[51] – New Features In Autotask

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rae-Ann Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rae-Ann Buccianico. Hey, Rae-Ann, how are you doing?

I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. Lovely warm day here over in the UK, despite it being autumn or fall, whatever you guys call it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think we use those words synonymously. Yeah, exactly. So it's a nice warm day. How about over there with you? Equally warm, and this time sunny.

So life is good here in Florida in the United States for the moment. We still have that whole pandemic thing running around, but hopefully, fingers crossed, that we're going to come on the other side of that here soon. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're pretty much come out of the other end of that. Things seem to be relatively back to normal, besides us having a shortage of some stuff in supermarkets still, but it's got a lot better than it was 18 months ago.

So what are we going to talk about today, Rae-Ann? Well, I've been stumbling upon some new features in Autotask, and I thought that what we could do is just talk about some of the interesting new features that maybe haven't gotten a whole lot of press in Autotask. There was a release, the 21.2 release, and there's a couple of neat little things in there, and I thought that you might like to talk about some of them. You thought that I might like to talk about my favorite things, right? I think all our listeners by now will know that all of this stuff is absolutely the favorite thing I love talking about.

So are new features really your favorite thing? Everything's my favorite thing about the PSA tool, right? But actually, one of the features I did want to talk about is something that I think is really good, and I think is really going to change the way that MSPs log time and add time to the system. So I'll make a start on that, and that's really what Autotask is calling the quick time. So for example, before, if you've needed to add time to a ticket, you've always had to use a time entry, right?

And so you've had to go in, you've had to add the time entry, you've had to click a start and end time, or let the timer run, and then you've had the timer automatically bring that time in. It can be quite long-winded to enter a time entry within Autotask. So as of the 2021.2 release, there's actually a brand new feature that's just come out, which is called quick time. So now you can just add a note, just a normal, ordinary note to the ticket, and you can go ahead and actually add some time to it. So when you click on the little box that says time, it pops up a little graph that allows you to use 15 minutes or 25 minutes or half an hour or an hour, whatever it is.

So there's no time entry as there is with the normal time entry, or there's no clock that ticks. It's just a, I did this task for 15 minutes or something to that effect. I wonder, will that show up on the timesheet? I mean, could that possibly replace a ticket time entry? Yes to both.

So yes, it does show up on the time entry. It also allows you to, so it takes into account the burden costs at that point as well. So any reporting that you're doing from a profitability perspective, that's been taken into account at that point. And yes, it shows up on the time entry, on the timesheets even. And whether it will replace the actual time entry, I don't know.

Obviously using an actual time entry within Autotask, you've got the timer. You've also got the start and end time and date, so you can adjust it like that. This doesn't give you that ability right now. It's simply just a box that you click on and select whether you did 15 minutes or 25 minutes. You can't say I started at this time and ended at this time like you can on a time entry.

Right, because it's just a note. So you're opening up the ticket and you're just typing a note right on the wall of the ticket. And then you're saying, okay, so this took me 30 minutes to do what I did and to update the notes on the ticket, right? Yeah, exactly. So whether it will replace it or not, I don't know.

But if Autotask is going down this route, I can't see them kind of having two separate systems. I think eventually it'll probably just, I mean, it would make a lot of sense for it just to become the same thing. And I've always been a big fan of that is kind of saying, well, I've never really understood why we needed to have a time entry and a note. Because when you add a time entry, you're kind of typing a note in as well. And you would always want to really be capturing your time against the ticket.

So now you can do that. But I think that there's at some point, I'm sure it's just going to become one and the same. So there won't be notes and time entries. It'll just be a time entry. I can already think about 500 different ways that I might take advantage of this thing, right?

Because how many times do you start working on something and you forget to open up the ticket? And then before you know it, and then this task turns into another task and then turns into another task. Before you know it, the day is over and you have zero entries on your time sheet. And you also have zero notes on your client's tickets. And I'm the worst offender of this in my company.

Don't tell anybody, right? Because everybody else in my company is required to keep impeccable time sheets and time on tickets. And I pretend that I do, but I often fail that effort. I'm just emailing team at ABC right now, just to tell them. No, but I could totally see how I could open up a ticket.

