[24] – Introduction to Autotask Implementation Series

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. So hi everyone and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts myself Chris Tim and my co-host Rayanne Buccianico. So how are you doing Rayanne?

I'm doing great Chris, how are you doing? I'm very well, thank you. So Rayanne, we had a chat the other day about rebooting the PSA Impact podcasts. So for those people who are listening and see this dropping into their podcast catcher, we're now going to do a series of podcasts kind of taking you from zero to hero. We're going to cover off everything you need to look at from in the back end all the way through to your CRM, your billing and finance, service desks, all of those kind of things.

So we've got a series of around 25 different podcasts that we're going to do as an implementation series for folks to kind of get their PSA working correctly. So yeah, really excited, looking forward to that Rayanne. Yeah, me too. You know, I get so many questions about, you know, what is the difference between, you know, like the work types and the roles and where do I set this up or, you know, so there's a lot of confusion out there, especially for people that are just now implementing Autotask or even some companies that have been out there for a couple of years using it and have just never tapped into all of its features. So when you and I were talking about it, we thought, well, why don't we just do a series, you know, start from scratch with nothing literally in Autotask.

And you know, these are the steps that we take when we're helping customers set their Autotask up, you know, and get it ready to go live. So I'm really excited about this. I think it's going to be so informative. Absolutely. And I mean, you're right.

I think so many people get confused and partly because they haven't set the system up right in the first place. So, you know, for those people who've been using Autotask for a long time and may not quite understand things like statuses and cues, what the difference is between them, all of those kind of things, we're going to go through all of that throughout the series. Right. We're going to talk about the considerations that you need to make when setting these up, you know, all of the things that you need to do in the back end. And then we're going to kind of even deep dive into each area.

So we'll kind of go through CRM in detail. We'll talk about, you know, opportunity stages. We'll also go all the way through into things like, you know, billing and finance, into work types and roles and how they work and what considerations you need to make with setting them up. So I think this is going to be a real, real fun podcast for us to record and hopefully our listeners will enjoy it as well. So, yeah, I just want to touch on one more thing.

I think about that, that what we are about to embark upon, yes, it will get you from, you know, a completely blank Autotask set up and ready to go live. But if you've already been using Autotask for a couple of years, you may think, well, now I just need to scrap the whole thing and, you know, get a fresh database. That's not true because you can take what we are talking about in the next 25 episodes or so and correct your own Autotask to get it set up and running properly. You know, disable things or inactivate certain things. But so hopefully you won't feel the need to go out and get a brand new database because that's really not necessary 90 percent of the time.

Yeah, I agree, Rae-Anne, and I think, you know, although the series is designed to kind of go from a, you know, not having Autotask at all in the considerations that you make, there will be certain people who obviously have been using it for many, many years, as you say, and have, you know, hundreds of queues and hundreds of different statuses and that kind of thing. And hopefully by the end of the series, they'll be able to, you know, follow through what we're doing on each episode and make the changes necessary that we advise on. And then by the end of this, hopefully they'll have a working Autotask. So but, you know, by all means, to anyone who wants to reach out to us, you can reach us at psaimpact.net or, you know, on all the socials as well or directly reach out to Rae-Anne or myself. We will put all of those bits of information in the show notes so that anyone can access them, can talk to us directly.

And we're actually in the process of redesigning our website and there's going to be a, you know, a really cool little facility where you can record stuff and you can actually leave us a voice message essentially. So if there's certain things that you want us to cover off or you didn't understand something or how we explained it, then by all means, you know, leave us a message either as a voice message or, you know, leave us a message on contact us on the website and we'll try and address it as best we can during the series. So let's start there. You get a phone call from a potential client and they have just signed on with Autotask and they heard through the grapevine that Chris Tim is the guy to go to. Right.

So what is the first thing that you do after you do your initial fact finding call, you know, and make a planning session? So you've got your planning session, you've got everything, you understand the company and what they're shooting for and so on and so forth. Now it's time to start the Autotask work. Where do you begin? What is the very first thing that you go?

That's a great question, Rayanne. So the very first thing I do, you know, the first call, as you say, is that fact find. So I'll go through and make sure that everything is, well, I'll look at how they're currently using Autotask, right? So go, OK, how are your queues set up? Let's look at your statuses.

And one of the most important things I look at pretty much, probably the first thing I actually start to do is looking at things like have burden rates been set up correctly. And at this point, people are probably wondering what the heck is a burden rate. Well, we're going to explain that in a later episode. But, yeah, it's all about, you know, the costs of the engineers, the cost of the products and services, those kinds of things I look at. I also look at how many queues they've got, then start to ask questions around why do you need so many queues?

You know, talk me through your queue process, right? Why have you got that many? Talk me through your statuses. What do you use these statuses for? You know, do you workflow on these statuses?

All these kinds of things. And I try and gather as much information during that call as I possibly can. And then I devise a plan of how we're actually going to attack all of these these problems that they have. So things like, okay, maybe on the first call, we're then going to talk about why it's important to enter costs into the system and how, you know, how to map those costs against the engineer, how to map those costs against services, all of those kinds of things. And then we just go through this entire step through all of the modules we mentioned earlier on.

So how about you, Rayanne? Well, I do the exact same thing. First, the first thing we do, I do with a potential account is get on like a Zoom call with them, share screens, see what they're doing, ask a bunch of questions. What do you sell? How are you billing them for it?

