FinancialForce.com Announces PSA Summer '12, Extends Lead in Providing Visibility to Professional Services Managers

Introduces enhanced utilization variance analysis and FinancialForce Community. End Quote

(1888PressRelease) September 14, 2012 - San Francisco, CA - FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, today announced the availability of FinancialForce PSA Summer '12, continuing the company's mission to help professional service (PS) organizations gain visibility of their operations to increase revenue and profits. PSA Summer '12 includes a number of utilization visibility and productivity enhancements and introduces the FinancialForce Community, a social and learning destination for FinancialForce.com's growing user and partner community.
Advanced Utilization Variance Analysis: Providing the "Why" Behind Performance

With PSA Summer '12, FinancialForce.com has further improved executive visibility into the factors that affect resource management and utilization performance. PSA Summer '12 provides the ability to compare target, scheduled and actual utilization back through time, including the ability to analyze the root causes impacting performance. Users can create variance analysis dashboards to compare a variety of scheduled vs. actual metrics, including billable hours, non-billable hours, credited hours and excluded hours for a particular resource, project, location, region, group or across an entire services organization.

"Everyone compares actual utilization to target or planned utilization, but do they have visibility into why they missed or beat the target?" said Tom Brennan, Vice President of Marketing at FinancialForce.com. "Comparing scheduled hours to actual hours can be far more enlightening. These metrics give you a better feel for how you are performing with the work you have. It helps explain operational realities and why variances have occurred. For instance, did you give away more credited hours than scheduled? Did people fail to complete scheduled commitments? Or did they simply not get assigned enough work? Were some resources over allocated? Is a particular location taking too much time to complete certain types of projects? This new variance analysis give professional services managers the visibility to make course corrections and improve profitability."

Utilization is known as the "Master Metric" for PS organizations because it is used as a key indicator to determine billings, profitability, team goals and employee compensation. FinancialForce PSA excels at providing the deepest and most accurate insight into past, present and future utilization performance.
FinancialForce Community

FinancialForce Community is a social and online learning destination designed to serve as a central meeting place for FinancialForce.com users and partners. It is embedded in all FinancialForce applications, allowing users to log cases, find answers and offer product enhancement ideas directly from within the application. Customers and partners will also be able to easily navigate to FinancialForce Xtra to find documentation, release notes and the growing catalog of training videos.

"Our vision is to create a single destination where customers and partners not only can find what they need, but also enable them to easily interact with both our support team and other customers," said Brennan. "This will allow everyone in the FinancialForce.com ecosystem to form more collaborative and mutually beneficial relationships."

PSA Summer '12 provides additional functionality to help services teams be more productive, including:

Project Creation: enhancements to make it faster and easier to create projects and project tasks from Salesforce CRM opportunities.

Timecard Entry Improvements: speed up the time entry process, capture more data, and improve accuracy with more copy, paste, sorting and project location defaults.

Context-Sensitive Help: one-click access to relevant content without having to search through a list of help topics or indexes.

Billing Event Control: select and control billing events by region, practice or group, making it easier to manage billing by management responsibility.

Revenue Recognition Automation: improvements to more easily accommodate a combination of percentage-complete, fixed-fee and/or milestone-based contracts.

"Services businesses thrive or die based on their ability to see and manage what is happening with their people, projects and customers," said Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com. "When you combine the visibility enhancements from PSA Summer '12 with the advanced utilization capabilities we announced in our PSA Spring '12 release, professional service organizations can now gain more insights from the past, but also better predict how they will perform in the future with far greater accuracy."

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