Selling expertise and time can be viewed as ethereal. Often the relationship between the time booked and any tangible deliverables can be hard to reconcile and therefore liable to challenge.
Getting the right value invoice issued at the right time in a way that is acceptable to each and every one of your customers is tough. The process breaks down into a number of hurdles, each of which has to be right and timely. You need to get the right time modelled in a system, against the right rates; your team's various rates per hour need to be matched correctly to those rates; they need to fill in their time correctly and in a timely manner; the time they book needs to be justifiable against the contract or project; it needs to be added to invoices, with the right tax rules and without errors creeping in; the format of the invoice needs to match the customer’s requirements, with (often) the right purchase order reference; and lastly it needs to be sent to the right person (or people).
The process starts with sales, engages operations and project managers, users and lastly finance. With a disconnected architecture, it can span a number of systems, requiring manual data transfer, re-modelling and very often spreadsheets. PSA systems are designed to bring as much of this process together as possible in one place, but process breaks and poor communication can still introduce errors, even if your employees’ time compliance is good.