[48] – Autotask Implementation Series: Projects

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP with your hosts, Rayanne 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, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you doing? I'm very well, thank you. Sun is still shining, so all is good. Can't complain too much.

How's the weather in Florida? Well, it's raining because it's summertime, and that's all it really seems to do here in the summer. Absolutely. It almost seems like we've swapped weather, right? Because you guys normally have constant sunshine, and we normally have constant rain, so.

Right, except for perhaps in the summertime when things are beautiful there, and they are rainy and miserable here. Best of both worlds, right? You can't have everything. But the other nine months of the year, you know, we love it here, just saying. Absolutely, just saying.

So what have we got on the agenda for today, Rayanne? Well, we've been working on this implementation series for a number of months now, and we've taken it from all the way in the beginning, you know, with the back office stuff and everything that you need to do in order to get your Autotask set up. So we're starting to come to the end of this, and I thought today what we could talk about might be project management. What do you think about that? Yay, project management.

Do you know what? Of all the things we've spoken about in this entire series, guess what I'm going to say? It's got to be your favorite topic, right? Absolutely, it's my favorite topic. Okay, so where to even begin about project management?

I'm just going to jump off, right? So project management, one of the things I tell anybody that I'm working with, because if they call and say, we really need help with Autotask, and we want to get this set up, we want to get the contract set up, we want to get the service desk set up and the workflows and the projects, and then we want to do this, and then we want to do that. And I always stop and say, whoa, wait just a minute. Let's get everything else set up, and then we'll come back to projects, because projects is its own animal inside Autotask. And so when you're starting to think about project management and you're working with a company, what do you explain, how do you explain projects inside Autotask to them?

That's a great question. And the way I always answer this is, a project normally is something that requires multiple tasks to do and requires normally multiple resources working on those tasks and working on them at the same time. So, you know, you would set up a phase. So that might be for the implementation or the installation phase of something. And then each of the tasks to actually make up that implementation, each one of those tasks could be done by the same person, but very often it's done by different people.

So yeah, so a project is really, just to answer that question is, it goes over multiple days, normally goes over a certain length of time, multiple days and has multiple people and multiple tasks that are needed to complete that. You know, so that brings up an interesting question because I get this one a lot, right? Often some MSPs will say, you know, we do a lot of projects, you know, or a lot of small projects. And so they feel compelled to use the project module inside Autotask to manage the small projects. And to them, a small project might be installing, you know, one or two workstations.

And my first instinct is to try to talk them out of using the project task, the project module for that size of a project. Like you just said, it's something that's going to be over not just multiple days, but weeks or even months, because that's where you're going to go and schedule out all of the different phases and assign the phases and assign the tasks inside those phases. And to create a brand new project every time you're going to install a workstation, I think would be just a bit of overkill. And I think we should explain why that would be overkill, especially at the billing stage, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely.

And I think just to, you know, reiterate on that, it's if you were doing something like a PC install or even two PCs, you know, typically one person could do that, right? So typically you're going to have one engineer who's going to perform all the tasks to get that workstation installed. So they're going to install the operating system. They're going to install the RMM. It's typically going to be one person, right?

And it's not going to go over multiple days. It's not going to go over, you know, multiple weeks. So you wouldn't really use a project for a workstation installation. However, if you were doing a complete refresh of the entire infrastructure, then you may do that as a project because you're going to have some PC installs, some server installs, if people are still doing server installs these days. But, you know, you're going to have multiple components and you're going to then have multiple people working on that.

And potentially even, you know, multiple people at the same time working on certain things. You may need to engage your, you know, network installation team. And then you may need to engage your kind of first line support team who might install software on those machines. So there's going to be multiple people involved and there's going to be, typically that kind of thing is going to go over multiple days, multiple weeks. And that's where a project's really going to come into it.

