FinancialForce PSA - Is it right for you?
Overall Satisfaction
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!
Cons
- Scheduling can be tricky. Assigning a resource to the Project is easy, but when viewing the Resource Planner, the resource shows as being scheduled from the Start to End of the Project. If a resource is working on many projects, then the resource planner becomes convoluted.
- Our Project Managers (PMs) use MS Project to maintain the Project Timelines. There is an import tool w/in PSA, but it is not a two-way feed. PSA only imports the project plan from MS Project. It does not update the Project Plan in MS Project, nor is the Project Plan exportable in PSA, once it has been imported. This causes our PMs to update the Project details and timeline in two systems.
- The Project Planner tool only shows Project Tasks, it does not show Milestones (which are what we use to track project completeness). We do not use Project Tasks because you cannot assign resources to the Tasks.
- There are some limitations to Reporting from FinancialForce PSA
- "Out of the box", FinancialForce PSA was an improvement over our previous project management system (Projector) due to it being cloud based. Our users could access it from anywhere with an internet connection. Our previous software required a LAN or a VPN connection to access.
- With much customization, system improvements, and training, we have seen a steady increase in user adoption and efficiency
- FinancialForce PSA is no long just a day to day system. It is now being included in our Strategic Planning
Product Usage
220 - All of the employees in our organization use FinancialForce PSA. Usage ranges from basic Time & Expense Entry, to Resource Management, Project Management, and Project Accounting. We have multiple employees in each of these functions, with the majority of our employees only using the basic time and expense entry functionality.
3 - At a minimum, you should have someone on your staff who has Salesforce.com experience. Salesforce.com experience is a necessity for navigating around FinancialForce PSA successfully. Being knowledgeable of the force.com platform will give your admin a huge head start over other IT application support people. Application support experience and limited database experience are also good skills to have to support FinancialForce PSA.
- After an Opportunity is Closed-Won, we create a new FinancialForce PSA Project.
- The Resource Manager will staff the Project with resources, initially, as well as add resources as needed after the Project is established.
- Our Project Accountants will generate billing events based on Milestone completion, which will create invoices to be sent to the Client.
- Using FinancialForce PSA, many customizations within FinancialForce PSA, and a third party reporting tool, we have created a Project Health Report which captures our top-10 key Project Metrics, and displays them graphically.
- We're currently working on new (customized) functionality to help us with capacity planning.
- We are constantly looking at new ways to help us better manage our resources.
Support
Pros | Cons |
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Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Support understands my problem Support cares about my success | Difficult to get immediate help |
Yes - We have reported a couple bugs in the past year. Luckily for us, the bugs were set to be fixed with the next FinancialForce PSA release. In one situation, the time between reporting the bug to it actually being resolved was rather lengthy. We needed to create a work-around while the bug was being fixed.
We had a situation where we were trying to mass assign resources to a Project Milestone, but the Milestone selection wasn't showing on the Mass Assignment page. I contacted FinancialForce PSA support and their representative walked me through turning this feature on. Turning the functionality on took about 2 minutes and was exactly what we needed.
Usability
Pros | Cons |
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Like to use Easy to use Technical support not required Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | None |
- Creating New Projects
- Setting up Milestones on Projects
- Expense Reporting
- Time Reporting, especially if a resource is assigned to many projects or milestones on many projects.
- Resource Management
- Working with "managed" code or objects as an administrator can be difficult and frustrating, many times, leading to customizations.
Yes - FinancialForce PSA has two mobile apps. One for Time entry, and one for Expense Entry. I am not a fan of the Expense app because you cannot create expense reports using the app, but rather the expense report must already exist and you simply add expense lines to it. When you attach receipts via the mobile interface, they attach to each individual expense line instead of the Expense Report. The time entry app is functionally sound and works appropriately, with the exception of the situation where you have many similarly named assignments. It can be impossible to select the correct assignment from the list if you have many assignments with similar names because after so many characters, the results are truncated.
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