PSA Software for Small Teams

Professional Services Automation Without the Enterprise Suite

Rize gives a professional services team under 20 people the core of PSA software — staffing capacity, utilization, client workload, and account profitability — from time your team tracks automatically, not hours they type in.

No six-month implementation. No suite of CRM, invoicing, and project management modules you already have. Just the numbers an owner needs to see who’s over capacity, which client is over-burning, and where the margin went.

15–40%

Billable time manual tracking misses

Minutes

To install — not months

Timers to start or timesheets to fill

“The biggest issue with Harvest was designers would forget to track. With Rize, that's solved.”

Ben Jackson

Momentum Studio

THE PROBLEM

Enterprise PSA wasn't built for a 20-person shop

PSA software promises capacity, utilization, and profitability numbers — but the tools that sell it assume a dedicated ops team to run them.

The suite is the product

Enterprise PSA tools bundle CRM, project management, invoicing, and BI into one contract. If your shop already runs ClickUp and QuickBooks, you end up paying for — and administering — the parts you don't need.

Implementations measured in months

A full PSA rollout means scoping calls, data migration, and admin training before the first utilization report. A 20-person firm needs answers this month, not next quarter.

Utilization still runs on timesheets

Every PSA dashboard is only as good as the hours behind it — and those hours are still typed in from memory. Manual tracking misses 15-40% of billable time, so the reports you bought the suite for are wrong from day one.

Priced for enterprise procurement

Suite pricing means a per-seat fee on top of onboarding and minimum contracts sized for 200-person firms. The math doesn't work when the whole company fits in one Slack channel.

THE LEAN STACK

What a sub-20 shop actually needs

PSA, FP&A, and AI-driven BI are three needs, not one product. A small firm covers all three with tools it already has plus one missing dataset: accurate time.

PSA

Rize

Capacity, utilization, client workload, profitability

Rize captures every work session automatically and categorizes it by client, project, and task. The result is the dataset a PSA suite is supposed to produce — real utilization, burn vs. plan, and margin per account — without anyone filling in a timesheet.

See how tracking works

FP&A

Your accounting stack + real labor data

Revenue, payroll, expenses, hiring plans, cash flow

Keep QuickBooks or your spreadsheet for the financial model. The input it's always missing is labor cost per client — hours times cost rate. Rize exports exactly that, so scenario planning runs on actuals instead of guesses.

See profitability reporting

AI / BI

Rize MCP

Natural-language questions over the underlying systems

Connect Rize to Claude or ChatGPT through the Rize MCP server and ask questions in plain English: who was over capacity last week, which retainer is burning fastest, how this month's utilization compares. No BI tool to configure.

See Rize MCP

The PSA core, without the suite

Everything a small firm buys PSA software for is a report over time data. Rize produces that data automatically.

Utilization, measured not remembered

Rize runs in the background on each machine and logs every work session — including the ones people forget to write down. Utilization numbers reflect the actual week, not a Friday reconstruction.

Client workload and burn vs. plan

Set planned hours per retainer or fixed-fee scope, then watch actuals accumulate by person, project, and client. Over-servicing shows up mid-month, while there's still time to reset scope or raise an addendum.

Labor cost and account profitability

Apply cost and bill rates to real hours and see margin per client, per project. The clients that eat the most time stop hiding behind a decent monthly fee.

Capacity for hiring decisions

See who's consistently over-loaded and who has room before you write the next offer. Staffing calls stop depending on who's loudest about being busy.

Want to know what your team’s utilization really is? Try our free Utilization Rate Calculator to benchmark against your manual timesheet numbers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Professional services automation software is a category of business software that models staffing capacity, employee utilization, client workload, labor costs, resource needs, and account profitability for firms that sell time. Enterprise PSA suites like Kantata, Accelo, Scoro, and BigTime also bundle project management, CRM, and invoicing around that core.

Usually not. The need behind PSA — knowing capacity, utilization, and which clients are profitable — is real at any size, but the suites built to deliver it assume an ops team to implement and administer them. A small firm gets the same answers from accurate time data plus the PM and accounting tools it already runs.

Rize covers the reporting core of PSA — utilization, client workload, burn vs. plan, and account profitability — without the bundled CRM, invoicing, and project management modules. It also differs in the underlying data: PSA suites report on manually entered timesheets, while Rize captures time automatically and categorizes it by client and project with AI.

No — and that's the point. Rize does the time and profitability layer a PSA needs accurate data for, then exports that data to whatever invoicing and PM tools you already use. It connects with ClickUp, Linear, and Google Calendar directly, and with most other tools through Zapier or CSV export.

Yes. The Rize MCP server connects your time, project, and profitability data to AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Leadership can ask questions in plain English — which client burned the most hours this month, who's over capacity — without building dashboards or learning a BI tool.

Rize supplies the labor side of the model: actual hours and cost per client, project, and person, exported to your accounting tool or spreadsheet. Revenue, payroll, expenses, and cash flow scenarios stay in your finance stack — they just get labor inputs based on what actually happened.

Minutes to install, days to useful data. Each team member installs the desktop app, clients and projects are set up once (or imported from ClickUp or Asana), and utilization starts populating immediately. After 30 days you have real margin-per-client numbers; after 60 days, enough history to reprice retainers.

Have more questions? Contact us

Resources for Professional Services Teams

SolutionAgency ProfitabilityBurn vs. plan and margin per client for retainer and fixed-fee agencies.See profitability →SolutionCapacity PlanningSee who's overloaded and who has room before the next staffing call.See capacity planning →FeatureRize MCPConnect Rize to Claude or ChatGPT and ask questions about your time data in plain English.Explore Rize MCP →ToolUtilization Rate CalculatorCalculate your team's utilization rate and see how it compares to benchmarks.Try the calculator →

Join hundreds of thousands of people who made Rize a core part of how they work.