Right, so, and then the next thing is, well, how do you invoice your projects? And when you're in the approve and post screen, right, you see all of the different tabs and you will notice that there is not a tab for invoicing projects. And of course the reason for that is is because the project should be attached to a contract of some sort. Generally, you know, when you're thinking about a project, you're thinking about like a fixed price project. Okay, pay us $25,000.

We're going to replace the server. We're going to replace, you know, all of these workstations. We're going to upgrade the firewall, so on and so forth. You've got a whole list of tasks and phases, you know, to roll out a new implementation. So you would use the fixed price contract for that.

But, you know, what would you do, you know, in the case of a project that was, you know, sure, we're going to do all of that work for you, but we're just going to bill you by the hour. How would you set that up? Because I probably would go straight to the time and materials contract, but I don't know that it's necessary. Do you? Great question.

And you're right. And projects typically are going to be billed at a fixed price, right? So like you say, you've got a fixed price contract, which is going to be $25,000. And you're then going to say, you know, that's what we're going to bill you for the entire implementation or the entire installation, whatever you want to call it. And that's $25,000.

So that gets done as a fixed price contract. And there are some clients I talk to from time to time who do things as by the hour or break fix or time and materials, whatever you want to call them. And the time and materials contract is a great thing to use for that. Because that allows you to then say to the customer, you know, if you buy this project from us, or if you let us do this project, you know, we're going to give you a discount on our standard rates, right? And that's really where your time and materials contract is going to come in.

If your standard rate is normally 150 bucks an hour, you might charge your customer 120 or 100 an hour to do the project. So that's where a time and materials contract comes in. However, as with everything else in Autotask, whether it be a ticket or a project, you actually don't need a contract if you're going to bill by the hour, because you can just use the roll rate, right? But the roll rate will just say, you know, for this type of engineer, it's $120. And that's what it will bill.

It'll just bill out at $120 an hour. Whereas the time and materials contract will allow you to then say, okay, well, maybe if a senior engineer does a project, I'm not going to do $120 an hour. I'm actually going to charge $180 an hour. So you can override that hourly roll rate using a time and materials contract. Yeah, and sometimes, you know, I might even recommend that they have a work type called project work, so that on the other contracts that you might have with the same customer, you can exclude the work type of project and then point that to the project time and materials or the fixed price contract, just in case somebody accidentally chooses the wrong contract or opens up a ticket and they know that it's project work, but they forget to change the contract, you know, use the exclusions.

I do that a lot too. Yeah, and that's a great point about exclusion. So even in a fixed price contract or, you know, in fact, any of the contract types within Autotask, you can have exclusion. So you can say, you know, a particular type of work is excluded from this. So even, you know, if you had a fixed price contract, you might say, if it's after hours or it's weekends or something like that, we don't include that work as part of the project.

So you can actually exclude that from the fixed price contract. So can we hop topics just for a second? I want to ask about the scheduler, right? So inside the project module, and you've got all of this phases set up and the tasks set up. And by the way, that will bring me back to setting up project templates so that you don't have to do this for every project, you know, manually, because that would just drive somebody mad, certainly me.

But anyway, before we get over to there, let's talk about the scheduler. When you schedule out this work, can you tie that into, say, the dispatch calendar so that you can make sure that the tech that you assigned to that schedule or that project doesn't get assigned, you know, to another ticket during that time? You sure can. I mean, it ties into the dispatcher's calendar really nicely. So that allows you to then say, yeah, it shows up in their calendar.

So then when somebody is coming to schedule that resource for something else, they're going to see it blocked out in their calendar. So it's going to give you the ability to say, okay, well, I'm not going to be able to use that particular resource on another project or a ticket or whatever the case might be. And that actually syncs over to Outlook, right? The desktop app? It does, yeah.

It syncs through Exchange. So it'll sync into the calendar. So, and the great thing from there, it then just means, and it's actually a two-way sync as well. So that Exchange sync is two-way. So that will bring in everything that's inside Outlook as well into the Autotask calendar or into the dispatcher's calendar.

