One thing I have been repeating for years is that most MSPs use their PSA as a glorified service desk, and then wonder why it never shows them the profitability they were promised. Autotask is more than capable of telling you exactly which clients make you money and which ones bleed you dry — but it only works if you set it up to do so.
And profitability itself is no great mystery. It’s revenue minus cost. That’s it. Everything below is really just about getting accurate revenue and accurate costs flowing through Autotask so the math works out right.
Here are five ways to make that happen.
1. Enter all of your costs and stop billing at zero
This is the number one profitability killer I see. If your engineers, products and services all have a cost of zero, Autotask will report that everything is 100% profitable. This is a great ego boost, but not reality.
The fully burdened internal cost of your engineers needs to be entered into Autotask. The fully burdened rate is their true cost including tax, National Insurance, pension and benefits — not just salary divided by hours. Then put cost prices against your products and services too, and make sure they are regularly updated as they change. Without costs, Autotask’s profitability reports will show you that everything is 100% profitable, when the reality is completely different.
2. Master contracts and exclusions properly
Whenever I talk to MSPs about contracts, most of them glaze over and have no idea how to set them up. Contracts in Autotask underpin everything you do in the system — they are exactly where most of the profitability lives.
The single most useful pattern I ever used in my own MSP: sell a fixed monthly recurring contract that covers remote and phone support, then exclude onsite and after-hours work so it draws down from a block of hours instead. Set that exclusion up properly in the contract and Autotask handles it automatically — onsite time comes off the block, not the all-you-can-eat contract, and when the block’s depleted you sell another.
The beauty of it is you don’t need your engineers removing contracts from tickets or remembering special rules. Set the exclusions up once, correctly, and the system bills the right work the right way every time. Get this right and you stop giving away expensive work for free.
3. Use work types and multipliers to bill premium work correctly
Autotask lets you set work types with multipliers — so weekend, after-hours or emergency work can automatically bill at, say, 1.5 or 2 times your standard role rate. A $65 hourly rate becomes $97.50 at the weekend without anyone having to remember to apply it.
Most MSPs never set these up, and just eat the cost of out-of-hours work at their normal rate — or forget to bill it at all. Configure your work types under Billing Codes, decide which are included in contracts and which are billed separately, and let the system apply the premium for you. It’s effort you spend once for margin you collect forever.
4. Actually bill from Autotask — run Approve and Post properly
Autotask only makes you money if you run the billing process through Autotask (this is called Approve and Post). The Approve and Post stage is split across tabs — Labour, Charges, Recurring Contracts, Milestones, Expenses — and each one has to be run deliberately.
I always recommend that the person who knows the work, such as the service desk manager, should be the person to approve (and post) it — the SDM will check labour, and they can easily spot if the time being billed looks wrong. Autotask deliberately keeps billing manual, which a lot of people don’t like, but personally I think it’s a very good idea, especially with labour, so you (or your SDM) can spot and fix inflated or mis-entered time before it ever reaches an invoice. Approving also recalculates profitability, so the moment you’ve posted, your reports are live and accurate. Sending a wrong invoice costs you far more in queries and delayed payment than the few minutes it takes to check.
5. Report on your best and worst clients every single month
Autotask’s billing dashboards and BI will show you top revenue accounts at a glance, which you would expect any PSA tool to do. But the real gold for me is the reverse view: your least profitable clients, as this shows you which clients are costing you money and — more importantly — why. This is fact-based decision making at its best. Run both, every month, right after you’ve approved billing.
The point isn’t to admire the good numbers; it’s to spot the contract that’s underwater, the client logging the same call every week, or the engineer whose time doesn’t add up — and then actually do something about it. Maybe that’s a price review, maybe it’s an upsell, maybe it’s a difficult conversation. That monthly loop — approve, report, act — is what turns Autotask from a ticketing system into a genuine profitability engine.
In summary
None of these are clever tricks. They’re the fundamentals of a profitable MSP. If you follow the process of these simple steps, you will be well on your way to being a well-oiled profitability machine.
If you know your Autotask setup isn’t showing you this kind of profitability, that’s exactly what we do at Sondela. We’re a bit obsessed with it — so obsessed that I wrote THE book on it.
You can grab your copy here: https://www.psaprofitability.com
Get in touch here and let’s talk: sondelaconsulting.com/contact
Chris Timm is the founder of Sondela Consulting and the author of PSA Profitability. He has worked with MSPs for over 20 years and helped hundreds of companies become more profitable. A former Autotask employee and former MSP owner, Chris knows the PSA world from both sides.
