Four Reasons for Data Audits in Your Professional Services Operations

Your data is only as valuable as it is accurate. The last thing you want is the pressure to make a critical decision, then realize the data you’re working with is inaccurate and unreliable. You might ask questions like:

• How could I have prevented this?
• What proactive measures could I have taken to ensure data is reliable?

For any professional services organization, one of its most valuable assets is data, and the need for high-quality data is critical. This is where the need for data audits comes in. Data auditing helps inspect the data throughout its lifecycle and assess its purpose’s accuracy, completeness, and efficacy.

Investing in data auditing will help you stay ahead of things and make informed decisions driven by analytics because you will have complete confidence in the quality of your data.

Why Audit Data?

Data audits can be a crucial success factor contributing to your business growth. Its benefits extend beyond just ascertaining the quality of business data. It also helps you have a clear vision of all areas of your business and have the confidence to navigate challenges. If you’re still in doubt, here are more reasons to consider data auditing.

Process and Policy Compliance

Every business adopts a unique business model, practices, procedures, processes, and policies. As a business owner, you’ve planned, invested resources, and established best practices for success. So, how do you ensure your well-thought-out guidelines are being followed? Lucky for you, advanced PSA tools such as NetSuite OpenAir are designed to help you easily monitor critical business areas to ensure your teams comply with your guidelines. They include:

• Timesheets: Timesheets are a key metric that look further into the time your team spends working. The PSA system will help you track start-to-end times for employees, project approval timelines, task completion timelines, etc. The system will notify you whenever a member is behind the deadline.
• Expenses: OpenAir helps you ensure expense reports are submitted on time and within the defined aging window for data accuracy, proper cash management, or avoiding cases of invoicing customers’ inappropriate amounts.
• Projects: Projects are more of a process compliance rather than policy compliance. Defining your project stages – proposal, pending, planning, active, or closed – is critical to setting up OpenAir. So, auditing helps you determine if the projects are in their expected life cycle, which indicates the right project and business health.
• Resourcing: Resources are the engine of your business, so they should be managed appropriately. The system helps you set up proper controls for the access and use of resources.

Data Accuracy and Completeness

Data accuracy and completeness are essential to quality data that must be sufficiently monitored and audited. Unfortunately, many organizations run into the challenges of working with different systems. Sometimes, a disconnect may exist in some of these systems, forcing organizations to track data outside of PSA tools like OpenAir or any tool.

The more data that is tracked outside OpenAir, the more difficult it becomes to trace such information, thus weakening the ability of the system to perform its function. The solution to this problem is to build an audit structure that doubles up as metrics for the accuracy and completeness of data.  Classic examples include:

• Plan vs. actuals accuracy for resource planning
• Project setup completeness and alignment with SoW
• Bill rates (reduce invoice corrections).

Change Management

Change is difficult, and delegating and permeating change throughout the organization is even more complicated. Your team members can deliberately or unintentionally find themselves in a state of resistance to change. Still, change is inevitable and a necessary part of growth. So, making change worthwhile for everyone is essential, which is where auditing comes in.

Adoption needs particular measures in order to support audits. Measures look into how adaptable or acceptable people have become of change which can be tracked using the following metrics:

• “Starting xx/xx/xxx we will be doing…” This involves setting expectations for audits to start and follow through.
• Highlight metrics for improvement (for example, reduce timesheet corrections, increase forecasted utilization, etc.)
• Learn from data

It’s important to communicate the value of change to the group of people resisting it, which is possible through the traceability and history of your system.

PSA System Maintenance

System maintenance involves cleaning up the system to make it more efficient and optimized for its functionality. The value of system maintenance must be balanced. It has tremendous time and cost-saving advantages. Having a well-maintained system takes work. But there are a few auditing practices you can take to help keep data clean and consistent.

• Users: Identifying and freeing up users that no longer require a license to your PSA tool. The more such users you can deactivate, the more cost-saving benefits you have since you won’t have to keep spending on unused licenses.
• Reports: cleaning “dead” reports, those that are no longer valid or relevant. Dead reports are like unwanted noise to the system and can slow the system. So, removing these reports can improve system performance and save time.  
• Custom fields: customizing OpenAir to meet your specific needs is highly advised. But, if some of these custom and standard fields remain unused over time, they can cause frustrations and confusion for users. So, these fields should be retired.
• Values: your system may also have values that are not useful or are duplicated with similar values. So, reviewing your solution and identifying what values are crucial and which ones need to be deleted is essential.

Getting Started

You are the auditor of your PSA tool. Data audits can benefit you greatly. Here are three easy steps to get started:

• Know how your PSA capabilities can be applied to audit trails. 
• Ensure your audit trails provide answers to questions like what changed? When was it changed or created? Who did it? 
• Determine the traceability provided by your PSA and analyze how it helps you determine WHY regarding the quality of data.

OpenAir is designed to help you run your business as efficiently as possible. It achieves this by leveraging data managed within to help you make informed and profitable decisions. However, just like any other PSA tool, what you put into OpenAir is what you get out of it, and quality data does not happen by accident. It is advisable to review and audit your data to ensure it is clean, complete, and reliable to support critical business decisions. The data auditing best practices outlined in this article are an excellent place to start ensuring you’re working with high-quality data in OpenAir.

Please let us know if you have any more questions about OpenAir data audits or any other topic related to OpenAir. Our team is committed and looking forward to helping you get the most out of the OpenAir solution to grow your business.