[35] – Autotask Implementation Series: Revisiting Covered Topics

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP. With your hosts, Rayan Bucianico 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. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact.

With your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayan Bucianico. Hey, Rayan, how are you doing? I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you? How are things on the other side of the pond today?

Everything's great. It's almost spring, so it's getting a lot warmer, and so life is all good. I can't hate that. Absolutely. So, Rayan, what have we got on the agenda to talk about today?

Well, Chris, we've been doing this Audit to Ask implementation series for I don't even know how many weeks now. But one thing, I'm not certain that we ever really mapped out what we were going to cover in which episodes and why we have chosen a particular order to cover these things. I thought that if we just took a step back, revisit some of the things we've already covered, and then talk about why we have chosen this particular order, it might really help our listeners when they are doing their own implementation to understand that we did not just arbitrarily choose these topics in this order. There was a very specific reason. What are your thoughts on that?

That's a great thing to talk about, Rayan. Of course, everything we've spoken about so far in this whole podcast series, you know exactly what I'm going to say. Do I? It's your favorite topics. No, I'm kidding.

It's my absolute favorite thing to talk about. You're right. We've covered off of everything. We've covered off everything, how you set up the back end. We've talked about setting up your burden rates, and we've talked about queues, and statuses, and work types, all those kinds of things.

We then went on to talk about in the CRM, the opportunity, the stages, all of those kinds of things, and then went into billing and finance. As you say, there's a reason we've done that, and there's something actually that probably a lot of people at this point are thinking, well, there's actually a fundamental part of the system you've left out, and that's deliberate. The thing that we've left out is the service desk. And there's a reason we've gone through this in this particular sequence, because this is where people should really be focusing on setting these things up in a particular order with service desk kind of towards the end. And I just wanted to kind of get your take on that.

I mean, when you do implementations with customers, I'm sure you kind of agree with some of the processes that I use, and we leave service desk kind of toward the end. And is that the case with you? And what is your reasons for doing that? Yeah, quite frankly, I leave the service desk to pretty close to the end. Let me see if there were, if there are any things that I would cover after the service desk, but for instance, the projects module.

And I call the projects module its own separate animal. Yes, it's inside Autotask, and it's a part of it. But when you decide to take on the projects and implement the projects in your company, that's a completely different conversation from implementation. And we will get to the projects. And so some of the things that we have not yet covered is inventory, purchasing and procurement, and the service desk, and the ticketing system.

And I'll tell you why I try to leave those more towards the end. When I'm doing an implementation with, just as somebody straight out of the, just brand new, signed up with Autotask, the first thing I do is, let's get your logo, let's do all of your backend, let's set up the line of business, let's talk about your services and your work types. Who's going to be doing the work? How are you going to handle the escalation? That sort of thing, and we get all of that stuff set up.

But more times than not, I get companies that come to me that they've been using Autotask for about two or three, four or five years, and all they've ever used it for was the ticketing system. And I'm sure that you see this too, right? So because as soon as you get Autotask, the first thing that you're going to do is you're going to open it up and create yourself a ticket and boom, you're off to the races. But the thing is, is that it turns invoicing into an absolute nightmare, because some things are covered under contracts and some things are not covered under contracts. And if you don't have the contract set up, then somebody has to manually say, hmm, is this ticket billable?

Is this ticket billable? Did I really mean to charge this amount? No, I promised this client I would charge this other amount, but you don't have any contracts set up to automate this process. Now your invoicing takes five or six hours instead of 25 minutes. Tell me about some of your experiences, because I'm sure we could talk about this all day.

Absolutely, and you know what? I think you and I are literally on the exact same page with this. I do the service delivery element, as I call it, which is kind of the service desk and projects toward the very end. And like yourself, I leave procurement and purchase orders and all of that kind of good stuff, I leave till the very end. And I do the service delivery element, which is always going to be the service desk side first and then the projects.

But I will almost never install the service desk or get the service desk set up and working in an implementation before I've done the contracts. And I have so many people come to me that have just signed up with Datto. They've got the product, they've logged in, and they go, right, I need you to help me set up the service desk. And I say, well, let's just put the brakes on at this point because yes, we're going to set up the service desk, absolutely, that's what you're going to be using most of the system for. However, there are so many other things we need to do first before we get the service desk set up.

And like you mentioned, things like billing, the billing and the contracts underpins everything we do in the PSA, right? So if we don't have the contracts in place first, how are we ever going to know how much time our engineers are spending on a particular customer's contract? How are we ever going to know if we're profitable with our customer? Yes, we can run some reports on how long we spent on those tickets. But I see some people just delve in and start doing tickets without even entering burden rates.

So at that point, you don't even know how much the time has cost you. And all too often, I see that so many times. And part of the reason for that fundamentally is I think people, and I bang on about this in my book, and I talk about this in so many other podcasts or things that I'm on. I always talk about this that it's purely because fundamentally people choose the PSA for the wrong reasons. They buy it because they need a service desk.

