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From the middle ages through the renaissance period and even as late as the 18^th century, alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone. A magical device, substance, mechanism or process that could transmute base metals into silver or gold.

Volumes were written, secret and complex methods were devised, multiple stages of transmutation were documented all with the single goal of creating something of value from nothing.

The situation here in the UK is changing daily as we work our way through the coronavirus situation. 

In January, in preparation for this, we planned and tested 100% home working to ensure that service would remain unaffected by travel restrictions and/or self-isolation.  As of today, the office remains open but a number of our employees are working from home. 

In the ERP world, the entry point to delivery is always executing an order. So much, so normal.

Information like a customer’s purchase order reference, delivery address, special instructions etc. all form an essential part of the sales order process and drive delivery actions.

But, when you move into the Professional Services space, in particular with project based PSA systems, order processing seems to reside firmly in the CRM space with, at best, a notification to create a project triggered by an order executed status.

We are glad to kick start 2020 with the announcement of our most anticipated and feature rich version so far. Harmony PSA Version 4.20 includes the following changes and added features explained in this article.

The one thing all professional services business share in common is that, fundamentally, they sell expertise.

Expertise is a combination of both the company’s track record in similar problems and the skills of their employees. All of course residing within their process and quality framework.

Understanding the skills of your employees and applying that capability to what work you go after and once won, assignment of people to tasks, is therefore a key aspect of running a services business. In certain circumstances and for certain types of services business, demonstrating you have the skills to perform the work, in terms of employee backgrounds and qualifications, is even key to winning the work.

As we approach the festive season, we thought it a good opportunity to review what we have achieved in 2019 and to look forward to in the New Year.

2019 achievements

The 2019 saw us launch a revamped user home page containing user definable pinned reports of objects meaningful to their day to day activity. This ensures that users can make their homepage focused on the things of direct relevance to their role.

This is one of a series of blog posts dealing with the criteria to be included when reviewing which PSA to purchase.

At a high level, all solutions will generally look the same as they are designed to cover the same problem. However, there are many detailed considerations that can make a big difference in how effective the solution is in support of your business.

In this blog we examine the subtle difference between ticket status lists and ticket workflows.

Buying any business software product always involves a degree of compromise.

The extent to which that compromise impedes productivity and effective use of the system, while still allowing you to run the business the way you want, is the difference between success and failure in your choice of PSA.

Minimising these compromises depends on how configurable the solution is. How easy it is to add custom data and functionality without requiring code changes the vendor is unlikely to want to deliver just for you.

Where the value of an invoice does not relate to revenue 100% earned in the period of the invoice, some degree of deferred revenue treatment is necessary. Without making a process separation between revenue recognition and cash-flow, period accounting will be incorrect and so misleading.

Worse, the effect of this at year end will lead to an overstatement of revenue, in turn driving the business to pay more corporation tax than is necessary.

Lastly, under ASC606, ensuring revenue is taken over the life of a contract is key to accounts compliance.

What is SAML?

SAML stands for Security Assertion Mark-up Language and is an open standard for managing the separation between the authentication of a user by a service provider and the identity provider that grants the assertion providing access right to the service.

While alternatives for Single Sign On (SSO) exist within an organisational domain (such as Microsoft Active Directory) and for consumer access (such as OAuth used by personal web applications), SAML is the preferred standard for creating a federated security access model for cloud (internet) business applications such as Service Desk, CRM and of course PSA.