How Scoro Transforms Service Businesses: Based On Actual Results

Running a professional services business is hard work. Scaling it successfully is even harder. Whether you run an agency, consultancy, legal, accounting, or IT service firm, the friction points that sabotage your day-to-day are usually similar. Overservicing, unbilled work, unpredictable workloads, and shrinking margins are all too common amongst firms that sell their time and expertise.

While the extent of the issues vary from business to business, they all share a common source: using disconnected tools for estimating, resourcing, tracking, and billing projects. In fact, leaders on average have 5+ apps in their project toolset. As a result, they have to connect the dots across these platforms through manual spreadsheet reports. By the time they’re finished, the reports are outdated, and outcomes can no longer be impacted.

If you are a leader who struggles with similar obstacles, then it may be time to graduate from basic project tools to professional services automation (PSA) software. This way, you’ll be able to plan your budgets, timeline, resources, delivery, invoicing and reporting in one place.

Sounds great on paper, right? But you might be wondering how that plays out in the real world? In this article, we share how Scoro PSA software effectively covers the entire project lifecycle from the first quote to the final invoice, helping professional service businesses operate and scale profitably.

Save Days On Project Estimations

Right before making the switch to Scoro, the quoting process at Kojo, a 250-head production studio, was painful. Producers spent days shuffling between the firm’s legacy project tool and spreadsheets to draft client quotes. The manual process not only cost time, but made it difficult to see profit margins and increased the risk of underquoting.

After switching to Scoro and setting up quote templates, Kojo has reduced quote turnaround time from 2-3 days to 24 hours. It takes the production team around 30 minutes to get ready even the most detailed and bespoke quotes.

The result is not just the quoting speed. Teams now have more time to focus on driving revenue, clients can enjoy better experience, and leadership has real-time data to make proactive business decisions.

Optimize Utilization And Drive Revenue

Understanding team capacity and managing resources was a challenge across DGA Group’s seven entities. Some teams at the global consultancy didn’t track time at all, while others struggled with cumbersome tools. It was unclear how much time was spent on what and, as a result, impossible to get a clear overview of team capacity.

Since switching to Scoro, DGA’s 350+ global team logs time in a consistent way. Timesheets feed directly into live project and utilization reports, offering real-time insights. As a result, DGA has been able to boost its utilization rates by 20% compared to the previous year.

Today, leadership is also able to make data-driven decisions when it comes to resource management. When teams request additional hires, it is easy to spot when existing resources can be optimized or if expanding the team is necessary.

Having accurate time logs has also had a knock-on effect on the consultancy’s project profitability. Previously, teams had to reconcile timesheets with budgets using spreadsheets, which was both time-consuming and prone to errors. Overservicing was hard to address because the data wasn’t available to course-correct in time. With Scoro, leadership can monitor progress daily, compare actuals to budgets, and adjust as needed. This helped DGA increase project profitability by 33% compared to the previous year.

Cut Manual Reports And Gain Back 2+ Workdays Every Month

Central America’s leading architecture firm, Mallol Arquitectos, was using various tools – from Deltek Vision to Teamwork – to run their projects. As data across each stage of the project lifecycle was accumulated on different platforms, it was not synchronized, and in the end, had no real value for the company.

Mallol faced the constant challenge of standardizing and ensuring the accuracy of the data, resulting in too many valuable hours dedicated to manual reports.

Moving to Scoro rebooted Mallol’s reporting framework completely. With live dashboards and prebuilt report templates tailored to their needs, every KPI from time spent per project phase to forecasted revenue and resource capacity is now accessible in real time. Reports that previously ate up 5-6 hours per week are now available in an instant.

Faster Invoicing And Revenue Forecasting

Julia Longo, the Finance Director at multi-entity agency, Saentys, used to spend two full days on revenue forecasting each month. She had to export a project list from an old buggy system, prepare spreadsheet templates for each account manager, collate the spreadsheets, and finally arrange a call with each account manager to sense-check the forecasts.

It’s easy to understand why the final report was often outdated by the time it was ready. After adopting Scoro, the platform does all the heavy lifting and Julia can see the revenue forecast in real time whenever she needs, saving two days every month.

Invoicing also used to take up too much valuable time due to all the back-and-forth with their customers and account managers. Now, invoices are sent directly from Scoro and automatically synced with Xero, allowing the team to track payment status in one place. For client queries or changes, comments can be added directly to the invoice, making adjustments simple.

Summary

Consolidating your business data isn’t just a technical upgrade. Scoro is a growth enabler that turns disconnected systems into a single, reliable source of truth. Instead of switching between spreadsheets, finance tools, CRM, or project-tracking apps, unified data allows your team to access accurate, up-to-date insights from one place.

When revenue, time tracking, billing, project management, and resource data are joined under one system, leadership gains the visibility to spot trends, anticipate revenue and profit issues, and adjust course before issues spiral. Book a demo with Scoro’s team to get similar results as the teams above. If you’re not yet sure if your company needs a PSA tool like Scoro, learn more about business maturity stages to find out.