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.

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

Obviously, you hire people to do your accounting, but it always helps to know a bit of financial matters yourself, if only to have intelligent conversations with the financial folks. For the month of April, we’re running a series of blog posts through which we’ll give you a rundown on some fundamental financial issues. In a perfect world, this would be a lot of Captain Obvious stuff. But if it were obvious, businesses wouldn’t struggle so much with financial matters.

We’re going to start with the most important one — MSP cash flow. If the cash isn’t flowing, that’s when solvency issues start to rear their heads, which also happens to be the cause of a significant percentage of small business failures. That’s why attention to cash flow is, to say the least, mission-critical. Without cash, you can’t pay your staff or your bills, so watch your cash at all times.

Forecast Cash Flow

If you have no way of knowing how your cash is flowing, you’re screwed. Cash flow forecasts give you a picture of what’s coming in and when. Understanding your inflows makes it easier to time your outflows. This is why the break-fix business evolved into managed services; with the latter, it’s a lot easier to know what your future inflows look like, which puts you in a position to plan better. Make sure your MSP cash flow forecasts are up to date. That also means that if your projections are off, you need to find out why. Have you overestimated how much revenue you’ll get from a service type or a client?

Pro Tip: Account for bad debts. Don’t assume every customer will pay you on time, every time. Use past data to estimate how much to set aside for bad debts and account for that in advance.

Managing Cash Flow

Let’s say you’ve identified that your flow could be flowing a little better. Maybe your biggest customer just went under and your forecast flipped from black to red. How do you deal with this?

Tighten Receivables

Extending credit to clients is pretty standard in a lot of lines of work. But you’re not a bank, so don’t get carried away with letting receivables slide. If you’re not getting paid upfront, keep an eye and make sure that receivables aren’t stretching out too far. You don’t have to be a jerk about it since the pandemic made it clear that sometimes your customers get smacked with unforeseen issues. But be wary of customers who should be paying but aren’t. That could indicate that they’re in trouble and you definitely want to tighten up on those clients, lest they default on you.

Stretch Payables

This is the reverse, and yes, it signals to your vendors that you’re having some issues of your own. This tactic makes the most sense when it’s a one-off, unusual scenario. For example, maybe you had to settle a lawsuit that left you a bit strapped this month, but your operating budget hasn’t actually changed, so you’ll be back to normal next month.

Increase Sales Without Increasing Your Costs

I mean, who wouldn’t do this? However, the point is to look for other ways to increase revenue that usually tend to be overlooked. Ensure your billing is aligned with service delivery; often, items get out of whack, especially if your clients are growing. Sell as many of your services to your clients as possible. Maybe they’ve changed their tune about cyber insurance or disaster recovery since the last time you talked. Leave no stone unturned.

Increase Efficiency

Shameless IT Glue plug? Sure, but there are other ways to increase efficiency as well. We just know that our partners get efficiency gains from standardizing their processes and cutting out space between the knowledge their techs need and the tools that hold that knowledge. Increasing efficiency can help you grow your business without increasing expenses.

Know Your Sources of Financing

Growth can be a massive cash flow sink, especially if you invest in growth first and don’t see a return very quickly. While this is a bigger issue in industries that are more capital intensive than managed services, it still pays to be aware of your options for aligning the costs of expansion with the benefits of it. This is one area where financial accounting and cash flow accounting can yield completely different perspectives on your finances – spending big on items you amortize doesn’t brutalize your income statement. However, if it puts you in a bad spot in terms of cash flow, you can still get into trouble. Align your outflows and inflows.

The main thing to remember about cash flow management is this: If you think about MSP cash flow proactively, you should be fine. If you think about cash flow retroactively, after you notice you’ve got a problem, you have much less flexibility to fix things.

Want to learn more about MSP finance? Sign-up for our upcoming finance-focused webinar featuring Peter Melby, CEO of Greystone Technology, a globally recognized MSP, as he reveals how MSPs can reinvest and make money at the same time.

Sign me up for the webinar!

