managers. Such reports display revenue and expenses, including salary expenses, which are pulled from the employee directory where financial plans are recorded.

For each project over a specific period, a PnL (Profit and Loss) Dashboard is available to identify potential issues such as inflated costs, revenue discrepancies, or unusually high/low profitability.

There is also a high-level breakdown of salary-related data for top-level oversight: total salaries accrued across the company, payroll taxes, and social contributions.

From an accounting perspective, Professional Services Automation Software is not an accounting tool, but an analytical overlay for high-level control. Many of the figures are currently imported from the accounting system. It’s beneficial to view results by project, client, or delivery stream, i.e., by groups of clients and projects. Previously, this level of detail was unavailable, as the maximum granularity was at the departmental level. Now, with the company’s restructuring, the level of detail has significantly increased. If further developed with additional calculation functionalities, the PSA Software could evolve into a full-fledged ERP system, enabling comprehensive management accounting.
Accounting Team at Belitsoft Company

Financial documentation management module used for managing financial documents related to projects.

It allows users to attach client-approved documents, such as Statements of Work, contracts, invoices.

Users can easily generate and manage invoices directly within the system.

The central dashboard displays a brief summary for each project, including the client, account, project phase, pricing model, start date, and contract amount.

Projects List and Details

The Projects dashboard provides the status and a brief summary of each project the PM has been involved in or is currently managing. It displays. The PM can use a search box or filters to find a specific project, based on project name, project type (e.g., commercial, internal), client/account name, and more. If a PM needs to review projects managed by other PMs (due to leave or other commitments), the tool allows them to access those projects as well. In a shared resources model, employees may be assigned to multiple projects, often under different PMs. With a centralized system to track resource allocation, PMs have full visibility into each employee's availability.

Project Details pages are used by PMs to fill out and keep up to date project information, including project phases like MVP, second phase, and third phase. This is required to ensure that all worklogs are properly attached to the associated phase later.

Due to human errors, timesheets may not be linked to specific clients, or team members may incorrectly allocate costs (time) to the wrong projects, especially for clients with multiple projects using different payment types (e.g., Cost Plus and T&M). This can lead to incorrect invoicing and misinterpretation, such as these projects being displayed in accounting as highly profitable, which should not be the case.

An easy-to-use project's dashboards allows quick recognition of such issues. Financial managers can review individual clients and projects, analyze results, identify discrepancies and their causes, and make adjustments that are not achievable with standard tools.

Assignments

PMs want to understand employee workloads across multiple current projects to plan for future projects. The assignment functionality allows them to locate employees using the search function, assign employees to projects, specify their roles to ensure everyone knows their tasks, and set the daily workload for each employee, as well as the start and end dates of each employee’s involvement in the project.

After inputting the cost of employees and the rate charged to the client, they can calculate project profitability. Not all work performed by employees on a project is billable (for instance, onboarding, bench reduction), so PMs have the ability to specify non-billable time for accurate financial reporting and proper client billing.

Project conditions often change (e.g., client requests, employee availability), so PMs can update assignments in real time.

After all configurations are made by PMs, the Delivery team can understand who is working on each project, their roles, timeframes, rates, and how they are billed to the client.

Worklogs

PMs need to know how many hours each employee has logged, when they logged them, and the type of work tracked. All hours logged in Jira or ClickUp are automatically pulled into the system.

PMs can choose specific employees and select the period for which they want to audit their workloads. They can also see the billable hours (payable by the client) and the total number of hours spent on the project, which may include internal hours (paid by the company) or non-billable hours (e.g., related to a trainee or assigned by the PM to reduce bench time).

Detailed worklogs allow PMs to provide clients with clear breakdowns of hours worked, ensuring trust and minimizing disputes over billing.

Timesheets

This dashboard is primarily designed for project and resource managers, but it is also useful for Delivery Managers. They can track who is working on which project, how many hours have been logged, how these hours are accounted for or not accounted for, and, in general, how many people have logged time on a specific project over a certain period. The advantage is that if someone tracks time in Jira and someone else in ClickUp, the data can be viewed in a single interface.

The dashboard allows you to determine the total number of hours worked, broken down into billable and non-billable, and compare them month by month. It highlights discrepancies, for example, when there is an increase in non-billable hours in the current period compared to the previous one. In this case, it’s possible to drill down to identify which specific project caused it and understand the reason (may be the data was entered incorrectly).

The "Problems in Reported Hours" tab within the Timesheets dashboard is a very handy and extremely useful tool! All resource managers are absolutely thrilled with it!
Resource Management Team at Belitsoft Company

The Timesheet module shows the efficiency of their resource pool for resource managers. They don’t have to go through every project to figure out what each employee is working on. All the information from project management systems is combined in the Time Sheets module, which creates an Utilization dashboard.

On the Utilization dashboard, resource managers can see their department’s utilization for the quarter, compare it with other quarters and financial years, and track the percentage of bench time in their pool. Additionally, they can view how much each employee has reported, whether they are utilized or underutilized, and their bench time. This allows them to not only analyze their team’s performance but also forecast potential outcomes and react quickly.

Rate Calculator

This module lets the resource manager calculate an employee’s cost rate per hour.

When assembling a team for a project, managers need to know which employees make sense to bring in (whether a Senior specialist or a Mid-level one) and at what cost rates to ensure the project is profitable. Delivery Managers and PMs usually ask the resource manager for this rate.

The calculation includes all costs tied to the employee (admin expenses, social contributions, and indirect costs like fees on incoming payments or taxes). Whether the employee is on payroll or works under a B2B contract also affects the calculation. Some employees may have unique terms that need to be factored in as well. Once these details are added, the zero rate is calculated, giving PMs and Delivery Managers a baseline to work with for their own planning.

With this info, Delivery Managers and PMs then work together to figure out the final client rate to make the project profitable.

If the cost rate changes, the system automatically recalculates the recommended client rate. And if the client has a strict rate limit, the system can figure out the maximum cost rate to make sure the project is still profitable.