Because when I'm doing stuff, I put everything in my OneNote. I could just simply grab my notes from OneNote, throw it into the note and then put in how much time I spent on it. And I don't think that it's going to replace the time entry with the start and stop times because there's a lot of really good reasons to keep those. But I think you touched on it when you said when you're entering notes, you still want to capture the amount of time it took for you to do what you did in order to make a note. And it's also going to be helpful in the CRM package too, in the CRM keys, when you're putting notes on an opportunity and you can get your salespeople to start entering their time there without forcing them to open a ticket, create a ticket, enter their time into a ticket.

Salespeople are historically not fond of time tracking. But if you can get them to estimate their time that they've spent following up with a prospect or working an opportunity or writing a quote or something like that, I think you might even get some better usage reports. Yeah. So at the moment, it's only on tickets. It's not on opportunities or CRM or anything like that.

But again, I'm sure it's only a matter of time until that becomes something more. And equally, you know, the thing that I really like about it is, I think, as you say, I mean, there's so many people that actually just use the notes anyway. And, you know, I've been banging the drum for many years about don't use notes on the ticket, use a time entry because you need to capture your time. And this is almost kind of a way of saying, well, actually, it's OK now to just add them as a note, because you can add the notes, just click how long you've taken to type in that note and you're good to go. The other thing is actually just as we've been talking, I've just been thinking I'm going to have to now update my book because in my book, I talked about don't use notes, use time entries.

And now you kind of can use the notes in all the tasks. So a good opportunity for me to update my book at this point. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with creating a version 2, you know, PSA profitability 2.0, you know, or whatever. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. So that's a great feature. And I think it's something that is absolutely going to change the way that MSPs work, the way that you and I work, I think, because as you type in your notes, like you say, with one note, plug them in, say how long it's taken you and you're good to go. The only caveat with it, just if somebody does try and click on it, you will only have that little time entry button being displayed if you are the primary resource or a resource on the ticket. If the ticket is not assigned to anyone, you can't use that quick notes.

Interesting, though. I wonder if it will carry over to a proven post too, or does it automatically post, you know? So, you know, this is one of those things. And hey, Dato, by the way, get on that CRM opportunity thing, because I think it would really, really help a lot of salespeople. So to answer that question is it does, it does go through to a proven post.

So it acts in the same way as any other time entry is adding time, using an actual time entry on the tickets. You're just doing it as a quick note, but goes through to a proven post. It posts against the contract. It does all of those kinds of things. So and you're right, I think hopefully somebody at Dato is listening that can make some changes or have some impact.

Yeah, start doing that on opportunities because I think that'd be a great way for sales guys to actually log their time as well. All right. Here's the next one that, you know, when we were looking through the list of all of the updates and new features that jumped out at us, the client portal single sign-on. So that, correct me if I'm wrong, that means that your clients can now sign into the client portal using their Google or Microsoft login. So the single sign-on feature is starting to branch out a little bit more throughout the Dato product.

Have you seen many people use that yet? Are you using it? No and no. So I've not seen that many people use it. I don't think that many people know about it and no, I'm not using it with any of my clients, but I'm really glad that Autotask has kind of brought that out because I think, you know, as you know, from speaking to many MSPs and consulting on Autotask yourself, very few people actually use the portal.

And one of the main reasons for that, why very few people actually use it is because, you know, it's a pain in the butt for your clients to have to log in to remember yet another password. Clients don't want to go to a web page and then have to log in and it's just too much like hard work. This way, what you can now do is you can actually get them to just use their Microsoft or Google credentials to log in so that once they've logged in the first time, that's it. They're in and when they change their Microsoft password or Google password, it's automatically going to change the password for them to log in as well. So I think that's going to be a really good reason to get your customers to actually start using the portal now.

That's a good idea. You know, I do have quite a few clients that are using the portal, but are their customers actually logging in to look at tickets and look at their invoices and all of the other things that they can do inside the portal? Probably not. But MSPs out there want to offer this as an option and the sign-on has always been, you know, one of the largest complaints. Oh, it's just another portal.

Oh, it's another password. It's another 2FA, right? So they're often looking for some other third party system like Tribu that can take a lot of that effort away and use another tool that people are already using like Teams. So we'll see if it makes a huge difference in the use of Client Portal. I certainly hope it does.

