[27] – Autotask Implementation Series: Creating Users & Burden Rates

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? I'm good, thank you. Lovely, wet, rainy day here in the UK.

What's the weather doing for you over there? Well, I'm in Florida, right? So it is a beautiful blue sky, and we've got awesome weather. We're down in the low 70s, and fall is definitely here. Oh, I've still got to get myself on a plane and come over, so I'll do that as soon as I can.

So, Rayanne, what did you want to talk about today? I know we have our series going on the back end stuff, so, yeah, what did you have for us today? So, last week we were talking about things like work types and ticket statuses and things of that nature, and I thought, you know, while we're still in the initial setup, it's time to enter the team into Autotask. So, we have a bunch of team members, and we need everybody to have their own login, and so I thought that we could talk about all of the things that are involved in, you know, creating the team member. Oh, Rayanne, you've got to stop doing this to me.

We're always talking about my absolute favorite topics, and users and resources and security levels, one of my favorite things to talk about in Autotask. Well, here we go, then. We're going to have a ball. So, okay, so what's the first thing that we do, right? We go into the admin center and start adding our users, and, of course, the first thing that you should know is that every time you add a user that's not an API user, it's going to cost you money.

So, you'll get a little pop-up, and it'll say, hey, there's, you know, we're going to add a license to your contract, and you say okay, and then all of a sudden your bill goes up. So, don't be surprised. You know, so don't start adding a bunch of fake users just to have somebody to, you know, play around with, you know, like in a sandbox. So, then you go in, you add in the name and the email address and all of that stuff, and then you get to the security tab. So, Chris, let's talk about the security levels that you can set at the user level.

Yeah, great, you know, great question, Rae-Ann, and in terms of just to point out, there are actually two user levels or two user types that you don't get billed for. So, one of them is dashboard users or wall board users, I guess, as they used to be called, and as you say, API users. And for those who haven't set up users for a while on the system, you'll notice there are actually, you know, two specific places where you set them up. So, the first one is under the users tab. You'll see it says users, and then there's another sort of drop-down tab from there where you specifically set up API users.

So, they are set up very, very differently to a normal user, and that allows you to then, you know, use that user for integrations and all that kind of stuff. So, but yeah, in terms of the security levels, you were talking about, you know, what we need to do with this, and one of the things I see all the time is, you know, when somebody is creating those users, you know, by default, they'll either copy another user that's on the system, which I'll talk about shortly, or they create a brand-new user, and they always give it the system administrator role. And of course, you know, I think it goes without saying with any product, it's a big no-no to give somebody, you know, system administrator, you know, rights or privileges when they're just a service desk user. So, make sure that you're changing those, and make sure you're looking at those security levels to change those for users. I totally agree, because there's a lot of sensitive information that you might not want all of your employees to have access to, such things as the burden rates that we're going to talk about when we're setting up each of the employees, and all of the different, you know, the hours and stuff like that.

There's a lot of sensitive information, what you're invoicing the customers. You know, not everybody needs to see that kind of information. Only give your people exactly what they need in order to do their job. Absolutely. And in saying that, Rayanne, actually, you know, there is a security level that allows you to, even as a full admin user, you can block certain parts of the admin module, right?

So, you can go into there, and you can say, you know, if you're an admin user, you can see everything except the users and resources. So, you could actually still have a kind of a lower level admin user, and give them the ability to still actually not see certain things. But there are a bunch of security levels on the system that allow you to, you know, that are preset with things like a service desk user automatically doesn't get any of the admin stuff at all. So, you know, rather start to look at those, and start to figure out what do you want those users to be able to do, and then change those security levels accordingly, and assign them to your users. And you should do that before you give your user his username and password, or his login details, purely because, you know, I just see so many people going, yeah, I'll come back to that.

And six months down the line, they still have admin users on the system. Right. You know, except with the new login for users, you no longer set the password for users and give them their login, right? So, Autotask is going to automatically, as soon as you set that user up, it's going to email them an invitation for them to set up their own password and 2FA. So, you want to make sure that you choose a security level before you hit save on that, because they're going to get notified, like, immediately.

And, you know, the best, I've always found that the best course of action is to give a user as few permissions as possible, and let them tell you when they can't get to something that they need, right? So, just like, you know, in Microsoft 365, as you're doling out permissions to your various users, you're going to start them at the very basic standard user level. If they need to do something more, then you can always escalate those permissions. Same thing with that. Absolutely.

