[25] – Autotask Implementation Series: Work Types & Roles

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. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing?

Doing great today, Chris. How are you doing? I'm very well, thank you. I'm super excited to start talking about our first topic in the Autotask implementation. Absolutely.

Yeah, me too, Rayanne. And so what have we got on the agenda for today, Rayanne? Well, I thought that what we could do is talk about work types and roles because those are so often confused. Many people confuse a work type for a role or the role and the work type or don't understand what the differences are. And so I thought that we could start there.

What roles do people need to set up? What work types do people need to set up? So how do you approach that? That's a great question. Rayanne, I was just about to say that.

As of course, you know, it's my absolute favorite topic to talk about. So, yeah, roles and work types. So let's talk about the difference, what they are, how they work. So essentially, all a role is, it's the rate in which you bill your time out at, right? So it's what you bill out your engineers at.

So most people, 90% of people that I talk to have one standard rate that they bill out at. So, you know, $100 an hour, $200 an hour, whatever the case might be. And that's what you're billing your customers out for ad hoc work or for work that is excluded against the contract. So it's really important to bear that in mind, that it's ad hoc work. So, you know, this is when you're doing work that's break free, expire the hour, and you're billing out at $100 an hour.

That's where you would set up a role. Now, what I often find is people then set up multiple roles, right? So they go, well, I've got a role called senior engineer, and I've got another one called engineer, and I've got another one called this, and I've got another one called that. And they're all listed as $120 an hour, right? You really don't need to have that many.

What you need to do is to have one role. In that particular instance, you need to have one role that says it's $120. That's it, right? And call it support role or something to that effect. The only time you need to have multiple of those roles is really if you've got, you know, multiple engineers that you're billing out at different rates.

So if you've got a senior engineer that you bill out for ad hoc work at $150 an hour and a junior engineer that you bill out at $80 an hour, then you would have two separate roles that you would assign to those engineers. Is that kind of how you're seeing it, Rayanne? That's exactly how I see it. The first thing that I try to do to explain the difference between the work type and the role is that the role has one function in this world, and that is to tell Autotask how much to bill for a particular hour of that. And so, yeah, you might have, like you were saying, if you have different billing rates for different, you know, levels of technicians, senior engineer versus, you know, level one help desk, they may come with different hourly rates if you're even charging your customers hourly rates at all, right, because in the world of the modern MSP, there's a lot of stuff that's simply no longer charged by the hour, although I think the onsite support is making a comeback to the hourly rate because of the pandemic and all of, you know, all of the trouble that is this in 2020 to try and get out to the customers.

So, yeah, if all of your rates are $120 an hour, then you probably need one role, and like you said, support. If you recall, there used to be a need for, like, an after hours or an emergency support role to be done, you know, after hours so that you could charge extra to your customers for those after hours, holidays, double time, whatever. But now that can even be controlled at the work type level. So you don't even need that after hours or emergency support role any longer. You know, and I had lost the rest of my thought.

So, Chris, take it away. Yeah. Actually, you mentioned something there about you mentioned the word rate, right? And that's essentially what a role is. It's a billing rate.

That's all it is, right? And if you're billing, like we said, by the hour, then you need to use roles. If you're using contracts, recurring service contracts, then roles are pretty irrelevant. You really don't need them because it then bills that work against the contract. It doesn't bill it against that $80 or $100 or $120 an hour.

And then you were asking about the difference between roles and work types. So essentially, the work type is exactly that. It says, how am I going to bill this work? Am I going to bill it at the standard role rate, which is $120 an hour, or am I going to bill it with some kind of multiplier? So if it was emergency after hours support, like you mentioned, you might say emergency work gets billed out at two times the role rate.

So then that would say in that particular instance, if it's emergency after hours support, it's going to bill that out at $240 for that hour of work that we do. But again, that's only relevant if you're not using a recurring service contract or any other contract for that matter, unless you're excluding that kind of work from the contract. So when we do the thing about contracts, we'll kind of cover this in more detail about the exclusions as well. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, the work type is a billing code, right?

So let's simplify the difference between these two. The role is the rate. The role determines the rate. And if you ever get confused, just keep repeating that sentence. The role determines the rate, the dollar amount that the customer is going to get billed for an hour's worth of work.

The work type is a billing code. And so while you can set the multiplier, you could even set the rate. But I always frown upon setting the rate at the work type level. Let the role do its job. If you start monkeying around with the billing rates inside the work types that is going to override the role rates, you're going to cause yourself a world of headaches.

So let the role do its job. Let the work type do its job. And don't try to mix and match them. You can set the multiplier. I think that's a good idea for things like the holiday or the after hours, weekends, emergency support, that sort of thing.

Those multipliers are fine, you know, at the work type level so that you don't have to create a separate role for it. But the work type is really just a billing code. This is what's going to land on your accounting system. This is what's going to land on the invoice. Your customer is going to see the work type.

This is the type of work that you've done. The customer will never see the role rates, the name of the role. They're only going to see the dollar amount that gets associated with that employee, with that ticket. Absolutely. Yeah.

