The rapid innovations and widespread adoption of technology within tech services firms is creating a pivotal moment for financial leaders—the previous ways of managing finance and operations data will no longer suffice. Although the path forward is challenging, several key mandates have emerged that, when followed, can position finance teams in tech services firms to achieve and maintain better business performance.

1. Modernize the Finance Infrastructure

To avoid costly failures and lapses, the savvy tech services firm must embrace the financial infrastructure of tomorrow, a system that provides comprehensive— but simple-to-use—functionality to bring finance, projects, and reporting/analysis together. That means breaking down silos to create end-to-end, compliant processes for project-based accounting, time/expense capture and approval, billing, and revenue recognition—instead of the weekly spreadsheet scrambles, billing errors, lost T&E dollars, and slower manual workflows. The right financial management foundation shows you projects and operational and financial information in one unified view.

2. Support the Entire Project Life Cycle

Tech services firms live and die by the quality of their project execution. Ideally, you want to automate and connect your entire project lifecycle to achieve consistently reliable project delivery. Of course, manual tracking and validations erode confidence in your information and processes, and project teams will simply avoid systems and processes that are too complex to drive up adoption. You’ll need to maintain a strong emphasis on the importance of usability and manageability which means providing easy ways to generate reports, clickable graphs with drill down capability, and scroll through dashboards of key indicators.

3. See Real-Time, Actionable Metrics

In tech services, the only time is real time. Can you instantaneously track any project and determine if it is on-time and on-budget? You need to avoid surprises with real-time views into budgeted, billed, and actual amounts, as well as budget and schedule variances. That means you can focus on customer satisfaction, not disputes and delays.

4. Turn Insights into Optimized Business Performance

Fine-tune your business plans to not merely understand past performance, but to take action to improve future performance. For instance, you can analyze historical project profitability to strengthen forecasts, improve sales planning, identify the types of projects that are more profitable, make smarter bids, and drive profitable growth.

Contact us to learn how a cloud-based financial management solution can help your business.