The post MSP Finance: Mastering Cash Flow appeared first on IT Glue.

The Basics

Activity-based costing seeks to determine the true cost of doing something. If you’re looking at this at a client level, which is a good idea for an MSP, you’re determining the cost of servicing that client. The obvious benefit is that you can align what you charge a client a lot more closely with what it costs to service a client.

Let’s say you have two clients and you charge each of them the same $150/seat, and they each have 20 seats. That means each client is worth $3,000 a month in revenue. Company A is low-maintenance. They use your full stack and hardly ever send in tickets. Your service desk spends 10 hours per month dealing with them and each hour of your service desk costs $75 all in, which means they cost you $750 each month. This is a great client.

Company B is a complete dumpster fire. They have all sorts of old equipment, refuse to adopt half your stack, and because they are all useless with technology, they call in for tickets all the time. Your service desk spends 50 hours per month dealing with them, costing you $3,750 a month.  

Obviously, I’ve made up these numbers just to prove a point, but I think we all accept that some clients cost more to service than others. If you can apply hard numbers to that, you can make a case to them to a) adopt your stack, b) pay more or c) both. It also makes it easier for you to feel good about letting go of a client if you have good numbers and those numbers show that a client is routinely losing you money (or even just coming in below your cost of capital).

Probably the most difficult thing about this concept is getting the data. Pay attention to whether or not the tools in your stack are delivering the data that you need to have accurate costing information, and then make the best decisions on pricing.

Want to learn more about MSP finance? Sign-up for our upcoming finance-focused webinar featuring Peter Melby, CEO of Greystone Technology, a globally recognized MSP, as he reveals how MSPs can reinvest and make money at the same time.

Sign me up for the webinar!

The post MSP Finance: Activity-Based Costing 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.

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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.

Negotiation Mode: Restructure the Contract

Contract re-negotiations happen all the time, especially where outstanding debt is concerned. If your client cannot pay for the services in the contract, then you may need to have a conversation about what services they can pay for. Separate their musts from their wants. They must have secure environments at all times. They want new hardware, or rapid ticket response. It’s better to renegotiate a deal and get something, while maintaining the positive relationship, than it is to get nothing.

Cost-Cutting Mode: Reduce Expenses

A lot of companies are getting into the cost-cutting game. Putting people on furlough or laying them off is one of the absolute worst parts of running a business. Most people hate firing toxic incompetents much less laying off actual awesome people. If your financial projections allow you to cut costs elsewhere, do it. You’re not in an office, so don’t keep the lights on. Reduce salaries if you need to. Look for efficiency all around your business – is the total cost of ownership for your tech stack giving you the ROI you need? Deep integrations, killer documentation and automated everything make you more efficient. The total cost of ownership is what matters – not the sticker price. Sticker price is a trap; smart business owners know better than to be suckered into buying bargain basement crap.

Shutdown Mode: Disconnect Everything

Pay to play makes some intuitive sense. If they can’t pay for your services, don’t provide any. This is what you’d do if it was business as usual. In business unusual, however, I recommend you play the long game. What business are they in? How healthy was that business before COVID? By all means, shed some deadweight customers, that’s always a healthy thing to do, but if you’ve got a good client that you think will be able to get back up and running when all this is over, it’s probably better to go into negotiation mode.

Jerk Mode: Increasing Collections Aggressiveness

When it’s business as usual, increasing pressure on your outstanding clients is a common tactic for managing A/R. But this is business unusual. In business unusual, you’re not going to get blood out of stone by smashing it harder with your hammer. Someone who isn’t paying, but always did before, it’s because they can’t. So if you increase pressure, you’ll just come across like an insensitive jerk, and ultimately you’ll probably do more harm than good. Don’t be a jerk.

Lifesaver Mode: Take Advantage of Your Options

In most countries, there are a number of programs available to employers to help them cope with the struggles they are facing. The Kaseya Cares program helps our partners to navigate the myriad programs available to them. Use every dollar you’re eligible for in order to help you get through this. These programs have been developed specifically to help businesses like yours.

