NetSuite OpenAir: The PSA Platform for Professional Services

NetSuite OpenAir: what professional services firms actually need from an ERP

Professional services firms — consulting, IT services, marketing agencies, engineering firms, law-adjacent businesses — have a unique operational challenge. Your "inventory" is people's time. Your "manufacturing process" is project delivery. Your "cost of goods sold" is labor and subcontractor expense. Standard ERP modules built for companies that make or distribute physical products don't map well to this reality.

TL;DR: NetSuite OpenAir is a professional services automation (PSA) platform for firms with 30-500+ delivery staff that need skills-based resource management, project accounting, and integrated billing. It goes beyond NetSuite's native project module by adding utilization tracking, capacity planning, and real-time project profitability analysis -- making it the right choice when resource management is a strategic function rather than a spreadsheet exercise.

That's why NetSuite OpenAir exists. It's a professional services automation (PSA) platform that handles the operational side of running a services business: project management, resource planning, time and expense tracking, and project accounting. Combined with NetSuite's financial platform, it gives services firms a complete system for managing both delivery and finances.

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OpenAir vs. NetSuite's native project management

Before diving into OpenAir, it's worth understanding that NetSuite has its own native project management features. Projects module, time tracking, basic resource allocation — these come with certain NetSuite editions and handle simple project scenarios adequately.

The question is where your firm falls on the complexity spectrum. A small consultancy with 10 people running 5-10 active projects at a time? Native projects might work. A 200-person firm managing 50+ concurrent projects with complex resource allocation across skill sets, utilization targets, and multi-phase project structures? That's OpenAir territory.

The dividing line is usually resource management. If you can manage staffing decisions in a spreadsheet or with simple dashboards, native NetSuite is likely sufficient. If resource management is a strategic function — with dedicated resource managers, utilization targets, skill-based matching, and capacity planning — OpenAir provides the depth you need.

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Project management in OpenAir

OpenAir approaches projects differently than general-purpose project management tools like Asana, Monday, or MS Project. Those tools manage tasks and timelines. OpenAir manages projects as financial entities — every project has a budget, a margin target, billing terms, and a relationship to your firm's revenue and profitability.

Project structures can be as simple or complex as your delivery model requires. A fixed-fee website redesign might be a single project with three phases: discovery, design, development. A multi-year IT outsourcing engagement might be a program with dozens of sub-projects, each with its own budget, timeline, and billing arrangement.

Within each project, you define tasks, assign resources, set budgets, and track progress. Actual time and expenses post against the project in real-time, so project managers can see where they stand financially at any point — not just whether milestones are hit, but whether the project is on budget.

Revenue recognition ties directly to project progress. For time-and-materials projects, revenue recognizes as time is logged. For fixed-fee projects, revenue can recognize based on percentage of completion, milestones, or other methods that align with ASC 606 and your firm's accounting policies.

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Resource management

Resource management is where OpenAir earns its keep. For any services firm over about 30 people, getting the right people on the right projects at the right time is the single biggest driver of profitability. Under-utilize your consultants, and you're paying people to sit on the bench. Over-allocate them, and quality suffers and people burn out.

OpenAir's resource management starts with skills-based matching. Each resource has a profile: skills, certifications, location, cost rate, bill rate, and availability. When a project needs a senior Java developer in New York starting next month, you can search the resource pool and find matches instantly.

The resource planning view shows utilization forecasts across your entire team. You can see who's allocated at 120% (red flag), who's at 40% (bench risk), and who has capacity for new projects. This view, updated in real-time as projects change, is the information resource managers need to make good staffing decisions.

Requested vs. allocated vs. actual tracking gives visibility into the full resource lifecycle. A project manager requests resources with specific skills. The resource manager reviews availability and allocates people. Actual hours log against the allocation. Variances between planned and actual surface early, allowing adjustments before they impact the budget.

For firms with multiple offices or geographic markets, OpenAir handles cross-office resource sharing with transfer pricing considerations. A consultant from your Chicago office working on a New York client project can have different bill rates and cost allocations than a local resource.

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Time and expense tracking

Time tracking in a PSA context is fundamentally different from "clocking in." Every hour your team logs needs to associate with a client, a project, a task, and a billing classification. It's the raw data that drives billing, revenue recognition, utilization reporting, and project accounting.

