Whether your team is composed of architects, accountants, engineer, doctors, lawyers, or teachers — or a combination of all of the above — an effective project management tool can mean the difference between smooth, on-budget workflows and chaotic assignment systems that miss deadlines and upset customers.

Professional services face unique challenges and demand creative solutions in order to bring value to clients and stakeholders. Powerful, effective tools that meet the ever-changing demands of professional service providers in this client-focused market will result in clean operations and happy customers. In this guide, we outline the challenges that professional service providers face and the solutions that properly-equipped workflow management tools can offer.

What are the biggest challenges that professional service providers face?

Professional service providers such as accountants, marketers, and law firms face unique challenges as they interact with clients and seek to deliver custom solutions. Those include:

• Poorly understood billable hours: With no handle on exactly how long personnel spend on tasks, profit margins can shrink into nothingness — or customer invoices can balloon to unsustainable levels that result in lost business.
• Poorly recorded billable hours: The first stop to getting a handle on invoices is gaining a clear framework for precisely recording billable hours by employee, department, and task.
• Difficultly defining scope as a part of project management: Poor project definition can derail the best client-focused solutions. When projects are poorly defined, project scope can shrink too narrowly or widen so far that it winds up off the rails. Poorly defined project scope can result in project delays and missing budget deadlines.
• Poor visibility and strategic decision making: Poor workflow management systems mean those in charge of projects and client retention have too limited of a view into client service operations, meaning they are unable to anticipate and respond to requests, allocate resources, keep projects on-task and on-budget, and ensure healthy profit margins.

With the professional services industry set for explosive global growth, organizations will need to rely on well-equipped project management tools to ensure efficiency, profitability, and high customer satisfaction. The complexity of these operations and the need for resource planning, client management, and sound billing practices means a powerful professional services software solution is called for.

While the exact tools a provider may need depend on factors like project complexity, there are a host of common features to expect in a top-tier workflow management system:

• Time and expense tracking: You want pre-made templates and integrated work timers that allow employees to easily and simply keep track of how much time or resources they spend on any particular project at any step in that project.
• Task management: A workflow management software tool should permit easy visibility of tasks, who is working on what, what deadlines exist and what deadlines are approaching.
• Simple invoicing: Work smarter with invoicing options that let you handle jobs in a few simple clicks.
• Simple recording and summarizing tools: Gain insight into workflows company-wide with simple recording, classification, and summarization of economic transactions.
• Easy information and file transfer and management: Gather, store, and disseminate files from one central location.
• Clear task assignment tools: You should be able to create a task in seconds and apply an employee or team to it.
• Straightforward management of cross-departmental requests: This eliminates vague verbal or email requests and time consuming meetings.

ProWorkflow offers advanced tools that enable professional services performance

There are plenty of team project management software providers on the market, but not all are created equally. ProWorkflow is the best project management tool for professional service providers because it is uniquely equipped to deliver results. Only ProWorkflow has:

• CRM integration
• Onboarding templates
• Quickbooks integration
• Time tracing
• Resource management tools
• Advanced analytics for improved visibility

With these advanced tools from ProWorkflow, you can:

• Reduce project delivery time
• Optimize resource allocation
• Improve employee performance
• Collaborate between teams more easily
• Automatically generate project reports

Ready to get started? Call Prowofkflow now to schedule a free consultation.