They don't buy it because they want a business management tool. And it's really important when you're going through the implementation phase to just hold fire. We'll get the service desk set up, but it's going to be right toward the very end because we need to make sure that we're getting all that billing in place first. As you say, because otherwise it takes you five hours to fix all of that stuff when it could actually just take you 20 minutes. Exactly.

And even if you're running the tickets first without the contracts, and you say, oh, I'll get to the contracts later, and then three, four, six months down the road, you're finally ready to set up your contracts. Now you've got all of these tickets that have already been approved, posted, and invoiced out to the customer, whether they were correct or not. But now you don't even have the historical value as to what was covered under the contract during that time. You literally have to start almost from scratch and start your contract year over at that moment so that you can even see whether those contracts are profitable or not. So there's just so many reasons not to jump straight into that service desk and start issuing tickets.

I know that when you sign up for Autotask, you're thinking, finally, I can at least start to track my time, and I can have my texts put their time into tickets, and now I'm a grown-up MSP with a ticketing system, and I get that. But there's a really, really good reason why you do this stuff in a particular order. And yes, we're dragging this thing out because we're going into all of the details, but if our listeners are listening to this and then implement Autotask in the order that we do it, they could probably have the whole thing set up and run in three days. I know that I've gone on-site with clients, and I've been able to set up Autotask from beginning to end and be back out the door in three days. So it's not like we're asking you to make a huge time commitment in order to get these things set up properly, but because it can be done quickly, it just needs to be done in a particular order.

Absolutely, and I mean, when I do implementations, I sometimes, depending on whether they need PSA and or RMM, it's normally a 10 or 15-hour block, and I can actually easily get the entire Autotask PSA system set up in 10 hours, purely because it really doesn't take that long to set up. I mean, I'm talking about not having every single contract in place, admittedly, but certainly putting certain contracts into place and showing how the contracts work and setting them up for a few clients. So it's not a 10-hour process in that respect, but certainly getting it to a point where all the backend settings are set up, the contracts for one or two key clients are in place already, and then kind of getting the service desk element set up and tested with those few clients. We can easily do that in a very, very short space of time. And the thing I find, and you mentioned this earlier on, about people are so eager to kind of, they're a grown-up company, and they're suddenly going, now I just want to get tickets in the system and I want to start tracking my time.

Do you know what? You can't do that with any ticketing system under the planet. You do not need a PSA tool to do that. So if your purpose in life is to be a grown-up MSP and start tracking your time, and that's all you want to do, then don't buy a PSA tool. Then you need to go and buy a Zendesk or some other kind of ticketing tool, because you're going to be able to track your time just like that.

Yeah, and in fact, you don't even need to buy a service desk tool, because there's a billion of them out there that are free, and they will do just as good a job at tracking your time as a PSA tool would do. So if you're going to buy a PSA tool, don't go into it buying it as a service desk. Look at it as the bigger picture. Buy it as a tool that is going to run your entire business and set it up in such a way that you're getting all the contracts in so that you can start tracking profitability from day one. You mentioned earlier on, again, about people might use it for three, four, five, six months, two years, whatever the case might be.

And then you've got all these tickets that have been logged over that period of time that you've never billed for out of the system. You're still manually billing for stuff out of your other accounting tool, and you've got no way of tracking profitability on any of those tickets. So make sure you get, at the very least, get a few key clients into the system that you can actually start to bill those clients directly out of all the tasks before you even start thinking about how you're going to set up the service desk. Right, and it's interesting that you say that you sell an implementation in 10 or 15-hour blocks. That's literally exactly what I do, too.

So after the initial backend step, let's import your customers. I'll help them export their customer list from their accounting system or whatever it is that they're using, get them into Autotask and set up some of the basic stuff that we've already covered. But the number one thing that I'm trying to get to is let's get to contracts, because contracts can get us to invoicing, invoicing gets you money, and that's a quick win. And I think that that's probably the number one important piece is the contract, because the contract controls everything in Autotask. Yeah, absolutely.

And so that's why we've been going through this series in a particular order. And I know there's many people out there, MSPs that would probably disagree with what you and I are saying, as they go, well, we've used Autotask for many years and we've used it very successfully using the service desk, but not one of those people is billing or at the very least billing properly out of the system. Right, so it's really important to make sure that you are getting these things set up in an order. It's the same thing as on part of the backend system, there's a reason why we put burden rates in first, or right near the beginning, because we don't wait until we've got everything set up and then go, oh yeah, now we need to think about burden rates. We need to think about the costs of the engineers, because we do that right in the beginning so that we can start to track those costs, that even if you do have some clients where you might still run them through the ticketing system without a contract on the backend, at the very least, you're gonna have the burden rates entered in there.

So now you can track how much that work is actually costing you, rather than just blindly sending an invoice for $100 to a customer and having no idea how much that work has actually cost. So, the very first thing I do, literally, I actually go and put the burden rates in, literally even before I put in the logos and all these other kinds of things when I help somebody implement it, purely because it's just, that's the first thing that I stamp into the system to go, now we know the burden rates are in there. And anyway, we're talking about setting up, creating the user accounts and all these kinds of things, and it's in that same place. So we just go, let's make sure we get all of this stuff into the system first. Then we can talk about all the other cool stuff like logos and all these other wonderful things that we can put in, but we make sure we get that stuff in first.

