Overcome financial management challenges and improve your cash flow

A major challenge facing professional services businesses today is financial management, especially cash flow. With a financial management solution from Microsoft and Rand Group, you can unlock your organization’s full potential to drive financial performance. Connected Dynamics 365 business solutions like Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Dynamics 365 Finance help you maximize profitability and easily manage finances at every project phase. Easily automate most of your billing and invoicing processes to eliminate the risk of human error and payment delays.

One key business issue professional services firms face is the billing cycle. There are many different factors that can lead to a billing cycle bottleneck and reduced cash flow such as late time entry, adjustments, long or complex review processes, and complicated manual invoices. Professional services firms can take multiple steps to tackle this challenge by reducing the billing cycle and implementing powerful financial management software. With Dynamics 365 Project Operations, you can create rule-based accounting profiles that are tailored to your project types. Dynamics 365 Project Operations gives you the flexibility to set up a fixed price profile with no accruals for profit and loss impact, base your estimate principles on percent complete, or base revenue recognition amounts on a cost setup template. These rules will save you time by automatically setting the billing methods in new contracts when deals are won. Additionally, you may also set up a variety of billing scenarios and billing methods that only apply to a portion of contracts, individual contracts, or all contracts. In fact, you can even set up multiple billing methods for a single contract.

Inaccurate and delayed invoices not only slow down cash flow but also negatively impact the professional reputation of your services firm. Sending a client an incorrect invoice will diminish their confidence in your organization’s abilities. Additionally, reissuing invoices increases project costs and impacts your team’s ability to deliver projects on time. Cloud-based finance software such as Dynamics 365 Project Operations can help your professional services firm to eliminate issues by streamlining the invoicing process. With Dynamics 365 Project Operations, you can improve cash flow by invoicing customers quickly. The invoicing dashboard displays all the most important information and tasks for project managers. Easily manage billing queues, analyze key metrics in real-time, and mark billable transactions as ready to invoice. Then, invoice creation can be done manually or automated according to a pre-determined schedule with certain line items being auto-populated based on the contract.

Dynamics 365 Finance provides easy access to accurate real-time financial data that is critical to project and organizational success. Proactively monitor the health of your organization and financial performance with built-in reports, charts, and Power BI to view real-time cash flow, identify financial patterns, analyze trends, and improve business planning. Make more informed business decisions by monitoring your most important profit margin KPIs with the ability to drill down into key project information such as consumption, ledger postings, credit to revenue, forecasts, and more. Accurately project your cash flow and reliably predict customer payments to reduce write-offs and improve your margin by understanding if and when customers will pay their invoices. With Dynamics 365 Finance, your organization can make more profitable business decisions.

Rand Group is an experienced solution provider with deep expertise in working with professional services organizations to build custom solutions to meet unique needs. Our team can help you use Dynamics 365 to transform your financial management operations. For more information, contact us today.