[12] – Invoices and Queues

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 Podcast with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. We are a PSA independent series designed to help MSPs worldwide get the best from their PSA tool.

You can get your questions answered by Rayanne and myself and manage your business effectively by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency in your MSP. We have a phone in where folks can call up with their questions or problems, and we will attempt to answer them. You can also get in touch with us via our Facebook and LinkedIn groups and on Twitter, and we'll put all of the notes, all the links to these in the show notes. So hi, Rayanne. How are you doing?

Hey, Chris. I'm doing great. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you.

I'm actually sitting in a hotel, Rayanne, so let's hope that the Wi-Fi lasts during this podcast. It might be an interesting audio. So apologies to anyone who's listening if we do get cut off. If that's the case, Rayanne will take over and manage the podcast herself. Yep.

I got your back. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, Rayanne, we had a couple of questions that we wanted to go through today. I've been monitoring the Facebook groups, and I saw that there was a question from somebody about, you know, they're just about to go live and had a question on invoice numbers.

So, you know, using QuickBooks Pro and, you know, he wants to generate invoices out of Autotask and then email them out and sync them back to QuickBooks, et cetera. And you know, he's asking about how Autotask assigns the numbers and pushes them into QuickBooks. So I thought this one is right up your street, Rayanne. So maybe you can, you know, answer this question in the way that only you know how. Yeah.

I love this topic. Thank you very much. So QuickBooks Desktop is a bit of a different animal when you're talking about Autotask and connecting the invoices in. Right now, there's only one way to get those invoices out of Autotask and into QuickBooks Desktop, and that is using Internet Explorer and the ActiveX connectors. So they are working on fixing that and changing that up to a different solution, but it has not yet been released.

Anyway, you have invoices in Autotask, and what happens is Autotask provides its own invoice number, and it's called the invoice ID. And the invoice ID is like this big, long number, and you have no control over it. However, if you go into the system settings, you can set the next invoice number. Here's what's going to happen. So you go into the system settings.

You update the invoice number, the next invoice number, so that it corresponds a little bit more closely with the invoice numbering scheme that you have in QuickBooks. Then you prepare your invoices in Autotask, and then you can send them over or push them over into QuickBooks Desktop. The problem is that once those invoices leave Autotask, go to your customer with an invoice number on it. If you wait and push those invoices later, that number is likely to change because QuickBooks is going to say, hey, I have this invoice, and oh, look, that's not our next invoice number. This is our next invoice number.

Sends that back to Autotask, so now you have an invoice number in Autotask that does not match the invoice number that your customer has. So one of the things that many people do, most MSPs do, is send the invoice first to QuickBooks, then email it out to the customer. And the reason that they do that is multiple. Because one, you'll have the same invoice number in all systems, and so everything matches. And number two, when you're sending those invoices out of QuickBooks, you can often send a payment link.

Like, here's a link to our payment portal. Please go and pay our invoice, you know, quick, fast, and in a hurry. And then we will get paid right away, and everything is automated. So you don't have that opportunity in Autotask to send a payment link, unless it's a very static payment link that you can put into the invoice. But when you're talking about QuickBooks and the QuickBooks payment solution, the link that goes with that invoice is unique to every invoice.

So that's why many MSPs will push their invoices to QuickBooks first, then send it out to the customer. Absolutely. Wow. That's a great explanation on that, Rae-Ann. I could not have answered that better myself.

Well, thank you. You know, QuickBooks is my thing, right? But while I have you on the call, did you have any other thoughts on that QuickBooks before I hop on? Because I have another question that I wanted to run past you. Not on that one, or not on QuickBooks specifically, but I mean, I have the same thoughts around doing that.

I always recommend that people push everything into their accounting tool, whatever that may be, whether it be QuickBooks or Xero or Sage or whatever it is, you know, push it into there and have that accounting package actually do all the magic and send the invoices to the customer. Because then things like your payment links and all these things are going to work back into your accounting package and have that sync the invoice numbers back into, you know, into Autotask. So I think, you know, we're on the same page with that in terms of not using Autotask necessarily to send out those invoices, but have them sent out from the accounting tool. And I understand that a lot of MSPs like the look of the Autotask or ConnectWise invoice better than the look of the QuickBooks invoice. So I understand wanting to send those invoices out of Autotask or your PSA instead of pushing it to your accounting system, but you will find that the functionality works so much better if it's first pushed into the accounting system and then sent out to the customer.

Absolutely. No, I absolutely fully agree with that. So while I have you on the call here, I wanted to talk to you. We had another question on the Facebook groups about queues, and I know that we have talked about queues many times before, but this one is specifically surrounded by the built-in queues, whereas this one particular MSP thought that they didn't need all of these built-in queues and they wanted to do away with them. What were your thoughts on that?

Another one of my favorite topics to talk about is queues and service desk. So yeah, I saw that on the Facebook group, and the answer to that is really those built-in queues actually have a purpose in Autotask, and there's a reason that you can't delete them. So the three kind of built-in ones or main ones that come out of the box is monitoring, alert, post-sale, and client portal. And they really all have a purpose or certainly have a purpose by default built out of the box. So for example, post-sale queue, when an opportunity is won and a ticket is created, it automatically by default will create that ticket in the post-sale queue.

