Project Planning and Scheduling
Risk Management
Portfolio Management
Opportunity Management
Historical Information (for bids)
Project Tracking
Subcontracts
Time and Expense Collection
Consultant Utilization Tracking
Project Accounting
Billing, Invoicing and Accounts Receivable
Revenue Recognition
Accounts Receivables, Payables, and Cash Management
Help Desk and Customer Management

Project Planning and Scheduling
It's important to structure projects so they reflect the best practices of your firm, make sense to your prospect, and ensure efficient use of resources. It's equally important that you collect resource and cost information and use it in your reporting. Critical path schedules help ensure the highest priority work gets done, and portfolio management capabilities help consulting firms identify trends and focus on the most critical projects.
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Risk Management
Clients have become wary of the risks inherent in consulting projects. A business software system can help you provide them with a choice among scenarios based on modeling of various risk trade-offs. A business software system can also help you to configure workflow-driven approval processes and critical path schedules early on. Finally, it can help you to configure automatic, exception-driven alerts so key decision makers see and respond to risk issues quickly without losing sight of them among less important details.
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Portfolio Management
The ability to view and manage portfolios by various dimensions (such as practice area and industry) can help you manage projects better. You can identify at-risk and underperforming activities. What's more, analysis tools can provide insight into the performance of your overall portfolio by identifying trends and problem areas. And of course, insight into the portfolio and, in particular, firm-wide scheduling of resources can help you establish reliable plans during the bidding cycle.
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Opportunity Management
Successful software and IT firms develop, gather, and integrate knowledge of their industry with knowledge of prospects and customers. They then leverage this knowledge in the management of those relationships. Thus, tight integration of e-mail, client account activity and history, opportunities, packaged offerings, proposals, quotes, orders, literature, contacts, appointments, tasks, and past projects is essential. It is also vital to be able to manage leads through a defined sales process with rules guiding automation of routing, notifications, approvals, and escalations.
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Historical Information (For Bids)
With customers forcing tightly competitive bids and insisting on shared risks, it's critical to forecast revenue accurately before submitting a proposal. One key to success is to maintain a rich repository of historical project information. Analytical tools can then be used to model alternatives. Integrating the proposal system with scheduling and resource management tools during the proposal phase can help ensure all scheduled work is included in the cost proposal. Rate modeling can help ensure rates are adjusted to reflect the risk of various proposal types, such as fixed price and time and materials.
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Project Tracking
The ability of team members to share knowledge helps make projects run smoothly. A business software system that allows people to manage, track, and report on activities, even from distant locations, makes processes more efficient. Automatic alerts, automated workflows, and access to real-time, business-critical project data make for an efficient process. The right system can also help you get your customers to manage their part of the project effectively, using tools they already know like Microsoft Office and Web browsers.
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Subcontracts
Clients often demand specialists with deep knowledge. Assembling the necessary experts required to win business often requires partnering with other firms. A business software system can help you to track agreements and documents and change orders. Automated payment controls can help you protect cash flow, track outstanding liabilities, and make payments contingent on deliverables. This helps you to handle payment retention and pay-when-paid scenarios.
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Time and Expense Collection
Regular, complete, and accurate time and expense entry is essential for regular billing and cash-flow management. For fixed price contracts, it's essential that time and expenses be tracked against work scope completed so profitability can be monitored and ensured early on. Web-based time and expense entry systems for employees make the process easy on the consultants-regardless of where they are located. This should include full data validation, automated approval workflow, comprehensive reporting (including detailed audit trails), and integration and reconciliation with billing and payroll systems.
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Consultant Utilization Tracking
Consultants can increase productivity by tracking against goals for billable time and utilization percentages and by rewarding employees through automated incentives systems. Labor multipliers, billing write-ups and write-downs, margins, and non-billable time are automatically incorporated into realization results. Information can be viewed by employee, project, and custom groupings, such as departments or labor types. Systems draw in expense data to compute overall employee productivity.
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Project Accounting
Real-time views of detailed financial data helps increase project profitability. It helps you track the work breakdown structure from initial budget through project closure, without waiting for accounting periods to close. It also helps you manage fiscal performance every step of the way. The system helps you to forecast outcomes. It helps you monitor trends, predict the impact of changes, and track estimates at completion and forecasts at completion, in addition to the original budget.
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Billing, Invoicing, and Accounts Receivable
A business software system can help you generate invoices periodically or on demand based on time and material, fixed price, lump sum, percent complete, or another contractually agreed method. You can encourage quick client approval by customizing invoices to meet customer requirements. You can also provide your own customer service personnel with instant access to invoice information. The ability to drill down to underlying details helps your personnel answer customers' questions about their bills.
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Revenue Recognition
Contract flexibility and scrutiny of company reporting has created new demands. Management consulting firms need to be able to select from multiple revenue recognition methods such as by time, fees and expenses as worked, accrual, percent complete, completed contract, and milestone. Additionally, it's necessary to be able to specify how overruns will be handled on fixed price jobs and to specify revenue recognition rules independent of the billing cycle. U.S. software publishing firms must comply with Statement of Position (SOP) 97-2 and its amendment, SOP 98-9. These are designed to provide guidelines so that revenue can be:

Additionally, organizations may also be subject to SOP 81-1, originally created to be used for construction or construction-type contracts. Because some software arrangements require significant modification or customization before they can be used, it may be necessary to follow these guidelines for the entire arrangement regardless of the individual elements.
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Accounts Receivables, Payables, and Cash Management
With today's smaller margins and rising costs, managing cash flow is key to running a successful business. Tools that help you capture all billable charges make it easy to invoice and communicate with customers, monitor and apply receivables, automate processes, and reduce outstanding receivables. Up-to-date views of customer receivables and cash balances and the ability to generate projections easily are critical.

Accounts payable is an important tool in managing cash flow and guaranteeing quality. Tools that help you take advantage of the right vendor discounts make sure you're not spending too much money. The ability to control invoice selection for payment according to many parameters ensures you pay vendors when goods or services have been satisfactorily provided.
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Help Desk and Customer Service
A business software system should give you a complete view of your customers' accounts, including sales and order information and call history. It can help you identify your top customers and better understand specific customer needs. In addition to giving customers access to a searchable knowledge-base of your published support articles, a system can help you maintain an accurate record of customer-related communications with automated tracking of customer e-mail messages associated with the appropriate customer records.
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