I mean, yeah, I definitely think it's going to, I think it's really going to change the way in which, you know, the uptick on people actually getting their customers to use the portal. And there's no configuration. I mean, I've just, I tried it earlier on before the podcast and it's, you know, it's literally, there's a button that says Google or Microsoft, you click on there, ask you for your credentials, you log in and you're good to go. And it's logged you in. So, yeah, so I think it's a great feature.

I think it's something that people should try. And yeah, again, one of my favorite things that they brought out and I'm really glad that they've actually brought that out in the product now. All right. What else have you got? So the other one that I kind of wanted to talk about was the, in the live reports, they've now brought out a new resource utilization live report, which.

If you don't know that the resource utilization report is literally my favorite report in all of Autotask. So go ahead and tell us, you know, some of the changes that they've made because they're looking to replace the original resource utilization report with this one eventually. But right now, both reports are available and they're both called the same thing. Yeah, exactly. So the resource utilization report that's built into the system that's not inside live reports, you know, there's a few options you can take, you know, and it'll generate you a report.

But one of the things it does is it keeps all of your internal resources in there. So things like your API users, all of those kinds of things actually get reported on inside that current resource utilization report. One of the things that's really nice about the one that's coming in live reports, firstly, it's completely customizable. In the same way as any other thing inside the live reports designer is where you can completely customize and change the information that gets displayed on there. But by default, it also only shows you actual valid named users rather than API users.

The removal of the API users, I think, is huge, you know, because you would always have to click through, just select these people. These are the only people that you want to see. But, you know, now you'll be able to schedule that report. So if you're looking at resource utilization on a weekly or monthly basis, you can schedule the report and have it automatically show up. And if you did it weekly, sure, you would be able to see, you know, how much time and how timely all of your techs or people inside the business are entering their time on tickets and keeping up with their timesheet, as opposed to waiting until the timesheets are finally submitted to review them.

Yeah, absolutely. And the scheduling is a big thing because, as you know, the kind of built-in reports or panned reports, whatever you want to call them, in Autotask are uncustomizable, unschedulable. You display them on the screen and that's it. Whereas this report now has the ability to actually have that scheduled and also can output it into Excel or whatever other format you want. So it just means when you generate this report, you're no longer just having to view it in the way that Autotask says for you to view it, but in any output format that you want.

But also it can just appear in your inbox once a week or once a month, whenever you want that report. Yeah, you can think of all of the different things that you could do. Let's say you had some of your resources separated out by lines of business, you could filter the report just to show each of the lines of business, or you could manually filter the report to only show perhaps people that are in the service department or in the level one or the engineers or projects. There's so many different ways that you'll be able to customize this resource utilization report, and that's going to get you KPIs that you've never been able to get before simply because you were so limited in the filters that you could create on this report. You know, you were literally in there clicking buttons and unchecking boxes to try to get this report to give you the information that you're looking for.

But now you have all the filters that you can stand. And actually, I'm quite glad they kind of built that in as a live report because I've had to actually build that for some of my clients in the past because they wanted that report scheduled. So, you know, I've sat for hours on end recreating that whole, you know, resource utilization report, and now it's there as part of the live reports designer. I can't imagine that would have been an easy report to build from scratch. That probably would have made me run into a corner and cry.

Yeah, it was nuts. I think I ran into the corner and cried after I did it, and it still wasn't 100% accurate, 100% what they wanted, but it gave us the ability to at least report on some of that information. But now it's exactly the same. It's out of the box. So yeah, great report.

Really happy about that. Okay, I've got one more. Okay. Right. So the dashboards, they now have the whole tab grid widget, right?

So you can build your widgets, right? So you can have a tab where you have 10, 15, however many widgets on a particular tab. But let's say you need a widget that's going to be a grid and you need it to be a lot more than just, you know, the four or five lines that you are afforded in your typical widget, right? So let's say you want to see all of the open tickets, you know, that are overdue or something like that. And you don't want to have to click on that widget in order to see the entire report, or they click on see more to see the entire report.

What you can do now is create a new tab, and it has to be a new tab, a new blank tab, and then build your widget. And one of the options now is to create it for the size of the entire tab. So it'll be one big blank screen, you know, with nothing but your table on it. Absolutely. And it's worth noting here, and you mentioned this earlier on, it's only for the grid view widget.