And I alluded to earlier on around, you know, how to create these or how to set user accounts up. And one of the ways you can do it is you can obviously manually, you know, just click on new and fill in all the boxes. But you and I both know, Rae-Ann, that, you know, life's too short to create a new user from scratch in certain, in some of the PSA tools like Autotask, because it has to fill in a million screens. And that's not even an exaggeration, right? I mean, so, what I always say is, obviously, you know, there's going to at least be one user on the system whenever you buy Autotask for the first time.

And you can simply copy that user. If you just right-click on it and say copy, then all the required fields that you need for that user are already pre-filled in. The only thing you need to do is to obviously put in their first name, their last name, their email address, and their login details. And then, you know, all the other stuff you can configure later, but at least that's going to get you to a point where you only need to fill in a few bits and pieces of information for it. You just said something that reminded me of things like, you know, you can actually customize these security levels.

And so, one thing that you might do is say, okay, I'm going to set up a security level just for all of the help desk people, right? So, that, and you can call that security level help desk, security level. And so, you can go in and say, I want the help desk to have this, this, this, this, and this, but not any of these other things. And then, you know, as you are creating new users, take one of the help desk users, right click on it or hover over the hamburger and copy that user. And then, just like you said, enter in the name and the email address, and it's already going to have their department.

It's already going to have the roles that are assigned to them. All of those things will already be in there. You'll just have to put in, you know, specific information to that user, just like burden rates, pay rates, that sort of thing. Absolutely. And we'll come on to that very shortly.

But just, you know, one other thing I wanted to mention on that is when you are creating the user's login, by default, you'll see, you know, it'll have your domain name. So, it'll be username, app, whatever your domain name is. Now, one of the things I always recommend people to do is don't use your real email address on it. It doesn't actually have to be your email address. You could create that as, you know, chris.tim at whatever domain name or, you know, even though that's not your email address.

And, you know, that just adds an extra level of security. A lot of people in there just assume that that is their email address on the user account page. So, they fill that in as being their email address. And it doesn't have to be and probably shouldn't actually be your email address as well. Right.

So, a lot of times you can still receive the email at your real email address. So, the email address on the front page of the resource box, you know, where you put in the person's name and then email address, that's the email address that Autotask is going to use to communicate with you. Then on the second screen, you know, the login name, that's going to be, you know, something or whomever at yourdomain.com. And, you know, that can be anything that you want. Like you said, it does not need to be and maybe in many cases should not be your email address.

Absolutely. I think people get confused by that. They just assume it's the email address. And I always recommend my clients to just use something other than your email address. For no other reason than it just provides an extra level of security that if somebody was ever to hack into your Autotask, you know, we use our email addresses for everything these days to log into.

And, you know, just that extra level of security saying it's not my email address is, you know, what I always recommend to do. And make sure, please, when you set up these user accounts, make sure that you do turn on the two-factor authentication. In fact, I think now it's a requirement anyway with Autotask. You have to turn it on anyhow. But just make sure that you use that or you use, you know, the single sign-on with your Office 365 accounts or something like that.

But just, you know, make it as secure as you possibly can. Now is it time to get to your really favorite topic? Yes, I'm desperately wanting to talk about the next bit because I know exactly what's coming and I know what we're going to talk about. So do you want to fire off on that, Raeanne? So, yes, I would love to because I'm equally passionate about labor burden rates, right?

So you get to the HR tab on the resource page and you put in the number of hours that everybody's expected to work during the week, their holiday schedule, their vacation time off schedule, which, of course, can be set up. And I don't know if you recommend that people use the time off schedule, but I always recommend that they set up the holiday schedule and the PTO schedule so that they can track a lot of that stuff right inside Autotask. Then there is a rate at the very bottom of the screen and everybody needs to have one. And so one of the mistakes I see a lot of people make is that they think that that is the equivalent hourly rate of the gross wage. And that's not really the case, is it?

No. So you're talking about the internal cost of the engineer. Yes. So the internal cost of the engineer is exactly what it sounds like. It is the cost of the engineer, but it's not, like you say, just the hourly rates.

