[8] Accounting Systems and Invoice Reminders.

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, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, Rayanne and Chris. With me, I have my co-host, Rayanne.

Hi, Rayanne. How are you doing? Hey, Chris. I'm doing great. How are you today?

I'm good. Thank you. So, Rayanne, we had a question that came in from the Autotask group on Facebook, and I thought that this would actually be a great one for you being our resident accountant and resident financial guru. So it was all about how can we set up invoice reminders so when an invoice is late by X amount of days, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought this would be a really good one for us to talk about.

So have you got any thoughts on that? I do have quite a few thoughts, and I'm going to steal your line. This is literally one of my favorite topics because anytime we're talking about Autotask or any PSA and integrating it with your accounting system, that's right inside my wheelhouse. So out of the box, Autotask does not give you the option to set up reminders. And as far as I know, there's no way to automate the reminders for invoices that are overdue in Autotask.

This is the way it happens. You prepare the invoice in Autotask. You do all of your monthly management, your MSP work, do your tickets, and then you create your invoice, and then off goes the invoice. And that is Autotask. That's where Autotask washes its hands of the accounting function.

It says, okay, my accounting stops here. Your accounting service, your accounting system is going to pick it up from here and take it from there. So whether you're using QuickBooks or Xero or QuickBooks Online or even Sage, Great Plains, your accounting system is going to pick that up, and then it's up to that accounting system to prepare those reminders. There are some really cool apps out there. We use one called Late Fee Manager.

Late Fee Manager will pick up the invoices from the accounting system. It integrates with Xero. It integrates with QuickBooks Online, and it will automatically remind the clients every couple of days. You say, hey, I want to remind the clients every three days that this invoice is overdue. So it will send out the automatic reminders, give them a link to the payment portal to make a payment, and so that's one of the things that we use.

There are others out there. There's Bill.com. There's Bill and Pay. So how do you recommend handling this, Chris? It's a good question, Rae-Ann, and it's a bit naughty of you to actually steal my line.

So this is the last time you're going to do that. No, I'm just messing with you, Rae-Ann. So yeah, really, the way I say it is exactly the same as you, right? Autotask is essentially a billing platform. All it's going to do is it's going to bill.

It's going to generate an invoice, and it's going to push that invoice through to the accounting system. So like you say, whether that be QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks or Sage or whichever flavor of accounting system you're using, that's where all the magic happens, right? All Autotask is going to do is take all those monthly services, the block hours, all those kinds of good things, and it's literally just going to generate an invoice, and it's going to push that invoice through. And like you say, that's its job done. What you would then need to do is start to use some of these other platforms, like you're saying, you know, Late Fee Manager, I've not come across that, or bill.com or any of those kinds of things.

Or if you're using Xero, for example, it has it built into the application that sends out reminders if the bill hasn't been paid. So I often get that with customers, and I actually see it saying on there, you know, reminder sent, reminder sent. So it does go out and actually send all of those reminders directly from your accounting package. Now, in saying that, there are, you know, ways that you might be able to actually do this. It's a little bit tricky, but you could use the API, you know, you could then develop something that might actually trigger, you know, something from within the accounting package, link that into Autotask somehow and send that out as a configure a workflow rule to send that out.

But I wouldn't recommend doing that. It's just it's too much like hard work. So what I would say is, is probably just do it as a, you know, as a reminder directly from the accounting package. I'm always a fan of not reinventing the wheel. So if somebody else has already developed this for your accounting package or, you know, whatever system that you're using, I'm with you.

I would say use the tools that are already built instead of trying to create one yourself just to have it sent out of Autotask or ConnectWise or, you know, Harmony or whatever PSA you're using. Although I do believe that ConnectWise has the automated reminder feature that can be turned on or can be set up with a workflow rule because ConnectWise has a lot more control, I think, over the receivable that then Autotask does. But regardless, I still think let the PSA do its job and let the accounting system do its job. And I would keep them as separate as possible as opposed to try trying to figure out a way to force Autotask to send out those invoices, not to mention the fact that invoices from Autotask don't come with the nice payment portal that they get when you send the invoices out of Xero or out of QuickBooks Online or even QuickBooks Desktop can come with a payment portal link right on those invoices. And I think that's another reason why people use the accounting system to send invoices over, sending them directly to the customer from Autotask.

Good point, Rae-Anne. I mean, you know, the other PSA tools, I'd say ConnectWise has that built in. Harmony has some kind of, you know, reminder feature built in as well. It has a lot more functionality around the way in which the billing and accounts and financial side works. But, you know, even with those packages, I would I would still say, you know, do all of your receivables outside of that package.

You know, things like Xero and QuickBooks and Sage and all these other tools we've mentioned, you know, they're good at doing that. That's what they built to do, right, is they built to be a fully fledged accounting package. So like I say, why reinvent the wheel, right? If those tools already give you the ability to do that, then use those tools to actually perform that function and use them for what they designed to do. You know, we failed to mention the obvious tool, ConnectBooster.

ConnectBooster is going to pick up the invoices directly from Autotask, send the reminders out to the customer, you know, with the payment portal so that they can pay right on the portal. I'm pretty certain that ConnectBooster gives you the option of sending out reminders on an automated basis. I could be wrong. OK, that's interesting. So I'm from so just so you know, and and I might be completely wrong here.

So I'm sure some UK people will tell me. But my understanding is ConnectBooster doesn't work in the UK, doesn't work with any of the UK systems. I've had a conversation with them in the past and it doesn't seem to work here. Although the question that came on on the Facebook group, I think is a is a user in the US. So, yeah, if you're in the US, then certainly tools like ConnectBooster is going to be able to do what you want it to do.

But from a UK perspective, my understanding is that it's right now it's it's not supported and I don't think they'd even sell it to you in the UK. No kidding. I was not aware of that. Maybe we should start a petition to get them to get on board with the international community. Absolutely.

Well, you know what? Once I'm going to I'm going to say this, I'm just going to go out there on a limb. But once we Brexit, maybe things will be better. No, I'm kidding. I didn't mean to bring up the Brexit word.

That's great. Yeah. So that was a great topic. I mean, I think there's you know, it's a it's a very simple thing. I think we both agree on it here, Rayanne, is that use Autotask for what Autotask is designed for.

Use it for for generating your your invoices. Use it for, you know, managing profitability, all of those kinds of things. And use your accounting package for what it's good at doing. And that is for doing all the other side of your accounting, like your receivables and all of that kind of good stuff. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that.

Cool. OK, so that was a great topic. So if anyone's got any any questions or anyone would like any any further information on this, we are on all the socials on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. And if you visit our website at PSAImpact.net, then you can leave a message and you can ask us any kind of question. So we encourage you guys to just come on and and ask those kind of questions if there's anything specific that you want us to cover.

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