And, yeah, I fully agree in the way that this works. And what I see is a lot of people, the reason they set up multiple roles is firstly because, you know, they think that each engineer needs a role assigned to them, which they do, or a rate, if you like, assigned to that engineer. So and then they go, well, we've got a senior engineer, so we'll have a role called senior engineer. And one of the things that I think where certainly where DATO needs to change this is to not call it a role, because I think people get confused by the fact that it's called a role because the role is I'm a senior engineer or I'm a standard engineer or I'm a software developer or I'm something. And that's a role.

Right. But what these are not is they are not just a role as in a senior engineer or junior engineer. They are the rate at which that role gets built out at. That's that's what you need to be thinking about as far as roles are concerned. So they're called role rates, basically.

Exactly right. So and maybe that is a really that's a really interesting point that you brought up, you know, that people are assigning roles to the human being based on their job title. Right. Because if you think about their job title, you know, I'm a senior engineer. Therefore, my role must be a senior engineer.

And that's not the way that Autotask thinks. Autotask thinks of roles as rates and not as human beings. Right. So, yeah, interesting, interesting concept that you pointed out. Absolutely.

You're right. It's not. I mean, it could be called the job title. So you could have one called senior engineer. But bearing in mind that is that is the rate in which you would bail out somebody whose job role is the senior engineer.

That's the rate you would build that engineer out at if you had multiple billing roles. And I see a lot of people get confused because they say, well, you know, I've got customer A that I want to bail out at this this rate. So I send my senior engineer and he's one hundred and twenty dollars and I've got another one that I bail out at 80. And so I send my junior engineer and he gets bailed out at 80. So you can control that at the contract level and you don't have to set up all of the different roles.

Absolutely. And that's exactly what the time and materials contract is designed to do. Right. So which, again, we'll cover off in more detail when we go through billing and finance and talk about the contracts. But essentially all that is going to do is is in Autotask.

You actually if you're billing some work by the hour, either ad hoc, you know, break, fix type work or you're excluding it from the contract. So you don't include on site support. You want to bill for that separately. You actually don't need to have a contract, but you don't need a time and materials contract necessarily. The only time you really need to have that contract is if you want to charge your customers at different rates to what your your role rate is.

So if your role rate is set at one hundred and twenty dollars an hour and that's your kind of list price rate, that's what you charge everybody else at. But customer A says or you've got an agreement with customer A that you'll bill them out at eighty dollars an hour. And customer B, you bill them out at one hundred and seventy dollars an hour. That's where you would need a time and materials contract to to manage that, because then it can override that role rate. But otherwise, you don't even need to use a contract because everything will just revert down to that role and bill at whatever that role is specified to bill at.

Yes. So let's let's talk about the work types for a minute. So I have seen pages and pages of work types that have been set up. And, you know, from time to time, somebody will go through and clean it up and inactivate a particular work type. You know, what are your thoughts on the work types?

Is more better or is less better? And, you know, and what do you use them for? That's a great question, Ryan. And actually, I'm probably going to revert back to you on this being the accountant. But it really depends, I guess, on how granular you want to get in your billing.

Right. If you if you want to map everything that you do from a labor perspective and call it managed services labor, then you can just have one one work type called managed services labor. But if you kind of wanted to have it, you know, very specific to say managed service labor for, you know, for for onsite and managed services, labor for remote and managed services, labor for whatever else you do, you want to get granular like that. Then you can actually start to build those out as more granular. But my personal opinion on that is is to keep it as simple as possible and just put everything into, you know, managed managed services labor, for example.

So here's how I approach work types. There's a handful of work types that I think everybody should have. One is going to be some sort of non-billable work type, right? Whether it's, you know, it's admin or sales or sales and marketing, something along those lines, something where people can create a ticket that is not going to result in a billable event to the customer. Another one that I always feel like people should have is a procurement work type, because once you're winning something from the opportunity and then it goes over to procurement and you've got these things on the post sale queue ticket, then there's a ticket just for procuring the products.

So beyond those non-billable work types that I think everybody should have, maybe two or three of those so that, you know, you can adequately count or track the time for certain things. But then we're talking about the billable work types. And these will show up one on the invoice to they're going to map to your accounting system. And you may want them to go to different places on your accounting system. So think about how you want it to appear again on an invoice and on your P&L once it hits your accounting system.

But there's another thing that I really use work types for, and that's for specific exclusions at the contract level. So you might have a recurring service contract, you know, where all remote work is included, except things like project work, moves, adds and changes, things that you want to specifically exclude from certain contracts to automatically get billed. So when you start to think about some of those little details, what will this be included in my contracts? Or, you know, how can my technician or my engineers know? Because we don't want the engineer to think, is this billable or is this not billable?

That's not an engineer's job. The engineer's job is, what kind of work am I doing right now? And when they pick that work type, it's Autotask's job to know whether it's billable or not billable to a particular customer or contract. And so when we get into the contracts and the exclusions, you're going to see how all of this comes into play. But that is how I generally use my work types.