There needs to be some burden added on to that. So, you know, things like, I guess, over there in the U.S., you work it out slightly differently, but things like Social Security and pension and, you know, all of these kind of employer costs that you would add to have that employee working for you. Those are the sorts of things that you need to add as a burden to get the true cost of what that engineer actually costs your business. So I've taught classes on this. You probably know that.

You know, and there is a big long list of things that you can manually add up and get an exact burden rate. We even have a spreadsheet on that that I presented at our webinar that we did back in October. Right. So. So, yeah, you get the employer taxes and the health insurance and, you know, the employee benefits and the pension and all of that other stuff added all up and find out how much this employee costs your company to work there.

And that's the number that you want to build into auto task so that for every hour that employee works, that fully burdened labor rate is what gets calculated as the cost against that time. Right. So, you know what that person is costing and how much you're really making on that customer. So for somebody who doesn't want to go through that entire long calculation, do you have a standard rate that you use in the UK that they can estimate and get pretty close to what the actual burden rate is? Yeah, great question.

And I mean, here in the UK and I guess it's the same over there in the US, the kind of common standard practice that most people use is around about 30 percent. That's going to get you relatively close to to all of those burdens that you mentioned. So, you know, you take your hourly rates, you times it by 30 percent and that's going to give you a figure. And that's pretty much going to be, you know, fairly accurate as to as to what all of those employer costs would be. The other thing.

And it's funny you mentioned about, you know, how to work these out because I've seen so many people kind of trying to work out burden rates right down to the nth degree. I've literally seen people say, you know, like, well, the guy uses a pen that I supplied to him and the pen cost me 30 cents. And so therefore, I'm going to add that 30 cents. And, you know, you know, life's just far too short to work out the burden rate right down to the nth degree. You know, there's an argument that it's probably more accurate doing that.

But you really don't need to go right down to to that kind of level to work the burden right off. Have you kind of seen that happen as well a few times? Oh, from time to time, I will run into somebody who, you know, really does go through excruciating steps in order to calculate a labor burden rate. And then they want to do that on a monthly basis because, you know, well, what if something changed or something drastic changed? Like, for instance, the price of the monthly health care that the company provides or the person got a raise.

Yes. Then it's time to recalculate that burden rate for that person. You know, but like you said, if they if they took an extra pen out of the supply closet or if they, you know, maybe are now getting a 20 dollar cell phone reimbursement or something. I agree with you that I think, you know, just you just don't really need to go that far into it. You know, don't spend hours and days and hire a full time cost accountant to just try to figure out burden rates on a daily basis, because every time you change that burden rate, you know, it's going to it's going to take an immediate effect on all of your reports.

And it's not going to go backwards, but it will go forward. So, yeah, you can make those changes every month. But what benefit are you really getting out of that? You know, and that's I think what you were trying to say is that life is just far too short to be chasing that kind of penny. So, you know, what you could do, you know, like you were saying about the average burden rate.

If you're in a high rent district, you know, like let's say you're in let's say you're in New York or San Francisco where, you know, life is really very expensive. You know, then maybe your burden rate is going to be 35 percent, you know, and if you are in, you know, a less high rent district, you know, like Florida, for instance, maybe you're going to be closer to 30, you know, or if you're super rural, maybe it's going to be closer to 27. So find out approximately what it is for you and then apply that percentage across the board in your company. Be consistent. And, you know, and it will be a lot easier to maintain, I think, going forward.

I agree, Rayanne, and I think I think we're both in agreement that, you know, using a percentage, you know, over your hourly rate or the cost of your engineer is about what most people should be doing. And the recommended way of really working these burdens out. You know, and like saying in, you know, certainly in the UK, you know, if you're in London, you're probably going to actually maybe even make that closer to 40 percent because, you know, London is a very, very expensive place to live in. If you live where I live, where, you know, rents are cheap, you might even be able to get away with going as low as 20 percent. But, you know, the average normally that we find, you know, works for most people is round about 30 percent.

But, you know, the listeners need to figure out for themselves what, you know, what it is in their area that makes the most sense and use that that percentage, you know, across the board with all the employees in the company. OK, so then after we get through the HR tab, it's time to move over to the next step. We've got a couple of other tabs that most people generally forget until they hit the save and close button and realize that they have been entered the critical information of the department and the roles. So we went through the roles last week and remember what we said about the role of the role is to have a billing rate. Right.