When receivables increase like they are for most of you, it can feel like your cash conversion cycle extends out beyond the end of time. Look for ways to find new revenue. Look for ways to improve the efficiency of your tech stack – not the cost – the efficiency. And for goodness sake, not every client that owes you is the same. Talk to them – this is a time when you need to engage in an honest dialogue rather than wasting time trying to collect from people who don’t have any money.

At IT Glue, efficiency is what we do. All that stuff about saving time, automation, and deep integrations – that’s our jam. Take a look at how we can help you manage your financial picture, starting now.

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The post Do More With Less: How to Handle Rising Receivables appeared first on IT Glue.

Strategic Network Planning

Network Glue allows you to identify opportunities for change, especially in terms of network hardware. These changes are often revenue opportunities for you, but they can also be compelling improvements for the customer because they represent investments that support internal teams, and mitigate future expenses due to equipment failure. The network diagrams that come with Network Glue can be used to concretely demonstrate to your clients specific areas for improvement. Having this piece of tangible evidence that shows the client how one out-of-date piece of hardware can affect the performance of an entire location or pod can increase your sales both during the onboarding process and as part of ongoing quarterly business reviews.

Showcase Expertise

A lot of IT service providers have clients that haven’t yet been converted to recurring revenue. Whether legacy clients or new ones, clients on break-fix or piecemeal plans aren’t as lucrative as those on managed services plans. Furthermore, it takes more effort on your part to offer a larger range of services. While there are many potential barriers to converting clients to managed services, if you can show the value in taking a proactive approach, you should be able to build more trust with your clients. Network Glue doesn’t just give you expertise over your clients’ networks, but allows you to showcase that expertise as well. It can be an effective tool for your account management team to showcase expertise and convert more of those legacy, piecemeal clients into steady, recurring revenue clients.

Free Up Resources

We always recommend that a standardized stack is the ideal. Not that getting there 100% is ever really going to happen but it should be something you are constantly moving towards. Network Glue helps you move towards that. As your clients all get on the same page, and shift towards proactively addressing issues to reduce dependence on reactionary fixes at the service desk level, you’ll find that you have more resources – especially time – to dedicate to things like sharpening up your lead gen or sales pitches. Whether it’s spending more money on your sales team, or spending more time building out your marketing, migrating towards a standardized stack helps you refocus resources towards revenue-generating activities. The visibility afforded by Network Glue helps you get there.

While on the surface of things, Network Glue is mostly about saving time and improving profitability that way, it’s worth thinking about how you can take the information that Network Glue gives you and use it to increase sales, because those opportunities are certainly out there for the majority of MSPs.

To see for yourself how Network Glue works its magic, sign up for a free trial today.

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Network Glue gives you automated discovery, documentation and diagramming of all network devices, regardless of vendor. Document all clients for one low, flat fee.

The post How Network Glue Helps Your Revenue Picture appeared first on IT Glue.

Choosing the right pricing model

Break-fix businesses tend to rely on an activity-based revenue model. Your clients come to you with a problem, and they’re charged based on that circumstance. As an MSP, you’re likely going to shift towards focusing on your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and thus be charging on a monthly basis.

The key to remember here is that you’re no longer simply stepping in when it’s time to solve your clients’ problems (though your job will still involve some element of that). Rather, you’re preventing problems from happening in the first place. The service you’re providing is uptime, and for that, you’re able to create a more stable flow of revenue.

The further you get into what kinds of services you’re going to offer, the more your pricing model is going to develop. For example, you might offer an a la carte model, where different services are individually priced, or where some are bundled. On the other hand, you might focus on price per user, rather than per service, where every user receives the same service for the same price. There’s a wide variety of opportunities to hash out here, and they’re not going to come together overnight. Take your time looking into what models are best for your clients and for you.

Mastering your service level agreements (SLAs)

Transitioning from a reactive service model to a proactive one completely alters how your business operates. Your SLAs are an integral part of establishing what your clients can expect from you. They include items such as uptime, how many tickets you might solve per day, or ticket response time. Making these agreements is what holds you accountable for your services. Plus, when you’re achieving great SLAs, your clients are going to notice, and not only is that going to solidify your relationship with them but it might also draw in new business.

