Likelihood to Recommend PSA is great at capturing all the data you would need to accurately track and report on consulting projects. It captures project financials, calculates projected GM%, and (among others) allows for hourly tracking of employees, which breaks it up between billable and non-billable for utilization tracking to accurately understand costs. However, the user interface is tough to learn, and the stability of the data reporting functions is questionable. This tool would be great for smaller consulting shops that fit the standard contracting mold. If your business is fairly straightforward without a lot of shades of gray, you shouldn't have much trouble with the tool. However, if your business practices have a lot of exceptions based on clients, then you'll have a tall administrative task on your hands.
Read full review The way Community Tax uses Sugar from a users point of view is, it can house a lot of information for either a company or individual with the option of adding additional sub cases . The down side is there are licenses issued per user and 1 per user is not enough because most of the time we are multitasking. Therefore a program/software would be more suitable instead of using a URL.
Read full review Pros The biggest strength of FinancialForce PSA is that it's built upon the force.com platform, which means it is very easily customizable to our business needs. Projects are easily created, as well as milestones and assignments. "Actuals" (dollars and hours) are calculated automatically, and are easily reported on. Resources are easily managed by using the Resource Planner FinancialForce PSA support is outstanding! Read full review Great way to keep myself organized. I do not miss appointments with clients since within the system I can input my appointment time and also send out a reminder to my clients. It has a nice layout [that] does not seem to be cluttered. I find it to be very user friendly. It has customizable dashboards which I find beneficial Read full review Cons The product is still maturing as a full featured PSA tool. The feature roadmap is compelling but is still being built out. Tool is ideal for managing a services business. It is not yet a project manager tool. Limited reporting Maturing change order process Limited integration to back-end financial systems beyond Financial Force Financials. We use Netsuite. The underlying SalesForce UI is constrained and can be keystroke intensive at times Limited archiving of historical data Read full review The back-end programming (logical hooks) for advanced customizations could benefit from a more user-friendly interface General layout could be improved by the addition of modern templates to customize the standard look and feel Support communities could be further improved with the addition of videos on how to do specific configuration, modules. Read full review Likelihood to Renew There is another PSA software program that we have been looking into (DreamFactory) that could potentially replace FinancialForce PSA in our organization. Like FinancialForce PSA, it is cloud based on the force.com platform. Licensing is slightly less than FinancialForce PSA, and the Resource Management tool is far superior to FinancialForce PSA. With that said, our renewal falls in Q4 2014 and I don't foresee us implementing a new system this fiscal year.
Read full review Our organization will continue to use Sugar as long as it remains cost effective and it addresses the majority of our needs. I will, however, recommend looking into other options once our needs increase and there is additional budget for some bigger named and more robust platform options. I feel if the application was friendlier to end users we would get better productivity as well.
Read full review Usability It is maturing and does what it does well although it is not fully complete. Integration to SF is great. Gives great visibility to incoming services projects and allows the staffing process to start on pipeline deals. There are certain processes that take more click-throughs then needed so there are refinement opportunities around the UI. The resource management screen and project status views have really matured since our original purchase, and while not perfect, allow business leaders to do their jobs. Configurations vs. customizations. We seem to have to bring in an Apex developer to do a customization for changes I would think could be configuration settings
Read full review There's a learning curve associated with Sugar. Right away, it's not as easy as an out-of-the-box CRM. Once you learn how to use Sugar, the system fits what your needs are. With any other CRM, you'd be trying to figure out how your company can best fit the CRM. You don't want to change your business cycle for your CRM, the CRM should fit your business cycle.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We have maybe had 1-2 outages over 3 years.
Read full review SugarCRM has never been down for us.
Read full review Performance Most of the time it is fine. There are peak periods of usage where performance noticably slows down (i.e., Monday mornings when time is due and many reports are being run)
Read full review No response time issues ever. Very productive due to its ease of use.
Read full review Support Rating Every time I submit a new help request, whether it's an actual help request or just a question about FinancialForce PSA, I always feel that I'm receiving world class support. The support we receive from FinancialForce PSA is always very detailed and professional. There are some requests that take longer than other for the initial response, which is why I did not give a full 10.
Read full review The support overall at least for us has been phenomenal. Anytime that the system has any Issues at all IT gets in contact from someone from support to get the system back up and running. Have never gone more than 30 minutes with the system not working. So overall I will be definetely recommending this system in any other company that I may work for in the future.
Read full review In-Person Training It was fine.
Read full review We feel clasroom training is essential to ensure user adoption and buy-in. Video and on-line training courses gave their place but being in a classroom setting enables the Team to make any potential CRM issues visble right up front.
Read full review Online Training Only part of an implemementation as noted previously.
Read full review Implementation Rating Appirio did a good job, however, the user team didn’t know enough to make all the right configuration/customization choices. The team focused too much on replicating existing processes vs. reengineering them. In hindsight we should have had deep dive reviews at key milestones and enforced more focus on how the software would operate. We didn’t have access to true best practices expertise. In hindsight, a consultant from the outside would have been helpful to drive this.
Read full review Study, study, and study. Be prepared to train everyday until all processes are flowing nicely. The CRM is the elephant and figuring out where to take the first bite can be a challenge. But there is only one way to eat this elephant, one bite at a time. Systematic planning is very important.
Read full review Alternatives Considered FF PSA is a robust Project Management solution that can be configured to fits any size business. We have tried several other applications and PSA so far has met and exceeded our needs. We run our day to day operations on Salesforce so having a solution that is native was a must have. PSA met that requirement and much more.
Read full review Sugar Sell is the only product we found that met the needs of everyone involved in the evaluation process. It can be customized to accomplish just about anything you need, and trust me....we pushed the limits on that. It is a product that our users actually enjoy using which in itself contributes to productivity. We used other CRM tools in the past, and the discontent from our users resulted in consistently declining use and ultimately dropping those products.
Read full review Scalability Works from 2-300 Users in our experience.
Read full review Return on Investment FinancialForce PSA has helped us improve our data tracking and allows us to get more granular about our financial information and performance. PSA has given more tools and reports to individual contributors to take greater ownership over their own data, and has increased accountability across the organization. PSA has added a fairly hefty administrative burden to individuals, project managers, and our financial team. Read full review Overall seems to be more expensive than other subscription based CRMs. Has positively impact our sales team to make more efficient and accountability among sales teams. Also allows for high level aggregated reporting Has been impactful for all teams, not only sales to track individual activity on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis Read full review ScreenShots