How to choose a PSA for a 20 to 100 person consultancy.

Most PSA shortlists start with a feature grid and end with whichever tool had the best demo. For a 20 to 100 person consultancy, a better place to start is the job you actually need the tool to do. Five questions get you most of the way there.

1. What is breaking today?

Be specific. If invoices go out late and wrong, you have a billing problem, and billing-first tools like BigTime are built for exactly that. If partners spend Tuesdays arguing over who is on which engagement, you have a resourcing problem, and Kantata, Cinode and Runn all lead there from different angles. If you sell and deliver lots of smaller projects and want quoting and CRM in the same place, Scoro is shaped for that.

Buy for the pain you have, not the brochure you liked.

2. Do you need to see the past or the future?

Most PSAs report beautifully on last month. Far fewer forecast next quarter's margin, capacity and cash. At 20 to 100 people, the decisions that matter are forward-looking: hire now or in three months, take the fixed-fee job or walk away, which client is about to go red. Ask every vendor to show you next quarter, not last quarter.

3. How heavy an implementation can you absorb?

Enterprise PSAs earn their depth, but implementations take months and need someone to own the change. A mid-size firm without a dedicated operations team usually gets more from a lighter tool used fully than from a deep one used at 30%. Ask for a realistic go-live date from a firm your size, not the best case.

4. How does the price grow as you grow?

Per-seat pricing is the norm. The bill grows with every hire, and it quietly punishes systematising: if your method lets fewer people deliver more, you still pay for everyone who logs in. Model the cost at today's headcount and at the headcount in your three-year plan before you sign. Flat-fee pricing exists, and it changes the maths.

5. Does it only manage the work, or can it help do the work?

Every traditional PSA manages work: who, when, how many hours, what to invoice. None of them produce the deliverable. That used to be a reasonable boundary. With AI, the biggest lever a consultancy has is now the delivery itself: encoding the firm's method so the first draft of a report, plan or design is produced in minutes and senior people spend their time on judgement. If that matters to you, it belongs on the shortlist criteria, not as a later add-on.

That is the gap ConsultancyOS was built for: the operate layer a PSA provides, plus an AI delivery layer that runs on your own IP, at a flat fee per firm.

Where to go next.

If your shortlist is Kantata, BigTime and Scoro, our three-way comparison puts them side by side for a mid-size consultancy. If resourcing is the main pain, see ConsultancyOS vs Cinode. For a broader list, start with the best Kantata alternatives. And if you want a quick read on where your firm is leaking margin before you buy anything, take the free Readiness Score.