So there needs to be a queue in Autotask called post-sale so that it can bring those tickets in and create them in that queue once the opportunity is won. What you can then do is obviously workflow that to move that to a different queue if you want to, but by default, that's kind of where it goes in. And I think really the client portal and the monitoring alert queue are fairly self-explanatory, although again, you can actually map the tickets that come in from both the monitoring alert tool and the client portal, certainly from a client portal's perspective. Using the ticket categories, you can link that into the client portal and you can determine where those tickets actually come into, what queue they come into directly from the client portal. And the same thing with the monitoring alert, you can say if it's a CPU alert or a memory alert or whatever, you can drop that into any queue that you like.

It doesn't have to go into the monitoring alert queue, but those are kind of built into the system for those reasons. If you just left them as the default, those are the queues that things would go into. So my answer to that question is leave them as they are. They do serve a purpose. And then just create all the other queues that you want and use the workflow engine within Autotask to move the tickets out of those queues and into other queues.

What is your thoughts on that, Rae-Ann? Almost exactly the same. I know that we can't get rid of those queues, those built-in queues. So the smart thing to do, like you said, with the post-sale queue and the monitoring queues, just set up a workflow rule that when something hits it, either notify somebody that it's in there so that people can remember to go and look inside that queue to clear out the tickets or set up a workflow rule to automatically move them to a working queue, like your support one or support two. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I kind of actually quite like the post-sale queue because it does what it says on the tin, right? It basically is there as a post-sale queue. And I know that everything that gets closed out from an opportunity and a ticket gets created, it automatically goes into that queue. And then what I can do is I have workflow that says, leave them in that queue for the most part.

But if they're for a specific opportunity or there's certain keywords in the opportunity, I then move them to a different queue. So maybe if it's for a server, I might move it to the support two or whatever other queue I want to. But otherwise, I'll leave most of them in that post-sale queue and just work on them from there. You know, I do the same thing with the post-sale queue. I like to have it in there because if I'm looking for something, I know that this opportunity was just one and now I need to find it.

Yes, I can find it either through the customer or I can find it through the opportunity list. But I can also go straight to the post-sale queue in the service desk and see all of my open post-sale tickets that are still open and have not yet been worked. It's a nice one location that I can see all of the post-sale queues, you know, that maybe are still waiting for implementation or, you know, installation. And then when the engineers start to work on them, then they'll move out of the post-sale queue and into a service queue so that I can see what's really going on inside the service desk. Absolutely.

And I fully agree. It's exactly the same thing that we do. In fact, I actually have another queue that I create a lot, which is a pre-sales queue, right? So I then say, you know, any tickets that get created from an opportunity. So if I've got an opportunity, I'll go in and create a ticket for pre-sales.

I'll do all the pre-sales work against that, close that pre-sales ticket. And then when the opportunity is won, it then moves into the or creates a new ticket and moves that ticket into the post-sale queue. And then I can run some reporting and report across the profitability of that entire opportunity. So I can then look at how much work I've spent on my pre-sales activity and how much work I've spent on the post-sales activity and get that across all of my profitability reports. That's a really interesting idea.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could take that pre-sale ticket and have it make its way all the way through to the post-sale queue? And I suppose you could have that ticket go from the pre-sales queue to the post-sale queue, but you just couldn't do it from the one opportunity wizard, but it would be nice if you could. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think there is some inconsistencies in that with the way that works.

So what I do is I just say, create the tickets manually from the opportunity, work that whole pre-sales and then close that ticket down and bring that in when the opportunity is when it creates a new ticket, brings that into the post-sale and then that ticket you can follow all the way through the rest of the cycle if you want to as well. But the other nice thing you can do, and I mean, I've seen this happen a few times and actually worked with clients on this, is you can take that pre-sales ticket and that post-sales ticket in fact, and when an opportunity, you can activate a project off the back end of that. So what I then do is I take those two tickets and I copy them into a project. So then they become a project task. It closes down those tickets and now you've got them in a project and you've just got them listed as tasks.

So you can then see any pre-sales activity, any post-sales activity against that entire project as well, which then links back to the opportunity. So there's a number of ways you can do that. But yeah, queues is a great thing to have and you can set up multiple queues for doing lots of things and then just using the workflows as we were talking about to kind of move those tickets in and out of different queues. Awesome topics today, Chris. Yeah, I think we've covered all some good stuff today.

So did you have anything else that you wanted to talk about today, Rae-Ann? No, but you know, it did give me an idea for a future episode. I think I might like to dig into those opportunities and tracking opportunities, tracking sales, you know, sales funnels. I'd like to maybe investigate that a little bit more because I get a lot of questions about that. So maybe we can talk about that on a future episode.

Absolutely, Rae-Ann. And I think that's something that's, you know, not very well used and utilized in all the other tasks is people don't really use the opportunity side and the CRM and sales side. And, you know, there's actually a lot of potential and I think there's a lot of really cool stuff you can do with it. So maybe we should talk about that in a future episode. This was a really great topic today and luckily the Wi-Fi in the hotel has kept me online and not kicked me off, which it was doing earlier on.

So that's really good. Right. So here's a shout out to anybody who's listening. If you have any questions or concerns or things that you would like to know about the opportunity and sales funnel tracking inside your PSA, would you pop over to psaimpact.net or any of the Facebook groups and put your question in there. Chris and I are monitoring those boards and groups all the time.

So put your question in there and we'll be sure to address it at another episode. Absolutely. Yeah, great. And so really all that's left for me to say, Rae-Ann, is your PSA is the key to your business success. Go out and make an impact on your world today.

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.