You know, and really get a handle on, you know, their business model, right? But when we're talking about, you know, the initial actual autotask work that we do, the very first thing I do is I go to the admin center, and I start working down the list, you know, making sure that all of the preferences are set, the system settings are set, is there a line of business that we need to track? What about the resources? What about the roles? You know, what about the work types, you know, the billing?

One of the things that I always like to focus on is, you know, first is the contracts, because, you know, that is a quick win. Once you have the contracts up and rolling, now you can start invoicing your customers. But before you can get to the contracts, you've got a slew of, you know, things that you have to set up first, services and products and roles and billing codes, and, you know, just even update, uploading the logo, you know, so all of those things. I spend, I probably spend at least a session or two just in the admin center. Absolutely.

And I fully agree with you, Rayanne, because, you know, the successful autotask implementation as such kind of really starts with the back end stuff, right? You know, it starts with how you actually set all of that stuff up in the beginning. So, you know, and again, we mentioned earlier on around the, you know, the considerations that you need to make when you're setting up the system. So, you know, it's not just a case of going, well, you know, we're going to enter in, you know, a tax rate, but what does that tax rate look like? How do we actually tax our customers?

I know you guys over there have multiple different tax rates. Over here, it's a lot easier where, you know, we just have one tax rate, for example, but there are going to be times when we need to take into consideration how those are billed and set those tax rates up accordingly. The same thing with statuses and queues, right? So many times people say, well, you know, we'll just leave the queues that kind of come out of the box. And when you buy autotask for the first time and you log in for the very first time, there are already statuses and queues already set up.

And I was actually looking at a brand new implementation of autotask just the other day that, you know, one of my clients had literally signed up with autotask and got his login, and there was about 15 statuses set up already on the system. So, you know, and what I find many people do is they just start running with that. They go, well, okay, we've got a level one and a level two support queue, and we've got a, you know, and in fact, I think in autotask, there's one that's called SW level one and SW level two and HWL one. And it's like just way too many, right? So the considerations you need to make when you're talking about autotask and setting it up is to look at what do I need to do with these statuses?

What do I want them for? And then sit and actually go through. And I often jot those down on a piece of paper too, right? So, you know, or if I'm working with a client, we whiteboard over that. And we say, you know, let's talk about statuses.

Let's talk about queues. Let's look at what do you actually need to do? Do you have, you know, a team of people that are dedicated to level one and level two? And if you've got dedicated level one and level two people, then maybe you can have a level one and two support queue. But if you only have, you know, all these people that do all the same work, they do level one and two, then you probably don't need to have both of those queues, right?

You can get away with just having one. So it's all about thinking about the considerations of how you set the system up in the back end. Yeah. So, you know, and of course, the one thing that I always try to emphasize is, you know, keep it as simple and uncomplicated as possible for as long as you can. The fewer decisions that the dispatch person or the service coordinator has to make when creating a ticket, the easier autotask will be for you.

And the more valuable, I think, because if you remove the conversation of does it belong here? Does it belong there? Issues and sub-issues is another one, right? So you've got the status, you've got the queue, you've got the work type, you've got the role, you've got the issue, you've got the sub-issue, you know? And so all of these different decisions that have to be made just by creating a ticket, you need to be able to do that in a consistent manner so that you can get consistent information back out of the system.

So yeah, I'm with you. You know, a lot of times you don't need 27 queues if you only have five people on the team, right? So we just need to find a way to, you know, simplify it and then roll it out and make sure that everybody is on board with it. There are good reasons to have different queues and different work types, and that's what I'm hoping that we will cover in detail in these sessions, is when do I need this at a queue? When do I need this to be an issue?

When do I need this to be a role or a work type? Absolutely, and it's, you know, everything else as well as that. So things like SLAs, right? A lot of people just rush into the system and don't even think about how they're going to set up SLAs. You know, and again, that's something that's really important if you're using SLAs in your business, to think about how are these SLAs working, because those are going to be mapped back into your contracts eventually, right?

And widgets. Exactly. So, you know, it's no point, again, no point leaving the standard SLAs that are set up from Autotask, which I think is in fact called standard SLA. There's no point using those if, firstly, you don't use SLAs in your business, or if your SLAs are completely different, because, you know, you're going to get the wrong reporting, you're going to get the wrong information out of the system. So, it's all about really understanding what you need to do with the PSA tool and how you need to, you know, use that within your business, and then make those decisions on how you're actually going to set the stuff up.

And what we're going to do through this entire series is we're going to go down and break down each one of these individually. So, we're going to talk about statuses. We're going to talk about why you need to use particular statuses and when to use particular statuses, right? You know, why don't I need to have 27 different statuses? So, we're going to go into great detail about those, how to map those statuses as well into things like SLAs, right?

When do you use an SLA event against a particular status? And what are the ramifications if you get it wrong, right? So, everything we're going to talk about through the next 25-ish so episodes is going to break down each one of these areas individually, and we're going to spend, you know, 15-20 minutes, half an hour, however long we talk for on those podcasts, to go through all of these in great detail. So, that's a great segue into where we're going to be going next week, Rayyan. We're going to talk about work types and roles in the next episode.

So, hopefully, that's given everyone a little bit of an idea of what the next few weeks are going to be. So, tune in next week, and we're going to talk about work types and roles. So, all that's left really for me to say, Rayyan, is your PSA is the key to your MSP 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.