OpenAir's timesheet captures all of this in a weekly view that most consultants find manageable. Non-billable categories are configurable — PTO, internal meetings, training, business development — so your utilization metrics accurately reflect available billable time versus administrative overhead.

The approval workflow for timesheets routes through project managers, who verify the hours against their project budget, and then to finance, who confirms the billing implications. Rejected entries go back to the employee with notes. Approved entries flow into the billing and revenue pipeline.

Expense tracking follows a similar pattern. Consultants submit expenses with receipts, tagged to clients and projects. Approval workflows route through the appropriate managers. Approved expenses either bill to the client (per the engagement terms) or absorb as internal cost. The data flows to NetSuite for AP processing and reimbursement.

Mobile time and expense entry is available and matters for firms with field-based consultants. Logging time and snapping receipt photos from a phone is significantly more likely to produce timely, accurate data than asking people to remember their hours at the end of the week.

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Project accounting and billing

The connection between OpenAir's project operations and NetSuite's financial platform is where the combined system really shines. Project data in OpenAir — hours worked, expenses incurred, milestones achieved — feeds directly into NetSuite's billing and accounting processes.

For time-and-materials billing, approved timesheets generate invoice lines based on the resource's bill rate and the project's billing terms. The invoice creates in NetSuite, posts to accounts receivable, and recognizes revenue simultaneously. No spreadsheet intermediary, no manual invoice creation.

For fixed-fee projects, billing milestones defined in OpenAir trigger invoice generation in NetSuite when marked complete. Revenue recognition follows the method configured for the project — typically percentage of completion based on hours-to-budget ratio, or milestone-based for phased deliverables.

Mixed billing arrangements — a fixed-fee for deliverables with time-and-materials for change orders — are handled through separate billing rules within the same project. This is common in IT services and consulting, and getting the billing configuration right during implementation saves significant manual effort.

Project profitability reporting pulls together revenue (from billing), direct costs (labor at cost rates plus expenses), and overhead allocations to produce margin analysis by project, client, practice area, and engagement manager. This is the data services firms need to understand which work is profitable and which isn't — and to adjust pricing, staffing, and sales targeting accordingly.

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Utilization and performance metrics

Services firms live and die by a few key metrics, and OpenAir produces all of them.

Utilization rate is the headline number — what percentage of available time is billable. Most firms target 65-80% for delivery staff, with the range depending on seniority (senior people typically have lower utilization due to business development and management responsibilities) and firm type (body shops target higher; advisory firms tolerate lower).

Realization rate measures what you actually bill versus what you could bill at standard rates. If your consultants log 1,000 hours at $200/hour but you bill $180,000, your realization is 90%. Discounting, write-offs, and scope changes all reduce realization.

Project margin tracks profitability at the engagement level. Revenue minus direct labor cost minus direct expenses divided by revenue. This metric, more than any other, tells you which clients and project types are worth pursuing.

Backlog shows the value of signed-but-not-yet-started or in-progress work. Combined with pipeline data from CRM, backlog is what you use to forecast revenue and plan hiring.

OpenAir dashboards display all of these in real-time, with drill-through to underlying project and resource data. The CFO sees firm-wide margins. Practice leaders see their team's utilization. Resource managers see capacity and allocation. Project managers see their project health.

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Who should consider OpenAir

OpenAir makes sense for professional services firms that have outgrown spreadsheet-based project management and basic time tracking. The typical profile is a firm with 30-500+ delivery staff, meaningful project complexity, and a need for integrated project accounting.

If you're already on NetSuite for financials and running a services business, OpenAir is the natural extension. The alternative — using a separate PSA tool like Mavenlink, Kantata, or Replicon and integrating with NetSuite — works but adds the same integration complexity that running separate billing and ERP systems creates.

For smaller firms (under 30 people), evaluate whether NetSuite's native project features cover your needs before investing in OpenAir. The additional cost and implementation effort may not be justified if your resource management and project accounting requirements are straightforward.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is NetSuite OpenAir used for?expand_more

What is the difference between NetSuite OpenAir and NetSuite Projects?expand_more

How much does NetSuite OpenAir cost?expand_more

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