Are you losing count of your employee’s billable hours?

Information taken from Ideaca’s “Revenue Leakage in Professional Services: How to Quash the Silent Killer of Profitability” whitepaper.

Professional services organizations (PSO’s) of all sizes and from all industries struggle to track service hours in a consistent and accurate way. Many organizations use tracking protocols that are inefficient and create challenges for accounting and finance departments. Often these protocols are spreadsheet based and not standardized. As a result, excessive time is spent on consolidation and organization, with hardly any time spent on strategy and analysis.

In many cases, organizations don’t realize where their billable hours are going and that small factors can make a big difference in accurate reporting. The following are examples of some of the small factors that lead to inaccurate time reporting:

• End of month time tracking: Many people have trouble accurately recalling the hours they worked at the start of the month by the time they submit their hours at the end of the month. Not everyone keeps personal records of their hours and those who don’t rely on memory and guesses.
• Time entry is late: When time entry is delayed because of vacation, technical difficulties or other causes, it is not always clear when submission deadlines are postponed to. As a result, employees may neglect to submit their time because they are unaware how and when they should.
• No standardization: Without clearly defined guidelines for tracking time, there may be confusion over what is and is not considered to be billable. Defining ambiguous reporting areas like travel time and administrative work leads to accurate and consistent reporting across the organization.
• Inaccurate manual processes: As with all manual processes, errors can happen unknowingly. Employees may rush through their time sheet or make costly but minor mistakes when reporting.

Many real-time, accessible and centralized time entry systems are available to empower organizations. Not only do they streamline and increase efficiency of accounting and finance departments, but they benefit employees as well. With accurate information about their hours, employees gain insight into how they directly affect the bottom line and they gain access to metrics about their project or personal hours.

View the full “Revenue Leakage in Professional Services: How to Quash the Silent Killer of Profitability” whitepaper here.

A crossover into MS Dynamics AX

This article is a personal and subjective story on what to expect when switching from other ERP systems into AX. My specific experience is with some smaller scale project-centric ERP systems and might be different from experiences of other users/consultants.

After working with AX for a couple of months and after attending a boot camp training on AX in Fargo, ND I thought it was time to reflect on the overall differences between AX and other ERP systems that I have been working with over time.

First of all I have to state that all of the ERP systems I have been working with were smaller than AX, both in functionality, breadth and complexity so I will sometimes compare apples and oranges here but this is part of the experience as well.

Targeted markets

Dynamics AX is Microsoft’s ERP flagship and is positioned with the likes of SAP and Oracle. And that’s the market, Microsoft is targeting: medium to large size businesses with multiple locations, multiple legal entities, dealing with multiple currencies and governments.

This in itself differentiates AX from previous ERP that I worked with. Most of them claimed to be multi-company and multi-currency but they really were not. The software packages were initially written for a specific vertical for small to mid-sized businesses and they grew with the companies that initially bought it. So all the features feel like they were tagged onto the solution and never really as integral part of it. AX on the other hand was designed from the ground up to handle these environments and transactions. So I found it especially easy to handle these things in AX whereas in other ERP solutions you had to jump through several hoops to get it working for the client.