A thriving, fast-growing professional services company is one that meets the varying needs of the business, staff and customers. Unfortunately, many professional services businesses are struggling to achieve this kind of sustainable growth due to poor systems and processes. Instead of fast and agile core operations, compelling value propositions and seamless, relevant customer experiences, they struggle with poor communication and collaboration, manual processes, dated service offerings and a lack of visibility. These are all symptoms of disjointed, siloed applications or highly customised, yet fragile, on-premise legacy solutions. The inefficiencies and vulnerabilities of these patched together systems only serve to stifle growth and prevent businesses from scaling at the same speed as their nimbler competitors. The solution is to implement ERP features and solutions that will help digitise your operations and scale up your organisation in the modern business landscape.

In this blog, we discuss the cloud ERP features that every professional services business needs to streamline their operations, improve productivity, collaboration and efficiency and drive sustainable growth.

 1. Interoperability with existing business systems

This is worth emphasising. Many professional services businesses are faced with managing multiple, highly complex and inflexible legacy IT systems. Perhaps they inherited multiple systems as a result of a merger or restructure. Or maybe their lingering systems have been caused by rapid business growth and changing priorities. Whatever the cause, this set-up is not only needlessly complex and frustrating, but it also drives up your costs. And it’s not warranted when other solutions exist.

NetSuite ERP offers comprehensive financial management and accounting capabilities. But more than that, NetSuite includes applications developed specifically for professional services. NetSuite OpenAir is professional services automation software that incorporates project and resource management, timesheet and expense management, project accounting and data analytics to provide your business with:

  • Real-time reporting and visibility into project performance and profitability
  • Features to ensure on-time project delivery and improve project success rates
  • Advanced resource management functionality to bolster resource utilisation 
  • Continuous, automatic updates to reduce hardware maintenance costs and upgrade hassles
Automation of key aspects of service delivery across the complete bid-to-bill lifecycle.

With an integrated professional services automation solution, complete with extensive native configurability options, you no longer need to cobble together multiple systems or run custom code that is painful (and expensive) to upgrade and scale. Accounting and finance seamlessly connect to project management, resource management, project financials, billing and invoicing to meet all the business requirements and needs of your organisation in one single system, even as you grow. You can learn more by viewing this NetSuite OpenAir datasheet.

2. Streamlined project management

Optimising resources is a challenge faced by any professional services business. Not only must you understand the capacity available for upcoming projects and the skills required for effective, on-time and on-budget delivery, you must also be able to assign the right employees to a project to maximise revenue. NetSuite OpenAir was designed from the ground up to support the management of your resources across the globe, including:

  • Optimise resource management – Easily assign the right resource with the best costs to optimise project delivery.
  • Project financial management – Match project activities with financials for accurate accounting and billing throughout the project lifecycle.
  • Track skills and availability – Boost resource utilisation as you deploy resources to projects based on an employee’s skills, interests, experience and availability. 
  • Deliver projects on time and within budget – Seamlessly collaborate on projects, view project status at any time and view accurate expense insights.

These ERP features can equip your business leaders and consultants with the tools needed to work unhindered, ensuring your professional services business is competitive, efficient and delivers a level of service to delight your customers. 

3. Supporting mobility and hybrid working

If your business was using an on-premises system during lockdowns, you’ll undertsand how valuable it is to have a cloud-based business suite. With NetSuite, you can enable online and mobile access so your teams can access everything they need in transit, between meetings and at home. The cloud-based business suite is the ideal collaboration companion, giving remote and hybrid service teams constant access to time and expense management, as well as relevant real-time business information when they need it.

4. Exploring new business models

To remain competitive and drive growth, leading professional service companies are not afraid to innovate as they explore new business models, products, markets, and pricing and billing strategies. Cloud ERP platforms open up exciting new possibilities for accomplishing these goals by offering the extensibility and agility required to add new business models, integrate acquisitions and support innovation. For example, NetSuite OneWorld delivers a real-time, unified global business management solution for companies that operate across multiple geographies. Or should you want to add additional functionality, NetSuite has an ecosystem of applications and integrations to choose from. Being a cloud solution, NetSuite can also be easily scaled up and down without requiring a significant increase in IT resources. 

Growing and scaling a business has never been harder. Emerging technologies, shifting consumer expectations and geographically dispersed teams continue to challenge businesses using legacy ERP or disjointed, siloed systems. But the right cloud ERP features can help solve the unique problems and satisfy the ambitions of professional services businesses.

To learn more about the benefits of ERP for the professional services industry, speak to the Annexa team. We have experience and expertise in the professional services industry, a deep understanding of the industry-specific challenges and knowledge of the best practices to to optimise your business’ operations through NetSuite.

More than just NetSuite experts

At Annexa, we provide industry-leading solutions customised to the NetSuite platform, including supply chain management. With our in-house integrations, extensions, partnerships and full-service capabilities, we deliver end-to-end solutions for our customers to help them grow and expand their business potential. Contact us today to speak to an expert to learn whether we are the right NetSuite implementation partner for you.


Annexa is a leading NetSuite partner with extensive experience designing and implementing comprehensive and customised business systems, including payroll solutions,  financial management, warehouse management and ecommerce solutions.