You do not need a PSA and an HRIS

An agency that buys a PSA for client projects and an HRIS for its people pays two subscriptions and owns the sync between them. PeopleMuster keeps both jobs in one database at $3 per person per month. Your approved leave lands in the capacity plan on its own, and logged hours feed utilisation without an export.

Vendor facts read from each vendor's own site in September 2026. Product facts from the PeopleMuster capacity grid, timesheets and project list.

Two products, one team

PSA stands for professional services automation. A PSA plans who works on which of your client projects, logs their hours and reports utilisation. Float, Productive.io and Kantata sell that shape, and Kantata calls itself a professional services automation platform.

An HRIS holds your people: the directory, reporting lines, leave, attendance and policies. BambooHR, Deel, HiBob and Personio sell that shape.

Most of the category splits in two along that line, and you can read it on the vendors' own sites. Productive.io ships time off and capacity, and pulls employee records in from BambooHR, Personio or Rippling. You end up with two vendors and two invoices for one team.

Where the seam costs you

The seam between the two tools is where your work leaks. You approve leave in the HRIS on Monday. Your capacity plan in the PSA still shows that person at full load on Thursday, because nothing carried your approval across.

Hours run the other way. Your team logs time in the PSA, and your HR side never sees it. An attendance record and a timesheet for the same day can disagree, and nobody notices.

You create every joiner twice, and you remove every leaver twice. Miss one and a departed person keeps a seat, a login and a row in your next month's plan.

You can wire the two together, and Productive.io's HR connections exist for exactly that reason. But a sync is a third thing you own, and it only moves the fields somebody mapped.

What one database changes

PeopleMuster keeps the person record and the project record in the same database, so the seam isn't there to leak.

Approve a leave request and your capacity grid marks an L on those days for that person. Company holidays show as H. Your planned hours sit on top of both, in bands that follow your expected working day: under, partial, full and over.

Log a day against a project in the daily recap and your utilisation report picks it up. You get total hours, a utilisation percentage, hours by project and by department, and a week-over-week trend. It posts to Slack on the schedule you set.

One directory feeds everything. A person's reporting line draws your org chart and places them in the right department on every report you open.

The project side stays a real project side

A PSA buyer's worry about an HR tool is that projects come as an afterthought. In PeopleMuster each of your projects carries its client and contact, a billable or non-billable flag, and a fixed-price or hourly flag. It also carries milestones and three scores: health, tasks and setup.

Meetings file themselves. Your recordings and transcripts arrive from Fireflies and attach to the project they belong to. A project with no meeting for longer than the gap you set gets a warning on the list, and the default gap is 14 days.

Boards are per project, with tags, so your delivery team plans in the same place your HR lead reads leave and attendance.

What two subscriptions cost, side by side

Prices are the plainest part of the argument. Productive.io Essential is $10 per user per month billed yearly, and its Professional tier is $25. Float Starter is $7 per scheduled person per month.

On the HR side, BambooHR Core is $10 per employee per month, Deel HR Core starts at $5 and Factorial starts at $8. Each figure was read from the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026.

If you run one product from each column, you pay both, per person, every month, plus the hours it takes to keep them agreeing.

PeopleMuster is $3 per person per month. Every module is included, there's no base fee and no seat minimum, and annual billing is $30 per person per year. You can add that up for your own headcount on one line.

How to test any all-in-one claim

Plenty of vendors say all-in-one. The test is whether one record does both jobs, and you can run it in a demo in ten minutes.

PeopleMuster passes each step because one database sits underneath, and the activity log records the old value and the new value of every field you change.

Approve a leave request, then open the capacity plan. Did the days change without an export?
Log hours against a client project, then open the utilisation report. Is your entry there?
Add a person once, then count how many other screens they appear on.
Remove a leaver, then look for the screens that still show them.
Ask for the audit trail of one leave change. Does it show the value before and after?

Questions people ask

What is PSA software?

Professional services automation: software that plans people onto client projects, logs their hours and reports utilisation. Float, Productive.io and Kantata sell it, and Kantata describes itself as a professional services automation platform.

Does an agency need a PSA as well as an HRIS?

Only when the two jobs live in two products. PeopleMuster holds people and client projects in one database, so approved leave appears on the capacity grid and logged hours feed utilisation, for $3 per person per month with every module included.

Can a PSA connect to an HR system instead?

Yes, and some do. Productive.io lists BambooHR, Personio and Rippling as sources for employee records, per its own site in September 2026. That keeps two subscriptions and a sync between them, so you pay one seat in each tool per person.