Since your documentation in IT Glue is meaningful and includes a variety of different assets, you can leverage it to automate your day-to-day tasks. Purposeful automation that is focused on your core business workflows can save valuable time and boost efficiency. When your billing, ticketing and vCIO solutions work together with IT documentation, you don’t ever have to go back to doing these tasks manually.

In this blog, we’ll explore how IT Glue helps you automate your core business processes.

Automated Billing: BMS

What would you rather spend your time on – stressing about billing for completed services or supporting your clients to bring in more revenue? We’re willing to bet it is the latter. That is exactly what you can achieve with IT Glue’s integration with BMS.

You can leverage the already documented IT Glue Flexible Assets to automate usage-based cloud services billing in BMS. Instead of spending hours each month manually reconciling cloud services provisioned with spreadsheets and then manually updating the recurring service contracts to accurately bill customers, you can leverage the already documented IT Glue Flexible Assets to automate billing.

BMS will automatically pull the IT Glue Flexible Asset quantity directly to the contract you’ve added the service to, and you have the option to change the quantity in IT Glue as needed.

Live Ticketing: BMS and Vorex

With the sheer increase in the complexity and volume of IT tickets, technicians need a simpler way to manage their tickets and support users. Simplifying the ticketing process is a priority for IT Glue, and you can achieve that with Live Ticketing in both BMS and Vorex.

With Live Ticketing, you can now choose to work in either IT Glue or BMS/Vorex based on your preference. Since you are working in a platform you are most familiar with, you can boost your efficiency in ticket resolution. You can create, view, assign, update and close a ticket on both these platforms.

In addition to offering a similar look and feel, both these platforms offer the same in-line editing capabilities and allow technicians to update and log time in accordance with their work practices.

Technicians can also save a lot of time by integrating with BMS or Vorex as all relevant IT Glue information is now auto-suggested to them. As an IT Glue administrator, you can now create workflows that provide relevant context to any BMS or Vorex ticket, so you can easily access suggested related IT Glue documentation for quick reference. This saves you the trouble of manually searching for KB articles or SOPs when working on an IT ticket.

Automated vCIO: myITprocess

With the latest update to the myITprocess integration, you can now automate technology assessment processes with the ability to search and link IT Glue Configurations and Flexible Assets directly in myITprocess and save hours per client.

As a result, you no longer have to deal with copies of data that are already stored in your other tools. Moreover, you don’t have to worry about upkeeping information in several places. This integration will also let you automatically track any changes to your client’s environment and provide you with the ability to easily identify key projects for high revenue opportunities.

Automation is the way forward

The more processes you automate, the fewer resources you waste on repetitive, manual tasks. Documentation is not just about storing and retrieving information. By leveraging IT Glue assets the right way, you can do so much more in terms of automating your business processes and boosting efficiency. The automation of your billing, ticketing and vCIO processes, with the help of IT Glue documentation, stands testament to that.

To learn more about how IT Glue can automate your core business processes, request a demo.

Get your demo today!

Found this article helpful? Share it with your social network using the icons below.

The post Leverage Documentation to Automate Billing, Ticketing and vCIO appeared first on IT Glue.

How do you achieve more precision? Billing by user.

When your business model is based on servicing multiple clients, your billing model should take into account that no two clients are the same. While there are exceptions, a rule of thumb will be that the more end-users there are, the larger and more complex the network will be, and a higher number of service tickets will be received. When you bill by user, you’re charging clients on an apples to apples basis.

As an MSP, you are incentivized to fully understand the client’s business and provide the IT infrastructure to make them succeed, since in doing so, your revenue from the client also increases. An additional benefit is that since you’re looking at clients from a per user basis, it becomes clear which clients are thriving, and which are struggling to remain afloat. For the latter, their struggle will often bleed over to you. They will be investing less into their IT, and demanding more from you to stretch the life of the IT infrastructure that exists.

Billing by user requires a tightly knit tech stack with powerful native integrations. Consider the following:

— Do you have a tool that discovers and documents client networks so there’s no guessing about how many users and devices there are?

— Is there a level of integration between your PSA and documentation tool that unlocks the ability to bill by user in a streamlined fashion?

— Does your user list automatically update line item counts on the customer’s invoice/contract that are charged “per user”?

— Is your user/contact list in sync with the customer’s Identity Management system (Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Azure AD, etc.)?

— Are devices linked to tickets automatically when a customer requests support from a certain device?

— Is information about the customers stack (backup, anti-virus, networks, etc.) updated automatically in the documentation tool?

— Do alerts detected by your RMM tool generate tickets to your PSA?

— Does your ticketing system or RMM tool de-dupe multiple alerts from the same device?

— Is information about the customer, user, and device pertaining to a ticket shown automatically to the technician when they open the ticket?

While not an exhaustive list, these are the questions you need to ask yourself to decide whether you’re set up to bill by user. If this seems like a heavy lift, I have good news: there are three tools that, when put together, make it look easy—IT Glue, Network Glue and BMS.

For more information on IT Glue click the link below for a quick demo. If you’d like more information on how IT Glue, Network Glue, and BMS integration together, a member of the Glue Crew would be happy to go into detail.

Yes, I’d like a demo!

The post Bill By User: Billing Precision appeared first on IT Glue.

Every client has a customer lifetime value (CLV), meaning the professional relationship brings in a certain amount of revenue throughout the duration of the engagement with them. The billing strategy your MSP uses can drastically impact how much revenue a client will represent. It goes without saying that you want a billing strategy that maximizes CLV.

A Bill by User Strategy

Similar to how paying by “seat” or per licence, billing by user permits a bespoke statement of work that is suited to the size of a client. Smaller clients can afford your services, and you can accurately allocate resources based on the number of end-users you service. As the client grows, so do the number of employees, and the size of your contract with them. It’s a win-win situation for both you and the client.

A statement of work often defines ticket response and resolution timeframes, so in order to ensure you have the internal resources to deliver on those terms, you need to know the exact number of users you’re servicing. Billing by user makes this clear, and avoids some common pitfalls of alternative billing strategies.

For example, billing by device tends to establish a mindset that is averse to replacing outdated products or hardware, even when they simply don’t get the job done anymore. As a result, the client is less inclined to add new products that will help the growth of their business, and therefore, grow the revenue that flows into your pocket.

Tiered Billing

Another example can be tiered billing. When using a tiered billing strategy, smaller clients will often have little choice but to go with the lowest and cheapest level of service. Doing so also means they won’t be receiving the level of service that could bolster revenue driving internal processes, helping them grow. This cuts off an opportunity for mutual growth that will benefit your MSP. In addition to this, you also run the risk of the client supplementing any holes in the service level agreement either by themselves or through other services. Doing this undermines your role as the IT expert, and introduces the risk of you being replaced by another IT service provider.

Use a billing method that relies on two things: (1) the honesty of a client who is motivated to minimize expenses, and (2) the ability to have accurate documentation on the client’s IT infrastructure. Without the former, the latter becomes an absolutely imperative.

In our next blog we’ll go into the products and services that provide this, by giving you billing precision.

Download IT Glue’s Secure Documentation Checklist

The post Bill By User: Growing Your Revenue, By Supporting the Growth of Clients appeared first on IT Glue.