Are Your Projects Suffering These Symptoms?

If you’re running a magical business that's hitting 90% billable utilization and delivering only profitable projects, your project health check ends here.

For everyone else – if overservicing, revenue leakage, or unpredictable workloads sound way too familiar, it’s time to take a closer look.

By the end of this article, you’ll not only be able to spot the symptoms, but also diagnose the root cause, and fix the problem.

Symptom 1: Projects keep running over budget?

Common pains:

• You can’t compare project actuals against quoted estimates in real time
• You track project progress manually, it's time-consuming, and errors slip in
• You only discover the impact of endless revisions and scope creep after the damage is done.

Diagnosis

More often than not, using separate apps to estimate and track your projects is a major issue. These disconnects create delays, lead to outdated or inaccurate insights, and result in missed opportunities to course-correct while you still can.

I’ve been there myself. In a previous workplace, we’d build budgets in one platform, timesheets (sporadically) in another, and then try to reconcile budgets in a spreadsheet. Nightmare. We were basically operating in the dark.

Symptom 2: Teams struggling with unpredictable workloads?

Common pains:

• You have no real-time visibility into who’s working on what
• Resource allocation often feels like guesswork due to unclear capacity
• Matching resources to new projects or shifting timelines is a tedious effort.

Diagnosis

You must be using disconnected systems for resourcing and project tracking. This disconnect makes it hard to allocate resources optimally as you don’t have a real-time view of team capacity.

Again, I’ve seen resourcing handled as a complete free-for-all – with resources requested and assigned to projects without any visibility on remaining budget. You’re in for a rude shock when you finally look at your business’ profit margin – despite your team being exhausted.

Symptom 3: Business losing revenue to unbilled work?

Common pains:

• You have to manually reconcile timesheets with project records
• It’s not always clear what’s been invoiced and what’s still pending
• Silos between delivery and finance mean that not all work gets invoiced on time (or at all).

Diagnosis

The issue again lies in the fact that you log time in one system, track your projects in another, and bill in a third. Without a clear overview, unbilled hours slip through the cracks, costing your business valuable revenue.

I can think of horror stories from some of my own clients – an account manager forgetting to invoice £20,000 on a multi-year project. In another case, the business was relying on pipeline stages to track invoicing status. If you care about getting paid for your work, this is not where you want to be.

The Fix—Graduate From Project Tools

While your symptoms and diagnoses may vary, they share a common source: disconnected tools.

On average, leaders use 5+ different tools to run their projects. But if you estimate work in one place, resource in another, and invoice in the third, you end up:

• spending ages on manual reporting — the hours and days you spend gathering data eats into time you could spend on strategic initiatives;
• relying on outdated insights — by the time a spreadsheet report is compiled, it's already outdated, and it's too late to impact outcomes.

An approach some service-based businesses consider is connecting individual apps via APIs or tools like Zapier. However, in my view, this is a temporary – and precarious – fix.

Your workflow will remain fragmented if you only solve one disconnect at a time – not to mention the labor involved in getting this right. Your team will still be switching between half a dozen tools. And you still won't have a complete overview of project, client, service or team performance – and you’ll have to rely on manual reports.

Instead, the best fix for businesses that sell their time and expertise, such as agencies, consultancies, legal, accounting or IT firms, is to consolidate their tech stack as much as possible with professional services automation (PSA) software.

What’s that? Unlike many best in class project tools that excel at specific parts of project workflow, PSA software connects your budgets, timeline, resources, delivery, invoicing and reporting in one place. This way you can:

• get financial context across every project, team, client or service in real-time
• monitor key metrics in real-time, such as resource demand vs. availability, billable utilization, profitability, and forecasted revenue
• make data-driven decisions to support your company's growth
• focus on value-added work instead of gathering data.

Navigating The PSA Software Market

I brought Scoro’s PSA software into my past workplace. From broken processes, inconsistent ways of working, and information silos, we gained complete visibility into project performance, capacity, and profitability.

While we were coming from a legacy PSA, moving to Scoro was game-changing in our business’ maturity journey.

How did we find the right system?

Working alongside our Finance Director, I started by creating a list of requirements in a spreadsheet and developed a flowchart to understand whether a PSA would be beneficial for our business.

For example:

• We were a multi-entity business, therefore the platform needed to support a multi-entity setup, allowing us to work and report in multiple currencies, and for the interface to be localized in multiple languages.
• We wanted standardized quote templates to ensure our team was quoting on work consistently, and that quotes would be easy to deploy. We also wanted a quote sign-off workflow so quotes could get internal approval before being sent to clients.
• We wanted to be able to view our pipeline in the system, so we could have a snapshot of where every deal was at any given time.
• The system needed to be able to handle purchase orders and invoicing, and had to integrate with Xero for accounting and Expensify for expense management.
• Having previously used a legacy PSA with a horrible user experience, I wanted to ensure the new system we brought in was cloud-based, had a modern UX that my team would be happy to use, and had loads of momentum behind the product by way of regular feature updates.

