PSA is data rich with a confusing user interface
January 31, 2019

PSA is data rich with a confusing user interface

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with FinancialForce PSA

Our organization uses PSA for project financial tracking and logging employees' work by the billable hour. We use it to track project performance against planned revenue and GM for individual projects. We have many project types, from fixed fee to time and materials. PSA has the ability to set up standard projects based on common contract types.
  • PSA is data rich. It captures all the data you would need in one form or fashion. If you know what you are looking for, you can find it somewhere. There is a strong reporting function that allows you to create any number of custom reports or dashboards for tracking performance.
  • The tool can scale fairly easily and can take on fair amounts of projects and data.
  • The user interface is generally poor. The tool is hard to navigate and it can be difficult to find something that should be sitting on the surface. It also takes way to many clicks to complete basic tasks. Using the tool can be quite an administrative task in and of itself.
  • Always double-check the math in PSA. One missed or incorrect checkbox somewhere and your calculations can be off. It can be frustrating because the math isn't surfaced, so you have to look closely to notice when PSA has done something unexpected. Sometimes the fix won't make sense and will require time spent with tech support to figure it out.
  • Assess the damage after each system update. System updates are great, but can often derail otherwise stable data and calculations. For instance, our last update shifted how our employee utilization rates are calculated to include data that hasn't been entered yet, resulting in lower numbers being reported. This means we have had to take the data outside the system and calculate on our own until the problem is solved.
  • 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.
PSA comes with a lot more data and reporting capabilities than were available at the time we switched from BigTime IQ. You get more features and functions with PSA, but the user interface is much much more difficult than BigTime. It was a fairly big trade-off to get more data and increase user accountability vs. a clean and simple tool that was easy to understand and use.
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.

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