Common attributes of services companies

Professional Services companies, or Services companies, vary hugely in terms of what they deliver to their customers and the scale on which they operate. However, all services companies have similar attributes in terms of their business models. They all develop, sell and deliver services to their customers, whilst managing human and financial resources. But what are professional services companies common financial requirements?

Financial requirements for services companies

It is surprising that in such a project and people-centric sector, many service companies still rely on spreadsheets or introductory accounting software to record all of their business transactions and expenses. Projects tend to be managed separately to finance. It is often very difficult to record project costing and compare where projects are with respect to budget. This is a typical financial requirement for any organisation including professional services.

professional services

Also, any human error made by manual input could have major implications on the service delivered to a client. Using spreadsheets or a low-cost, basic introductory system will only be suitable for so long. But once your business is growing they tend to falter with the increased workload or you will find newly-required functionality limitations. Not to mention the challenges of who has the latest version of the document.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is perfectly placed for service companies for their project costing and financial requirements. It can be used to manage project costing and invoicing more efficiently with its integrated automated processes. Found on the Microsoft platform, it is familiar to users and integrates with common applications such as Excel and Outlook.

Increasingly, we are seeing new entrepreneurial-style organisations , particularly in the technology sector, that are growing rapidly and targeting global markets. These organisations face the challenge of being able to deliver their services effectively using affordable and scalable information technology systems.

Benefits of Business Central for Professional Services companies

This is where Business Central can have huge benefits for businesses who want their technology to scale with their growth. As an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution, it contains modules needed to run a business integrated into the General Ledger. These include Chart of Accounts, Fixed Assets, Project Costing, CRM, Reporting, etc. You can decide what needs to be set up and when. Starting with Finance as the base, other functionality can be brought online when needed.

financial reporting

ERPs used to be seen as large-scale/large-cost implementations. However, the new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) user-based pricing model allows a much lower entry cost using a ‘per user per month’ subscription. The monthly subscription covers the user license, maintenance and Microsoft cloud hosting for each user. TVision offers a fixed-price pack for implementing the solution using the software’s best-practice standard processes. This means that delivering a holistic business system can be done in weeks, rather than months.

Get in touch to find out how we can analyse what financial requirements your professional service company may have.

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