So that if they've planned it somewhere else in their actual Outlook calendar, and they've got the customer and they've made another meeting, it's going to bring that meeting into the dispatcher's calendar in Autotask so that who's ever dispatching you is going to be able to see that information. I could never do that to my Autotask and my staff would kill me because my calendar is such a mess. The whole thing would turn red. It would be terrible. And actually, here's a tip, you know, that a lot of people don't actually realize is in Autotask or actually in Outlook, you can set your appointments as being private.

So if you set your appointment as being private, when it brings it into Autotask, it actually just shows it as appointments. It doesn't show you what's inside that appointment. You know, if you've got something confidential that you don't want your staff to see, it's going to show up under your name on the dispatcher's calendar, but it shows up as a private appointment. Project manager, the project module also integrate or works well with the customer portal as well, right? Often you might have these different phases or tasks, and one of those tasks might be stop here, get a customer's approval before moving on to the next task.

And you can use that, right, to assign the task to the customer and the customer should be able to respond right inside the portal. Am I thinking that through correctly? Absolutely, yeah. And that's exactly where the real benefit of using projects comes in, is you can actually collaborate directly with your customer. So you can assign that task to your customer.

You know, the customer can then go onto the portal. They don't necessarily add any time, but they can certainly add a note to say that they've done the work and they can mark it as complete as well. And you can actually do two things. You can say, you know, allow them to complete it or just allow them to view that task or that phase or whatever the case might be. So they can view it, but they can't do anything with it.

But if you need their inputs on something, you need them to actually physically do that task, then you can have them, you know, assign that to them and then have them close it. And one of the nice things you can do within the project module is you can have these things called predecessors and successors, which by the way, I hate, I don't know why they don't just call them dependent tasks or parent and child tasks, but because it's really confusing to try and explain predecessors and successors to people, but effectively that's what it is. It's a parent task and a child task or a dependent task. And very often when I used to work with a project module is I would make our task as the MSP. I would make that the successor task or the task that's dependent on the customer.

So I would then say, okay, Mr. Customer, I'm not gonna be able to start working on my task until you've completed yours. You know, and that actually brings up a really interesting point that I didn't bring up earlier. On the fixed price contracts, when you're setting up your milestones, you can attach the milestone to the ending of a particular phase in the project. So that milestone will then turn available as soon as that phase is marked as completed.

That's correct. So we should probably talk about what milestones are. We talked about the fixed price contract and effectively a fixed price contract is you can either bill that $25,000 in one go. So you will just have one milestone or you can have multiple milestones to make up that 25,000. So you could say after the first phase, we're gonna take $2,000 and then we'll take another 5,000 halfway through the project and we'll take the rest at the end.

So it's kind of installment billing, I guess, if you wanna call it that. So that's really what your milestones are. And that brings up another interesting point we mentioned earlier on about the approved post. You won't see anything in the approved post that says anything to do with contracts. It actually says the word milestones.

And when you see the word milestones, that is effectively your fixed price billing contract that you're billing for. Right. Here's another popular question that I get because projects use hands and otherwise you're generally using tickets, right? So let's help our listeners understand the difference between a task and a ticket and when you're going to use them. Yep.

So actually, fundamentally, they kind of the same thing. The only real difference between the two is a ticket is effectively standalone. So it's a standalone piece of work that you need to do. Fixing a mouse, fixing a keyboard, my outlook doesn't work, whatever, that's gonna be a ticket, right? Whereas a task, and when I say they're essentially the same, they kind of look and feel the same.

They have the same format of number, the interface looks the same, you add time in the same way. So for all intents and purposes, they're exactly the same thing. It's just that the task is designed to be worked against a project. So it's one of the tasks that you would do inside that project. And then we talked about phase earlier on.

