5 Areas for Data Audits in Your NetSuite OpenAir PSA System

Investing in a Professional Services Automation (PSA) system, such as Netsuite OpenAir, is a valuable step toward improving operational efficiency, which can positively impact revenue and growth for your business. Realizing a return on this investment and the value that it brings means being able to review, evaluate and report to the organization from multiple angles – financial, resourcing, project efficiency, and more.

The cornerstone to every point of evaluation is the data within your PSA. If your data is inaccurate or incomplete, the view you have into your business and the decisions you make based on that data will be, as well.

Clean and complete data within your OpenAir system doesn’t happen by accident. It requires establishing processes and expectations, adherence to those processes, adoption, and more. Ensuring the PSA is being used, and used according to your established guidelines, requires validation – in other words, reviews and audits of the data.

However, checking every input every day isn’t feasible. Instead, following a few best practices that allow you to audit specific areas of your OpenAir system will keep your data usable, accurate, and clean. Here are five areas you should consider for setting up a governance process to keep your data accurate.

#1 Adherence to Processes and Policies

When you initially implemented your PSA system, you sank time and resources into planning, establishing best practices for your organization, and training end-users.

But what about today? Is everyone still following those procedures? Are policies being followed? Compliance with those well-planned and thought-out processes and policies can impact how much value you see from your OpenAir platform.

There are four areas you can look at to ensure your teams are adhering to the guidelines you’ve defined:

Timesheets: Anyone who has tried to get their teams to regularly complete timesheets knows that compliance can be challenging. It’s also critically important for accurate data for a professional services organization and impacts everything from planning and projects to financials and hiring.

Expenses: Timely expense report submission is important for both data and financials. Spend time regularly validating that your expense report policies are being followed not only for data accuracy but to prevent impacts on cash flow and your ability to invoice appropriate expenses to customers.

Projects: As part of your setup of OpenAir, you likely defined your project stages – planning, active, closed, perhaps even at risk. Auditing your projects to see if they are moving along at the rate you expect and if team members are adding time where they should, point to correct usage of the system or issues with how policies are being followed. Health monitors can help, but even those should be audited to ensure that they are being used properly.

Resourcing: Resources are crucial to the success of a professional services organization – but not just because they are the engine that drives the business. Setting resources up properly in OpenAir is only the start. Audits keep resource data useful by checking on roles, role access, assignments, and more. As new functionality is released on the platform, resource audits can also ensure everyone has the correct permissions for platform features.

#2 Data Accuracy and Completeness

The quality of any reporting or data usage is primarily dependent on the quality of the data that exists in the system or systems. That’s why data accuracy and completeness are other areas that must be monitored and audited within your PSA.

There are two key places to audit the data for accuracy and completeness in relation to OpenAir. The first is data that applies to your PSA but is outside of it. It’s easy for data to get muddled and misrepresented when there isn’t a single source of truth. As much as possible, data that should be managed within OpenAir should be handled there.

The other place where it can be incomplete or inaccurate is within projects. Setting up projects thoroughly and consistently within OpenAir will keep project data clean and usable. Project budgets, budgeted hours at the project and task level, hours used, hours planned, and so on, are crucial to both profitability and customer satisfaction – there is no more significant misstep for a company than incorrectly billing a client.

In addition, entering a project correctly, based on the SoW, means you can baseline the project and measure how project estimates and completion are going. Are you over or under hours on projects? Does that happen frequently? Learning from mistakes requires accurate data to start from so that you can see where problems lie.

#3 Change Management

While our first area for audit – policies and procedures – is important, it’s mainly about the ongoing maintenance of a live system. On the other hand, change management is more focused on the go-live of the new system, user adoption, and usage. These need to be measured and managed to ensure that you’re getting the value out of your PSA system.

Change is hard, and teams can slip into a state of resistance to that change, whether intentionally or unintentionally. When introducing a PSA, even if you’ve configured it to align closely with existing procedures and processes, there will still be those who are hesitant to dig in and use it.

OpenAir success means auditing your usage and process metrics to validate system adoption. Typically, there is a drop-dead date where the system goes into regular use. It’s common – and even effective – to let teams know that not only is the expectation that they will use the system starting on that date, but that you’ll be checking to make sure that it’s being used.

However, along with that messaging, should be an explanation of why adopting the new system is so important. For instance, using the PSA will help get billing out quicker or streamline the process, so there is less administrative overhead. Or, perhaps you intend to use it to help determine resourcing – explaining to staff members that it’s critical to use the system and enter time correctly so that you can justify new hires can inspire compliance. Justifying the new system in terms of downstream benefits to the users will help push you past the initial resistance to the required changes.

#4 System Maintenance

Yearly and quarterly maintenance schedules are a given. It’s essential to plan specific times to update things like company holiday schedules, work calendars, and so forth. However, other maintenance tasks can and should be done regularly and even more frequently to maintain the health of your OpenAir system.

Regular systems maintenance is a little like cleaning your home. Doing it regularly and often will make the task much easier and go more quickly. That’s because regular maintenance is mainly about cleaning up the platform to keep it efficient and minimize confusion for users.

Some areas to look at when auditing the system for maintenance and to help keep data clean and consistent include:

• Users: Deactivating accounts and validating access levels will protect your system and save you money. Accounts that are allocated to employees no longer at the company can’t be assigned to someone else. We see companies with many more user licenses than they need because they haven’t been good about deallocating unused accounts.
• Reports: It’s not unheard of for a company to have tens or hundreds of “dead” reports – reports that no one uses anymore. Whatever the reason, reports should either be allocated to the right person or removed from the system to prevent clutter.
• Custom Fields: Do you have fields that you thought would be important when you first started with OpenAir but have never been used? Those fields cause frustration and confusion for your users – if they aren’t being actively used, they should be retired.
• Values: Similarly, you may have values that you thought would be important, but either aren’t being used or are duplicated with similar values. If you’ve ever pulled up a dropdown list in OpenAir and had to scroll through many values to find the one you want, it’s probably time to review which are important and remove those that are not.

#5 Audit for Auditors

Generally, a professional services group and the supporting PSA system are only tangential to an audit process. However, a lot of what goes on in OpenAir is used to support the audit process, so it’s good to review and understand where values that impact financials come from and identify how the system can support claims made to the auditors.

There are several areas that you should understand so that you can quickly and confidently answer any questions your auditors might have. First are any calculations within your PSA – especially those that impact financials. You should know what those are and how you get them. What is the backend calculation that provides that output?

You should also validate that those calculations are being used correctly. If you are making decisions or taking action based on them, you had better know who is using them and if they are being used properly.

Lastly, you should take the time to investigate the audit trail system in OpenAir and be able to speak to it. Not every change within the system is included in an audit trail with who made the change and when. Take the time before audits to review what leaves a trail so that you can discuss any changes, should they be reviewed.

Conclusion

The purpose of OpenAir, or any PSA, is to help you run your business more smoothly. To do that, you need to be able to see your performance, your resourcing, your financials, your project health, and so on. More importantly, the representation of those things needs to be accurate to make fact-based decisions. Reviewing and auditing the data at various critical points within OpenAir will ensure the information managed in the system can be relied on.

We discuss further the best practices for auditing and reviewing your data in OpenAir in our webinar, Best Practices for Auditing Data in Your Professional Services Automation System. If you still have questions or need help reviewing your OpenAir setup and configuration, let us know. At Top Step, we help companies every day just like yours get the most out of their OpenAir PSA system and continue to realize the value it brings to your organization.