So everybody needs to have a standard or default role and everybody needs to have a default department. So when you're talking about things like departments and because I don't think we touched on the departments last time, you know, what are your thoughts on those departments? Do we need a bunch of them? We well, we need to at least have one department set up in the system. So so by default, you know, everyone needs to be part of a department.

And I was actually asked the other day about those departments and they are just physically, you know, departments that you would have within your organisation. If you have people who are in a service day school, you have people who are in accounts or finance or whatever. You know, you can have multiple departments for all of those people. But I find that, you know, most people just kind of have a standard department, put everybody into those and then assign the roles and the work types against those deaf departments so that everyone has has the same. Right.

I don't go crazy with departments either, like service desk or service delivery or technical or whatever could be one department. And I also generally create an administration department, you know, for any of the admin workers. You know, let them head up admin because that's generally a non billable type of department. And if it's a larger company, you may need a few more. Like you were saying, a sales department or a finance department or something like that.

But, you know, when you start to get to the 10 to 20 users, you can probably get away with three departments. Your operations, your administration and your sales. Absolutely. I agree. And, you know, I think with with all of those and I'm a big fan of less is more.

The less you have, the easier it becomes when you have to troubleshoot something or you have to, you know, go back and make a change of some kind. The fewer bits of information you have, the better. And don't overcomplicate it by, you know, speaking in like 10,000 departments and putting everybody in a different department. And again, life's too short. You just got to kind of get it to a point where, like you say, you have one or two departments and everyone fits into one of those those two departments.

I think that's where you and I, you know, are always in agreement. Right. You know, keep it simple for as long as possible. There's plenty of time to overcomplicate your auto task, but wait until you understand it a little bit better and are really more comfortable. And then you can complicate it all you want.

But when you're starting out, keep it simple. Don't you know, don't overcomplicate things. They just are not yet complicated. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And I mean, on that on that same tab. So, you know, you were talking about the departments and the roles, that kind of thing. There's also the service desk queues that are sitting in that role in that tab as well. So, you know, every every engineer or every every person that's that's using all the tasks will be assigned to a service desk queue. For those listeners who are coming in from from ConnectWise, that's kind of very similar to a board.

But, you know, you'd have a queue and if you're assigned to the queue, you can see the tickets in that queue. I kind of always say, you know, if you're on the list, you're getting in. If you're not on the list, you're not getting in. And it's pretty much a case of, you know, if you have that queue, you know, assigned against your user, then you'll have visibility over the tickets within that queue. It doesn't mean, though, that you can't move tickets into that queue using the forward modify.

It just means, you know, from a from a widget perspective or or anything that's sitting in that queue, you know, you wouldn't be able to have access or have visibility of that queue unless you had it assigned to you in your user. Right. And so you make a really good point because a lot of people might say, well, what about my admin person? Why do I have to put them in a queue? They're never going to they're never going to grab a help desk ticket, but they will have tickets and they will have tickets assigned to them and they won't even see them.

If it's not, you know, one assigned to them and two into their their queue, because Autotask is very, very detailed in that, you know, it's only going to let people see things that they are entitled to see. Right. There's one, you know, staying on the user setup screen. There's one thing I wanted to point out around the approvers tab. So there seems to be a huge amount of confusion around, you know, how the kind of the timesheet and the expense approvers work as well, especially in Autotask.

So, again, you know, every single user needs a timesheet approver and an expense approver. Now, a timesheet approver is is actually anything to do with with time, whether that be even though it's called timesheet, it actually is also a time off approver as well. So somebody that has, you know, your line manager who's going to approve your your leave or your PTO, whatever it is, they are going to be needed to be added to the timesheet approvers tab. And a lot of people get confused because they say, well, we don't use timesheets or we're not going to need to approve timesheets. So we're not going to fill anything in there.

That is time approvers, you know, time off or something to that effect that needs to go in there as well. Right. And that's another one of those tabs that people forget they have to click on and put something in is the approvers tab. And you may not be using timesheets today, but perhaps at some point in the future, you may decide it makes a lot of sense in order to have everybody put all of their time in to the timesheets and have somebody actually look at it at the end of the week. So many people fall into the bad habit of only posting time that was on a ticket and not looking at the overall time for the week.

