Professional services automation solutions provider Certinia on Tuesday announced the launch of Services Forecasting, which the company says unifies cost and revenue data on a single platform so services organizations can move away from reactive reporting and toward real-time margin management.
In a blog post on April 21, Jessica Treadwell, director of product strategy at Certinia, wrote:
Historically, services forecasting in PSA [professional services automation] has been limited to high-level revenue summaries. Teams often had to take data off-platform to add cost information for a true forecast. Our new solution brings cost and revenue data together at the project level.
By pulling granular data from assignments, resource requests, milestones, and expenses, you gain a unified view of your project-level margins. This moves your team from looking at what happened last month to managing profitability in real time.
A tighter forecast does more than improve a number on a dashboard. When you can see margin clearly and continuously, the decisions that flow from it get sharper across the board. You scrutinize expenses with the full cost picture in front of you. You catch a margin variance on a single project before it quietly drags down the practice. And when a client asks for a change, you negotiate from a position of clarity rather than estimation. Real-time margin visibility turns forecasting from a reporting exercise into an active management tool.
She says Certinia built Services Forecasting on a new, scalable architecture designed to handle high volumes for its largest customers. Using Salesforce CRM Analytics, teams can analyze and adjust forecasts across multiple dimensions:
- For services leaders: Analyze forecast across several dimensions, including region, practice, and group. Leaders can use detailed revenue, profit, and growth forecasts to make additional adjustments for information not yet captured at the project level (e.g., a potential customer dispute) by creating best-case/worst-case scenarios to more accurately represent the forecast.
- For project managers: They can embed forecasts directly on project records, allowing them to add adjustments or unsigned change requests before they even hit the system. Comments can be made in any cell, and each cell has history tracking. This allows project managers to provide any insights regarding changes in the context of the forecast for collaboration with leadership.
Certinia designed Services Forecasting to transform forecasting into a continuous, living process where frequent data refreshes encourage a culture of clean data at the source, Treadwell wrote.
“This collaborative environment eliminates the friction of external status calls and fragmented email chains by moving the conversation directly into the forecast,” she said.
“The integration of Cell-Level Commentary allows project managers and service leaders to maintain a direct dialogue within the forecast itself,” she continued. “When a PM [project manager] makes an adjustment—such as accounting for a delayed milestone or a resource change—they can immediately document the ‘why’ behind the shift. This real-time context is supported by comprehensive Auditability and Cell History, which tracks every change to provide a transparent view of how a forecast evolved over the month. This level of visibility ensures that leaders can identify and resolve variances against the budget before they become major financial losses.”
The launch of Services Forecasting comes on the heels of Certinia’s Veda AI agent suite announcement last week. Services Forecasting provides the clean, unified cost and revenue data that Veda’s financial agents need to deliver trustworthy, autonomous decision-making at every stage of the services lifecycle, the company said.
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More information about Certinia can be found here.
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