That’s just a snapshot of some of the things I had in my requirements list, and of course some things were nice-to-haves while others were essential.

Next, I added columns for each of the systems I’d shortlisted. Let’s get into shortlisting and qualification.

Shortlisting systems

One of my favorite resources when it comes to system selection is Crozdesk. It’s a website where you can look up any category of software products – in this case professional services automation – and get a quick snapshot of how they stack up.

The Crozdesk Market Radar for the product category can be especially helpful for comparison and rapid shortlisting (tip: I tend to focus on the top-right corner – higher satisfaction and high market presence).

Source: Professional Services Automation (PSA) Market Research, Crozdesk

From what catches my attention here, I dive into their websites and do my own rapid research.

With the tools that look the most promising – I add them as columns in my comparison spreadsheet – I then move into demos, Q&A calls, testimonial calls, and free trials to ensure they can meet my requirements. I fill out the relevant rows in my comparison spreadsheet to indicate whether or not the platform meets those requirements.

Are all PSA systems built the same?

Short answer: NO.

I’ve been burned by a legacy PSA in the past. It did everything we needed it to do on paper, but the user experience was so bad that no one in the business enjoyed using it. It was a blessing in disguise when the company behind the product decided to pull the plug and we discovered Scoro.

Here’s how I categorise project management and professional services automation software and why:

Enterprise PSAs or ERPs (enterprise resource planning) platforms	Legacy PSAs	Classic project management tools	Modern project management tools	Modern PSAs
This category includes the likes of NetSuite. Not only are these systems incredibly expensive, they often require their own teams to configure the systems any time you need a change. On top of that, the complexity and the user experience is one I would avoid.	These include  the likes of Kantata, Screendragon, Synergist, Paprika, Certinia or any Deltek product (sorry Deltek)! Have you ever looked at a platform and thought it looked like it was designed over 2 decades ago and never evolved? I’ve used one, and I will never subject my team to that again. While these tools may be capable, usability and good design don’t live here – and for a system your teams may be spending most of their day in? A hard pass for me.	This includes apps like Asana, Trello, or Basecamp. I can’t complain about these tools. They’re easy to pick up and use. But they don’t solve the problem of disconnected tools. They aren’t PSA systems that bring together your quoting, resourcing, project tracking, invoicing and reporting into one central place.	This category includes tools like Monday, Clickup and Teamwork. I see these as toolkits that let you build whatever you want. They’re not PSA platforms, and they’re not designed to truly build and track your project financials and invoicing.	Finally, this is where a system like Scoro comes in. I chose Scoro because it did everything we needed it to – from multi-entity, multi-currency, end-to-end work management, and integration with third party systems when required. Plus, it was a sight for sore eyes having come from a legacy PSA platform, and it was updated monthly with new features.

How did Scoro change things for my business?

Well, first – check out my case study video below.

Next, I loved Scoro so much that I joined their team in 2025 – yes, I loved the platform THAT much!

But more seriously, what were the biggest wins for me? Here are just a few:

• Consistent quoting – I created a library of quote templates across our 3 entities so our sales team could quickly mix and match and build consistent quotes for their customers.
• Timesheeting ease – Timesheeting has moved on from setting a timer or manually filling out a table (although those are still options if you wish!) With Scoro, our team was easily able to assign tasks in their calendar to a project and task, and that’s it, timesheet done. If individual contributors had their work scheduled for them, all they had to do was tick the task as done, and again, time logged. It meant that everyone had a way of logging time that worked for them. No more excuses for not logging time.
• Preparing for management meetings – Honestly, this was one of my favorites. My prep for running our bi-weekly management meetings for each entity literally involved opening 4 browser tabs for us to focus on. No longer days getting spreadsheets up to date. And we would be looking at live data.
• Depth of reporting – from live visibility into project progress and profit, to viewing utilization, to revenue and capacity forecasts, there is a huge number of reports available in Scoro out of the box. All customizable with a few clicks. This enabled us to become a truly data driven organization – and one that wasn’t just analyzing how we did last quarter, but one that was able to see what was coming, so we could make adjustments.
• A single source of truth, and an ‘operating system’ for our business – that’s how I saw Scoro. We didn’t need to look up information in 5 different places and in a dozen spreadsheets, the truth lived in Scoro.

In a nutshell, Scoro levelled up our business maturity to a whole new level. Business maturity is something I talk about a lot, and in fact, I’ve just launched a business maturity quiz.

Below are Scoro’s core capabilities. If you’re ready to level up, then book a demo or get a free trial today. And drop me a note on LinkedIn, if you’d like to hear about my experiences.