For the service professionals themselves, PSA shields them from bookkeeping burdens—expense tracking, invoice generation, and reporting—allowing them to focus instead on their areas of expertise. With dozens of PSA solutions in the market, though, how do you find one the one that will best serve your organization?

One: Realize that Cost Can Be Deceiving

Many service organizations make the mistake of basing much of the decision on the most simplistic criteria: price. Price can’t be ignored, of course, but it’s often higher on the list of evaluation criteria than it should be.

According to a study commissioned by PSA service provider OpenAir and completed by SPI Research, Evaluating a Professional Services Automation (PSA) Solution , the typical cost of total deployment, including hardware, software, and services, runs between $500 and $1,500 per seat.

The first-year costs may very well rule out certain solutions, especially for smaller organizations, but organizations of any size are better served by looking at ROI than initial costs alone. Similarly, low-cost solutions must still perform. Cost only has meaning when taken in together with performance and functionality. Cheaper offerings may skimp on functionality, but the more expensive ones may pose a different problem: function overload.

Software vendors are often guilty of layering superfluous functions on top of their core offerings, just so they have those checkmarks on their features list. Those checkmark functions may never be used – despite those very functions being part of what led to the selection of that particular offering.

A better selection process is to match functionality to needs. That may sound obvious, but many organizations don’t really understand what their needs really are.

Two: Study Yourself First

According to Bob Vogel, chief marketing officer for Autotask, a PSA provider that targets IT service organizations, when Autotask meets with a potential client, the first thing they do is nail down the underlying processes that drive the business. “People are often running their businesses on an ad-hoc basis. There are no documented workflows. If you sell into a situation like that, all you’ll do is automate bad processes.”

Larry Goldberg, director of professional services for OpenAir, agrees: “You need to understand in great detail what your outputs are. A common mistake is to look at PSA software from a technical standpoint. ‘Here are these modules, how do we use them?’ That’s the wrong approach. What you should figure out first is what exactly you want to achieve.”

Since many PSA clients are SMBs, companies like OpenAir and Autotask often have to help their clients document processes and internalize best-practices before discussing the nitty-gritty details of the PSA solution itself.

Three: Check for Vertical Solutions