BIgTime has announced the launched of a new Premier product. The product is SaaS based and includes the functionality found within the Express and Pro products.
Pricing starts at $27.20 per user per month for a ten-user system and has an onboarding fee of $395.00. There are discount bands that start at 20 users.
Professional Services firms collect data all the time. However, traditionally they have used this to drive their organisation, often using it for historical record keeping and generating invoices, little more. A study that BigTime undertook last year revealed that professional services firms were losing $35 million from poor time tracking. It has decided to help close that gap.
Driven by data
The differential in the new version focuses on the collection and analysis of data. It is intended to help drive better decision making from real-time analytics. Brian Saunders, CEO of Bigtime Software commented: “We accelerated the rollout of our Premier product based on the demand from beta customers who said the platform had an immediate impact on project visibility and profitability, particularly in managing multiple projects and large staffing teams across multiple time zones. Customers view the Premier level offering as a powerful tool to manage their revenue pipeline whether they are billing hourly or fixed fee contracts.”
Users will have access to real time project budget data and staff allocation data without the requirement to run reports. It will allow managers to identify where staff are underutilised or overutilized. The former means lost revenue and the latter can lead to burn out. This is something that even the larger firms are starting to recognise and restrict the hours that employees can do.
Other analytics are available, such as an improved ability to identify project changes and inform clients in real-time. The documents available currently do not hold much further information about the new version unfortunately and there are no new videos on the BigTime Youtube channel.
What else to customer get?
With a price differential of just over $11 between the Pro and Premier versions customers would expect several new features. Several of the benefits listed are less to do with product benefits and more to with customer benefits. The benefits include:
- Resource Allocation (Product)
- Extended support hours (Customer)
- Priority support queue (Customer)
- Service level agreement (SLA) (One assumes this is a customer benefit rather than the inclusion of support for contract management in the product
- Unlimited data retention (Product)
- Unlimited API access (Product)
- Slack integration (Product)
- Service discounts (Customer – available on request but it is unclear what this is)
- Advanced audit tracking (Product- available on request)
- DCAA Compatibility (Product – available on request but does it have an additional cost?)
The precise nature of the advanced audit tracing and DCAA compatibility IS unclear. They may incur an additional charge. There are also no details about what they include. BigTime already has support for DCAA compatibility in the Pro version but is a $5 additional charge. There is no mention of the charge though in the Premier level. For customers who already have this option the incremental price difference might only be $6 therefore.
What does this mean
For BigTime this is a step up as it looks to compete with some of its larger rivals such as Mavenlink. It will help it to retain customers as they grow. It might even help its customers compete with the larger PSA firms. Saunders added: “As firms get bigger – client and projects compete for resources. BigTime’s resource allocation product allows a growing consulting firm to manage that competition so it doesn’t negatively impact revenues.”
What BigTime will need to do is improve the information available about the new version so that customers and potential customers can identify what the actual differences are.