So a phase would typically have a collection of tasks inside it. So you'd have a bunch of tasks that would make up that phase, but they get worked on and get assigned in exactly the same way to the engineer as a ticket would be. So we're back to the phases and the tasks again, or tasks. Tasks. Okay, so I said earlier, one of the first things I said is that the project module is its own animal inside Autotask.

And it's one of those things that when you're planning to start to use the project module, you really need to think the whole thing through. What are your templates gonna look like? Because if you are trying to do 10 projects or enter 10 projects in a month, and you try to do each one individually, like I said, you're gonna go mad, right? So you've got to figure out what your standard project template looks like. What is your standard phase one?

What are the standard tasks that go underneath of them? You know, and start to build out the projects and what's the typical timeline? Because as you're starting to create these different tasks underneath each of the different phases, you're going to be asked how long that task is gonna last, or this phase is gonna last. And so start to build out the template, you know, because you can change it up. As often as, you know, whenever you use it and you pull up this template, you can customize each one, but you should at least have something, you know, standardized so that you're not building it from scratch.

What are some of the other things people should think about when they're starting to use the project module? Yeah, and that's a great thing, actually. And the way you build templates, there's actually two ways. You can build them directly in all the tasks. You can just go to project templates and you can just create your template, which is exactly the same as just creating a project.

But the other way you can actually do that is you can import it through a CSV file. So you can create inside Excel and there is a template that you can use, but you can build your entire project through there and then just do the import of that CSV file. And I actually personally find that's a lot easier. And I have a bunch of templates that I've set up over the years for a whole host of different types of things that I normally share with my customers. That's, you know, I've got about probably 15 or 20 different types of templates all built in as a CSV file.

And all my customers need to do is click the import button and it'll import everything in for them. And then it will create those templates inside all the tasks. And then you can go and build projects, as many projects as you want from within side post templates. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stuff you can do. And I think, yeah.

I mean, what are your thoughts, Rayanne, in terms of building out templates and other cool ways that you can work with projects? Right, so one of the other things I probably might consider is, you know, when you're starting to think about your different projects and how you're going to use the project module and consider also the different types of contracts that will go with it. So you might want to even set up those project milestones because they may be different than your regular milestones. Think through the entire process of your project. When you're, you know, when you're building the procedures for your company, your MSP, think through the entire process, get it documented and make sure that everybody understands what the project module is going to do for your company.

Projects are about managing the project. They're not about managing the billing of the project. That's what the contract does. We think about all of the steps that need to take place, you know, in order to manage the project. What's the schedule?

How long is it going to take? Who's going to work on it? What days of the week can they work on it? How many hours, you know, can they work on it? Get all of that set up and standardized as much as possible.

Absolutely. And actually a couple of things I wanted to bring up on projects that we haven't talked about yet is something that a lot of people don't actually realize is if you start working on a ticket, you can actually convert that ticket into a project task. So what I very often do when I'm working on projects is, you know, I'm working, I have a pre-sales ticket and, you know, I create that pre-sales ticket. I assign that to an opportunity. Then it converts it into a post-sale ticket and that post-sale ticket, inside that post-sale ticket, I've got it set up to say, okay, go and set up the contract, go and set up all these things, you know, build project, all of those kinds of things.

So that's actually becomes effectively the first task within the project. So once I've completed that ticket, there's an option under the tools menu to simply say, I think it says import into project or something to that effect. And it gives you the ability to then just bring that in as a project task and it then becomes part of the project. So that's something that, you know, very few people actually realize that they can do. And that kind of workflow, I think, just completes the entire process from your pre-sales, working on your opportunity, you know, doing the post-sale ticket and then into the project.

And actually, I mean, part of my process is actually slightly different because part of what I do, to be fair, is inside the pre-sales ticket, I've actually got a, you know, a step as a checklist for me to actually go and build the opportunity and then assign the project to the opportunity. So when I close the app, it basically, it creates the project for me. So it does that automatically, but what it doesn't do is create the contract automatically for me. So my post-sale ticket, so I actually do both. When I win the opportunity, I then have it activate the project automatically.

