Financial management solution for PSOs

Professional services organizations now have a way to manage all aspects of service contracts without deploying their own billing, accounting and H/R software systems. A Web-based financial management solutions is being released next week by InfoWide which offers consulting groups, law firms and similar service agencies the ability to access an expense management system over the Internet.

According to Jagi Shahani, InfoWide’s VP of business development, InstaServ can pay for itself in three months by recovering up to 15% of net profits that might have been lost to manual billing or delays in reporting billable services.

“Services organizations want to keep their people billing all the time,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a time and expense contract, it’s a myth.

While smaller organizations can usually keep track of their staff’s billing hours, the task becomes difficult to manage for a larger organization. “If it’s smaller than 15 people, we don’t fit,” said Shahani. “Their needs are simpler; but over 15 makes a lot more sense.”

Shahani claims that InstaServ has no technical limit in terms of scalability. “We can handle 4,000 - 5,000 users,” he said.

The InstaServ package is tentatively priced at $40 per user per month, with a 25 user minimum.

Early adopters include the venture capital and management consulting company Brenner Group, which is streamlining its accounting system with the InfoWide product. “Traditional ERP and CRM products fail to address ‘profit erosion’ because they lack the front end processes required to capture, compute and present contract-based data and run financial operations against these terms and conditions,” said Rich Brenner, president of the Brenner Group. “Invoicing clients used to take us more than 40 man hours a month, now we spend less than eight.