Blog

The one thing all professional services business share in common is that, fundamentally, they sell expertise.

Expertise is a combination of both the company’s track record in similar problems and the skills of their employees. All of course residing within their process and quality framework.

Understanding the skills of your employees and applying that capability to what work you go after and once won, assignment of people to tasks, is therefore a key aspect of running a services business. In certain circumstances and for certain types of services business, demonstrating you have the skills to perform the work, in terms of employee backgrounds and qualifications, is even key to winning the work.

As we approach the festive season, we thought it a good opportunity to review what we have achieved in 2019 and to look forward to in the New Year.

2019 achievements

The 2019 saw us launch a revamped user home page containing user definable pinned reports of objects meaningful to their day to day activity. This ensures that users can make their homepage focused on the things of direct relevance to their role.

This is one of a series of blog posts dealing with the criteria to be included when reviewing which PSA to purchase.

At a high level, all solutions will generally look the same as they are designed to cover the same problem. However, there are many detailed considerations that can make a big difference in how effective the solution is in support of your business.

In this blog we examine the subtle difference between ticket status lists and ticket workflows.

Buying any business software product always involves a degree of compromise.

The extent to which that compromise impedes productivity and effective use of the system, while still allowing you to run the business the way you want, is the difference between success and failure in your choice of PSA.

Minimising these compromises depends on how configurable the solution is. How easy it is to add custom data and functionality without requiring code changes the vendor is unlikely to want to deliver just for you.

I've been lucky enough to be invited to speak at a few tech conferences and webinars recently.

It seems a good gauge of interest levels during any presentation these days, is by the number of people taking photos of individual slides! Most of mine are just images, however there's one part of my speech which constantly has people snapping away and talking to me about afterwards. I've also had emails thanking me for the tip too, which has surprised me.

Where the value of an invoice does not relate to revenue 100% earned in the period of the invoice, some degree of deferred revenue treatment is necessary. Without making a process separation between revenue recognition and cash-flow, period accounting will be incorrect and so misleading.

Worse, the effect of this at year end will lead to an overstatement of revenue, in turn driving the business to pay more corporation tax than is necessary.

Lastly, under ASC606, ensuring revenue is taken over the life of a contract is key to accounts compliance.

What is SAML?

SAML stands for Security Assertion Mark-up Language and is an open standard for managing the separation between the authentication of a user by a service provider and the identity provider that grants the assertion providing access right to the service.

While alternatives for Single Sign On (SSO) exist within an organisational domain (such as Microsoft Active Directory) and for consumer access (such as OAuth used by personal web applications), SAML is the preferred standard for creating a federated security access model for cloud (internet) business applications such as Service Desk, CRM and of course PSA.

Every business blog needs to find a reason to include a cat picture - everyone likes cats, right?

So here we go, a business blog featuring a cat in a box.

You may have heard of the 1930s thought-experiment called Schrödinger's cat.

If not, Schrödinger postulated that a cat in a closed box could either be alive or dead and the only way to determine the state of its health was to open the box and observe it.

Can you imagine how difficult and expensive it was marketing a business in the dark ages… the 1990s!

You were reliant on archaic tools like the Yellow Pages. And advertising in newspapers and magazines. Makes me shiver just to think of it.

We are smack bang in the middle of a communication and information revolution. It’s happening right now. It’s changing how people think, research, and make buying decisions.

For those who are not aware of this acronym, HIPAA stands for Health Insurance, Portability & Accountability Act. It is US legislation that addresses patient confidentiality and ensures your records can be moved between healthcare providers without hindrance.

If you provide services to the healthcare sector in the US, you will be aware of your responsibility to make that service provision HIPAA compliant.

Obviously, for software that deals with patient records this is a key requirement built in from day one. Similarly, cloud storage and backup solutions used by healthcare providers have clear responsibility to ensure patient records are protected by multi-level secure access controls.