So it won't work at the moment with, you know, any of the pie charts or bar charts or any of those. It's really for that grid view. And, you know, in the past, you'd have that grid view on the dashboard with all your other widgets. But like you say, you could only get two columns or three columns, you know, and you'd have to click the show more button to kind of expand it and open up the data behind it. So now the concept of it is you create a whole brand new tab so that that grid is the only thing that's on the tab.

And then you can take up the whole tab for it. And the other thing that I really like about that, and I was actually showing that to one of my clients the other day, is that you can output in the same way as you can publish any other dashboard that's sitting up on a big screen somewhere. You can kind of have that now published as its own dashboard, you know, with a full grid view of all open tickets or whatever information you want to report on. So again, another great feature. And I think it's something really cool that a lot of MSPs are going to use.

You know, what else you could even do with that is, let's say that there was some report that you want to see on a fairly regular basis, real time, that you could also build a widget for, right? Because widgets are really nothing more than instant real-time reports based on certain information. So if you can build a report that you want to see on, you could have like, I don't know, five or six, 10 tabs, however many tabs you want, be able to click on that widget and through them, if you are the owner or the executive at an MSP, and you want to see the management information, and you want to see this information, you know, all the time without having to click a bunch of buttons, set up these widgets, these whole tab widgets to build the reports and have them at your fingertips at any given moment. Absolutely. No, I mean, I think it's fantastic.

It's really, really good. And I can see a lot of use for it. And I know that a lot of my clients are going to love that. And definitely something I'm going to show them. And actually, one more thing I found, Rae-Ann, which we didn't sort of talk about before the podcast, but I think this is right up your street.

And I think you'll probably be quite happy with this. I can't wait to hear it. As you know, very often with the invoices that come out of Autotask, very often it's off by a penny or somehow it calculates the tax or the VAT or something like that incorrectly. And it ends up being one penny or one cent, whatever it is, short. So what they've now done is they've actually allowed you to now display three decimal places for the tax amounts on the items.

So what this is really saying is, you know, when the taxes are calculated, the value can now have multiple decimal places. So it now calculates it much more accurately than it used to before. And you're not going to kind of lose out on that penny or that cent. Or half a penny or whatever the case is. You know, and that's actually pretty huge because I've done a ton of integration with accounting systems, SAGE accounting systems, Intuit accounting systems, and so on.

And that rounding error causes more grief than you could possibly imagine. So a lot of times the integration is built to ignore rounding errors, because if the invoice total amount doesn't match what the calculated amount is from the accounting system, you get a failure to import the invoice. And when I was doing the SAGE imports, there was no way for me to tell Boomi, which was the third-party integration piece that we used to build it, there was no way for me to tell Boomi to please ignore the rounding errors. So I had to change settings inside Autotask so that it would move it to four places or move it back to two places. I forget which.

It's been so long since I did it. Anyway, so it may sound trivial that, you know, a half a penny is causing so much grief, but you can't even imagine how much time you could spend on a half a penny trying to get it through to your accounting system. So yeah, good job. Yeah, I mean, there's some really, really cool features. So hopefully, it's kind of been useful for everybody to kind of understand what those new features are.

And if anyone wants to know how to find out more about what those new features are in Autotask, all you need to do is click the little question mark at the top next to your picture, right at the very top right-hand corner. And when it brings up the help file search, simply type 2021.2, and that will give you the release notes. And at that point, you'll be able to go in and look through the information on what's been changed. And there's a bunch of other things that are kind of fairly small, but I think we've covered off most of the bulk of it. Well, that was a great conversation.

And I think that there was some really some interesting tips in there for our listeners. So hopefully, our listeners found it interesting and helpful as well. I know I always learn something new whenever we record one of our podcasts. So hopefully, they do too. Anyway, thanks, Chris.

Great conversation today. Yeah, thanks, Randi. I really enjoyed that. And if anyone wants to, you know, reach out to us, you can reach us on all the socials. You know where we are.

And thank you for listening. And all that's left for me to say, Rae-Ann, is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Cheers.

Thanks, Rae-Ann. Cheers. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.