Keeping up with quarterly business reviews (QBRs)

If you think QBRs are a hassle, think again. They’re an opportunity. QBRs offer you the chance to sit down with your clients and discuss what’s working and what isn’t – your success, and how to combat your failures. Be wary of treating it anything like a PowerPoint presentation. Instead, treat it as an opportunity for you to extract value and deepen your relationship with your clients.

When preparing for the QBR, and yes, you should be preparing, avoid making the discussion entirely on your success story. It’ll come across as a sales pitch, and won’t bring you anywhere near the kind of value you’re looking for. On the other hand, when you go into it prepared to listen and respond to your customers’ needs, you’ll be in a better position to help them grow, and in turn, help your overall business grow.

Focusing on process

Process, and more specifically, documenting your processes, is how you meet your SLAs, and it’s how you deliver an exceptional quarterly business review. When you’ve got concrete processes in place and documented in one central, secure, and accessible location, your entire team is in a better position to boost your operations. Not only can you develop reasonable SLAs that you actually meet, but you can show (rather than simply tell) your clients how you’re going to hold up your end of the bargain, or better yet, how you’re going to go above and beyond.

When considering how you’re going to tackle your pricing and your operations, don’t underestimate the value that documentation holds. In fact, it’s the one tool you can count on that’s going to assist you every step of the way as you transition from the break-fix business model to building an exceptional MSP.

Interested in learning what IT Glue can do to increase efficiency and fuel growth in your MSP? Sign up for a demo below or get in touch with your Account Manager.

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IT Glue is a proven, best practices-driven IT documentation platform packed with features designed to help you maximize the efficiency, transparency and consistency of your team. With so much of your business productivity lost each day in search of vital information, let IT Glue secure this information and start Freeing Minds.

The post Transitioning from Break-Fix to Managed Services Part 3: Pricing & Operations appeared first on IT Glue.

Don’t worry. You’re not alone. The documentation of processes often turns out to be the biggest hurdle for any business that grows quickly.

The best solution: Approach every procedure as a job aid.

To elaborate, designing your procedures as job aids means providing just the right amount of task guidance and support to users so that they can complete the job!

We recommend following this simple approach when reviewing process:

1. Focus on workflow, context, and job role

It is important to focus on the job role NOT the systems.

• Visualize who is doing the work and how content should be structured to help them get the job done.
• If the reader has a technical background, you can omit some of the details that they already know (e.g. how to ping an IP address).
• Focus attention on the overall process and any “gotchas” they might encounter along the way.

2. Use lots of examples

Examples are an important part of this approach. They will be the parts that the reader remembers most.

• The examples have to be relevant. If they aren’t relevant, the reader will have to exert extra mental effort to relate them to the procedure.
• Make your examples as visual as possible, through the use of screenshots and other visual aids. Screenshots make writing a little easier. You don’t have to document every screen detail and mouse click if your screenshots provide enough context.

3. Make it easily accessible

If the document is too hard to find, it probably won’t be used. Make sure that it can be easily accessed.

4. Use a visual mapping approach

Often using visual process mapping can help identify what parts of a procedure are not working.

This is an example of how the IT Glue team has used visual diagrams for its Blueprints

1. Start by bringing the process into a visual format to show who does what and in what order.
2. Think about each step. Make sure that “step 1” really is the first step, if there are presteps that are not completely obvious you need to include them so that following the instructions will go as expected. You shouldn’t get to step 4 and see an error message because they forgot to open a port on a firewall.
3. Don’t get too detailed. The idea is to visualize the steps and then expand on these details in a written procedure once you know how it all works together as one end-to-end process.

Processes are meant to be high level. Our best advice for creating them is to think about how you would explain the end-to-end process to a customer. Taking the customer’s perspective also gives you the opportunity to think about how well the process is working for the customer and make changes.

The post Fixing a Broken Procedure appeared first on IT Glue.