Yeah. And I agree. I mean, it's the exclusion ones I really like. Right. I actually create a work type, which I normally call Max.

Not to be not to be confused with the actual make of computer. The move, add, change. Yeah. Other computer makes are available. But yeah, I call it Max.

Right. And that's moves, adds and changes. And very simply, I take all of that, the Max work type, and I exclude it from every single contract. So I'll say anything that's a moves, adds and change is automatically excluded. And that's actually one of the really nice things when you set up a work type, by the way, is you can tell it to automatically exclude from from all new contracts or you can exclude it from existing contracts that are already there as well.

So you can just go through and say this now I want to be excluded. And then what that will do is that will then revolt, revolt, revolt down onto the roll rates. And that will then bill against the that particular roll rate. So, again, in that particular instance, if you had a moves, adds and change and you set up excluding this from the contract, what that would then do is that would say that moves, adds and changes would be billed at one hundred and twenty dollars or one hundred dollars or whatever. Your rate is unless you put some kind of exclusion against some kind of multiplier against that, which would then give you the ability to say I can charge this moves, adds and change at whatever rate I want to.

Right. So, you know, when you're setting them up, when you're setting up your work type, think about some of those things. What what is it that you do so often that, you know, you need it included or excluded from from certain contracts on site support versus remote support? You know, I'm a huge fan of those two work types installations or initial computer setups or something along those lines. You know, projects, things that generally are not included with, you know, a regular managed services contract.

Managed services contracts are to manage the machines already in place. That doesn't mean you've got free reign to, you know, buy an extra hundred machines and have them set up and installed and onboarded for free. Right. Oh, onboarding and offboarding customer employees. That's another huge one.

You know, how often do you do that? And I venture to say it's probably pretty often given the turnover that a typical larger company might have. Yeah, exactly. So I think, you know, the purpose of this, these podcasts are to kind of think about the considerations of how we set these up. So before you go and actually run kind of headlong into setting up all of these things and just creating work types all over the place, what you really need to do is sit down and say, you know, what am I including in a contract?

What am I excluding? And setting up the work types in such a way that actually makes sense to your engineers as well. Right. Again, it's no point setting up a work type that says something that your engineers don't know what that means. So if it's remote work or it's on site or it's moves, adds and changes or it's installation or, you know, onboarding, offboarding, whatever you want to call it, those are really good names to use for those.

So think about the naming convention that you want to use for those work types as well. And think about based on that, on how you name them. You know, are they ones that are going to be included or excluded? And are they going to confuse your engineers, you know, as to whether it's included or excluded? Which your engineers, by the way, don't really need to know or care.

All they need to know is I'm doing a moves, adds and change. Therefore, that's the work type I'm selecting. And then, as you said earlier on, Autotask takes care of the rest for you. It decides whether it's going to be included or excluded from a contract, whether it's going to, you know, back that off to a different contract, whatever the case might be. But what you need to do when you're setting up Autotask is to think about what you want to name those work types to be.

And, you know, and like you said, is the work going to be billable? Is it going to be included? Is it not going to be included? Which doesn't really apply over here, but I think more so over there. Is that work going to be taxable or not taxable as well?

You know, over here in the UK and Europe, pretty much everything is taxable, whether it's labour and or products. So we don't really have to worry about the taxable or non-taxable. But I guess you guys do over there as well. So I always say when it comes to setting these things up and maybe that's just me, but I write everything down on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard. So I go, OK, work type, you know, on-site support, billable.

Or I put a B next to it and I go administration and I put an N next to it for non-billable. And I literally write them down on a piece of paper until I've got all of them that I need. And then I go right now, I'm going to go in and create these in Autotask. And then I'm going to at that point determine whether it's included and excluded from the contract as well. Yeah, I do.

Literally almost the exact same thing. And if I could just add one more thought to that is when you're building that list for your company and you start to wonder, well, did I capture everything? Do I have too much? Do I not have enough? Once you have your initial list, sit down with your team.

Make sure that it makes sense, not just to you, but also to them, like Chris had just mentioned, because they need to understand what kind of work they're going to be doing. You know, have a sit down with them for 10 minutes. Everybody give everybody the list. You know, what do you think of these workloads? Do we have everything that we need?

And cross off the stuff that you don't need or, you know, maybe you add one or two more. But by all means, you probably have no need for a list of more than 10 work types for your business. You know, there's just no reason to overcomplicate things. Certainly not at the beginning. When you're brand new to Autotask, keep things as simple and uncomplicated as possible because there's so much to learn about the entire system that you don't want to overcomplicate things by having a bunch of long lists to weed through.

So this was a great conversation, Chris. Yeah, what a fun episode this was, Rayanne. And next week we're going to talk about cues and statuses and the considerations around those. So, you know, hopefully that was useful for everyone. So tune in next week where we'll be continuing with the series and going through talking about cues and work type or cues and statuses, I should say.

So really all that's left for me to say, Rayanne, is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So 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.