But when we get to the reports, especially the resource utilization reports, that information is super critical, you know, for you to determine how billable or how much of how much of each person's time is actually being spent on billable or client work versus, you know, all of the other time in a given week or in a given day that's not assigned to any ticket. What are they doing? And if they're forced to put three hours on on administrative time on their timesheet, that's going to make your employees stop and think for a minute. Hey, wait a minute. What did I do for those three hours?

So, you know, it's actually a really good thing. And it's even better to have somebody take a look at it once a week. Absolutely. And it's funny you were just saying about, you know, it's one of those things in all the tasks, you know, you need to have a timesheet approver, whether or not you approve timesheets or whether or not you approve expense reports. You still have to have somebody in there.

It reminds me of a guy I used to work with many, many years ago, actually from from your side of the world across the pond. And, you know, whenever you would say to him, why do I have to do something? Why do you have to do this on the system? His first response would be, you just gotta. There's no reason why you just got to do it.

Right. And so, you know, people ask, why do I need a timesheet approver? Why do I need this? You just got to order task, expect you to have one. So just put it in.

I'm going to I'm going to steal that as my new catchphrase. You just gotta. Just go. So, yeah. And then, you know, there's there's a whole bunch of other tabs that, you know, there's there's obviously your skills and attachments as well.

So you can go and set up things like you just briefly talk about those skills for a minute, because for the most part, I find that most people totally skip that tab. And, you know, is there anything useful for people inside that skills tab? So, yeah, I mean, so skills, obviously, that's going to be where you're going to put in, you know, what skills that engineer has, what certificates and training and degrees and all those kind of things that they have. And one of the things you can then do is when you start to to assign an engineer to to a ticket, you can actually say, you know, I want to pick an engineer that is skilled in, you know, Office 365 or has a CompTIA certification or something like that. Again, that's probably going to be something that's going to be used in a bigger company where you might be managing hundreds of people and you don't know what skill sets they have.

But you say, you know, for this particular ticket or project, I need to have somebody that has these particular skills. And it gives you the ability to to look through those that that skill set or those degrees or whatever the case might be and pick your engineer based on those. I always advocate people filling those in as well, though, because I think it's a it's a really good way to firstly know, especially if you're you know, if you have some kind of thing in your company where you're forcing people to actually go down some kind of certification route. You want to know what certifications they have. You want them to be captured and stored in an audit task.

And you can even give the users the ability to go in and update those skills themselves. So the last thing that I want to talk about is that once you hit that save and close button and your your employee or coworkers get invited to use Autotask, encourage them that once they log in, you know, and set up their 2FA, of course, because that is mandatory now. But in the upper right hand corner, when they see their name, you know, with the the in out slider button, they can click on their name and upload a picture of themselves and fill out their profile, you know, and really kind of personalize Autotask for themselves. They can, you know, see what's going to be on their home screen. They can change it from the dashboard to the ticket board or whatever.

But always encouraging people to get in there and customize Autotask so that it works for them. Yeah. And there is a section in there where they can go in and update their skills. You know, all of that kind of stuff will change the, you know, change the theme, change the landing page, make it dark mode, all those kind of things. And yeah, and that's when you do it once the user is set up.

So all of those tabs we've just talked about, you know, a lot of those are mandatory and you would have to fill those in. And that's why I say, you know, when it comes to creating a user, don't manually create the user because you've got to go in and assign all of that stuff to it. Rather, copy a user that's there already. And then things like, you know, the time sheet approvers and the expense report approvers and, you know, the roles and the queues and all those kinds of things are already there. And then you only have to pretty much fill in the first two tabs, at least to get the user accounts set up and created.

Right. So that was a great conversation today. Thanks for that. What's on our list for next time? So, yeah, it was a great, great topic.

So next time we're going to talk about products and services. We're going to talk about the difference between products and services. We're also going to talk about, you know, inventory items versus configuration items, how they work, how to set them up, all of those kind of things. Because I think there's a lot of confusion around that. So if anyone is specifically interested in those topics, then tune in to next week's episode and we'll be talking about that.

So, yeah, I've had a lot of fun today, Rae-Ann. Thank you very much for your time. And all that is left for me to say is the PSA is the key to your business success. So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris.

Thanks, Rae-Ann. Cheers. See ya. 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.