How Today’s Advancing Software Tools are Affecting Your Company’s Finance Team

By Mark Engelberg, TimeLinx

In today’s digital age, anyone can start a company. However, those companies with tight controls over their finances will become the companies that stand out from the crowd and have longevity. You need to know what’s happening in every aspect of your company processes while simultaneously having the foresight to see what is to come and how you can adapt to potential issues. In today’s competitive market, precise control over your finances is more complex than ever. In the services arena, you’ll need to employ a comprehensive Project and Services Management (PSM) solution that includes financial capabilities that turn time into money and keep projects above water.

Working harder than ever

Across industries and teams, we are all working with more data than ever before. This is especially true for finance teams. Managing a company’s money matters while accurately forecasting, optimizing, and reporting on finances is more important than ever before. Especially if you want to grow your business rather than just stay alive. A good PSM software tool makes growth much more manageable for your finance teams and management by making manual entries a thing of the past.

Days honestly seem to have fewer hours in them. A lot of this has to do with the fact that many of us now work from home, so not only are we disconnected physically, but it is difficult to draw the line between work time and home time. Finance teams and managers responsible for the finance processes in a company need all the help they can get to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

Benefits of integrating a PSM solution with your accounting system:

The benefits for a PSM system that includes a finance component eliminate the need for integration. An hour of work time by a salaried individual has a known cost. Therefore, it is easy enough to calculate that into the project cost and supply it to the accounting system afterward for cost analysis. Then your project managers can see job costs in real-time, rather than relying on integration with the accounting system to pull in salary costs.

But if you already have an accounting system you are happy with, adding a separate PSM that can do the calculations and send them to the accounting system gets the same result—real-time information provided to project managers with no calculating or retyping of any data.

Synchronizing Data

The most typical method is using multiple systems to track the work and the related costs. All data across the systems must be synchronized yet easy to access. As manual entry is error-prone, eliminate human error as much as possible by syncing data across platforms automatically.

Refined Decision Making

Everyone across your teams, including the finance, can make more informed decisions thanks to collected data known to be accurate.

Harmonious Information

There is nothing worse than data that can’t populate across platforms when required by multiple systems. Budget changes, scope changes, and everything in between need to be kept up-to-date at all times for everyone involved.

Keep Tabs on Subcontractors

Keep tabs on all of your subcontractors in one place. Enter their invoices (a project cost), track the materials, and eliminate human error by importing data directly into your accounting system without requiring double entry.

Improved cost management

Make sure that project managers can get correct salary cost information in real-time. Cost information allows them to adjust their project staffing on the fly and ensure that nothing goes over budget. A simple time entry is easily calculated for cost based on the person who did the work. More complicated math, such as calculating overtime costs, begin to require more sophisticated tools.

Using the right tech to make their job easier

No one would ask a service provider or technician to do their job without the correct tools. The right tech can make everyone’s life so much easier, as well as improve productivity. The right tools alleviate being overwhelmed and foster collaboration with both onsite and off-site teams. With employee mental health more crucial than ever and staff experiencing more significant amounts of burnout than ever before, it makes sense to give them every tool possible to make their job easier.

Conclusion

Service teams work hard. Crunching numbers to keep your business afloat and make sure that it grows is essential for correct business management.

Finance is the core of your business. Everything else is the actions that affect those numbers. Your finance data needs to flow seamlessly as the business evolves while allowing adjustments in strategy at any time. The right PSM solution can help your finance team get the most out of their service operations while maintaining real-time financial information for everyone with a need to know.

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About TimeLinx
TimeLinx delivers innovative project & service management software as a complete solution that perfects the sell-track-manage-support-bill cycle that services organizations must have to delight their customers; TimeLinx brings the cycle together in a single application that offers less frustration, better project management, complete reporting, and improved profitability – all specially designed for Infor and Sage.

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