And I also create a post-sale ticket where I then go in and I create the, you know, the contract and all of that kind of stuff and then assign that into the project. So it kind of completes that whole flow. I was just going to say something about that too, but just before you brought it up, I was thinking, oh, wait a minute, you know, when you're winning an opportunity, you can create the project as long as there's a project-related item on that quote that you're winning, right? So when you're building your quote inside the opportunity for a project, you know, you want to make sure that you're using the right items so that when you win the opportunity, that project radio button, create project radio button will highlight that. So yeah, thanks for bringing that up because a lot of people don't even know that exists.

Absolutely, absolutely. And the other thing I wanted to talk about was we've been talking kind of all about the benefits of using projects. And one of the things that's got in project management module is it's actually got some built-in reports. And one of them is a project financials report, which effectively gives you a running commentary on everything that's happening on that project. So every time you add time to the task, there's three columns that kind of, you know, look at your expenditure, look at what you've actually invoiced and what your profitability is.

And as you're running the billing and as you're adding time and all of these kinds of things, that report is automatically being updated. So you can get real live up-to-date information on the profitability of that project as you're working on it. And it's one of my favorite reports, certainly in all the tasks. And as you know, because of the book that I wrote, as you know, my, you know, I'm all about profitability. I'm all about kind of helping an MSP to become more profitable.

And that's a great report that is nowhere else on the system, but gives you the ability to look at that running total of the profitability of your project. Yeah, and I know this is a topic for a different day, but the new interface that came out recently for Autotask, I feel like we have a lot more features available at all different levels. And it's just organized, I think, in a more intuitive way, as opposed to the dropdown menu. You know, you now have these tabs across the windows, you know, at the customer level, but we'll get into that another day. So yeah, and I think that, you know, the reporting and the profitability reporting, the financials, I think they're a lot easier for people to find now, because they were kind of hidden for a minute there before.

Yeah, and I mean, this is a project specific one. So it's actually inside the project module itself, you know, and you can access it from live reports and other ways, but it gives you the ability to look at it directly from within a project. And that's another reason why you should be using a contract against the project, because it's going to, as soon as you build those milestones, it's going to show that as revenue, and then it automatically works out your profitability based on the costs of the engineers and the costs of, you know, all the stuff that you've provided as part of that project and expenses and all that kind of stuff. You can see that as you're working on the project. Yeah, I'm always surprised at how many MSPs don't ever look at those reports.

And how can you price the next project if you don't know how much money you made off the last one, right? Because you really do need to understand where you made money, you know, where costs got away from you, or, you know, you started to slip in profitability or whatever, you have to be able to measure those things before you can correct them for the next time. Absolutely. And I think this is a good segue into what our next episode is going to be about, because we're going to talk all about, you know, the reports that you can run and that's going to be throughout the system, not just from a project management perspective, but not just the reports, but the dashboards and widgets and what have you that you can build as well. Yeah, reporting is kind of my jam.

So I'm looking forward to that. Absolutely. I think you're the queen of reporting, right? So yeah, no, there's definitely a lot of stuff in the project module side. And what I'd be very interested actually to any of our listeners is, you know, reach out to us, tell us how you use projects.

Tell us, well, if you are using projects and if you are, how are you using them? How are you creating project templates? And in future episodes, we're going to get some MSPs onto our podcast. So it would be useful if maybe somebody could come on and kind of talk to us about how they actually use projects. I'd be very interested to see, because I think it's a very underutilized module within all the tasks, certainly.

And so I'd be very interested to see actually who uses it and what they use it for and, you know, how their team is working with it. Yeah, I think that'll be a great conversation. Absolutely. So, I mean, wow, Rayyan, this has been a really fun topic to talk about as always. I always enjoy talking about all things PSA with you.

So yeah, I mean, really at this point, Rayyan, all that's left for me to say is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Great conversation today. Thanks, Rayyan.

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.