So, we're probably, I'm gonna say halfway through the implementation series, would you agree? And last episode, we were talking about contracts, and I'm not certain, I know that we talked about all of the different types of contracts and things of that nature, but I know that we didn't take it all the way through billing, so we'll likely need to talk about that in a future episode. And of course, inventory purchasing and procurement, which inventory is kind of my jam, so I'm really looking forward to the inventory management and purchasing and procurement, because I just love putting those systems together. And I'm perfectly okay with escalating service desk in front of the purchasing and procurement, because even that, I think, is its own piece and can be implemented at any time. Really, but if you think about it, the purchasing and procurement comes off the tails of CRM and the opportunities and the quotes.

So, maybe we missed the opportunity to even talk about it, but I think we can implement that pretty much at any level. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're right. I mean, there's so much more that we can talk about on the contract side. I mean, just in terms of the billing, you were talking about us going through the contract section, and we've gone through that, but we haven't really talked much about what does billing actually mean, right?

Because in Autotask, it's effectively a two-step process. So, we've got the billing process, which is what we call approve and post, and then we've got the invoice process, where we actually need to generate and create those invoices. And I think a lot of people get confused with, well, I've run the approve and post, how come the stuff isn't arriving in my accounting tool? And that's because they're not running the processing of the invoices. So, there's a whole bunch of things we need to still go through and discussing the little intricacies about how the billing or the billing slash invoicing process happens in Autotask.

And I know that's where, and I know that's going to be your absolute favorite topic to talk about because you're an expert when it comes to invoicing and billing, and you're definitely my go-to person when it comes to finding out stuff about the invoicing and billing in Autotask. And, yeah, hey, I was talking with a, I was talking with a client a couple of days ago, and their accounting person, their bookkeeping person is really struggling with products versus services. And I know that we covered that, but if I could just touch on this for a little bit, because maybe you can help me find a way to explain it to this person so that it will really resonate with them. So here's the thing. We're setting up recurring service contracts, and I encourage them to put in their Microsoft 365 suite as services.

And the problem that this person is having is that she sees this as a product. Well, it might be a product in your accounting system, but what, you're not keeping inventory of the Microsoft 365 licenses, and you want to invoice it on a regular basis, on a regular recurring basis, and we always call it software as a service, right? So in my mind, Microsoft 365 licenses, those are services. But when I come across somebody who adamantly views that as a product, how do you handle that? That's a great question, and I get this all the time as well.

People get really confused with products and services, because actually there are some instances where they can kind of be the same thing. So you can have a product being a service and a service being a product, but typically, and I say typically because most of the time, a service is, as you say, that is something that you're gonna sell on a term basis, so monthly, quarterly, yearly, whatever the case might be, and you're gonna have that recurring revenue element of that. A product, again, is something typically that you're gonna sell as a one-off, right? So a server or a workstation or some kind of product of some kind, some physical thing that you can sell to somebody. That is generally what hardware is gonna be and what a product is gonna be.

A service is gonna be something, like I said, that you sell over a term basis. Now, there are some instances where products can be services, and actually, Audato doesn't make it easy these days because they confuse things a little bit because they now have these things called billing products, which are actually, well, are not really products as such because they're not something physical. It's kind of more a way to bill for something, so a way to bill for a configuration item or a user, neither of which are really products in their own right, although a configuration item needs a product in order to become a configuration item, and a user isn't really a product at all, but Audato has kind of made those as billing products. So that makes it even more confusing with the difference between a product and service, but for the most part, for listeners that are sitting here thinking like, what the heck is he talking about? It really is, just think about anything that you sell once off is gonna be a product, and anything that you're gonna sell on a term basis, on a recurring revenue basis, that's gonna typically be a service.

That makes it much easier. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna try that tomorrow in my meeting, and I'll let you know how that works out. You know, at least for like two weeks, I've been trying to, you know, I've been trying to find a way to break through the barriers, and they want to be able to invoice out of other tasks by the end of the month, and I can't even get the bookkeeper to agree to allow me to turn on the integration with their QuickBooks because of, you know, the differences in their thought process between products and services, and they want it to come over as a product, and instead it's coming over as a service, and I think once it gets into QuickBooks, it doesn't really much matter, you know, because other tasks is just gonna push that invoice in, but I'm getting away from myself here. But thank you for that, that was a huge help. Yeah, absolutely, and I mean, you know, I think that's another topic we really need to discuss in a future episode is all about where things need to map to in all the tasks when they come over into the accounting tool, because so many people get confused about, you know, billing codes, and should the billing codes actually, you know, match my chart of accounts, and should they be the same, and, you know, and there's just so much confusion around what those should be set to be, and, you know, I think that could be an episode on its own, and, you know, and I'd like to get listeners to reach out to us and let us know if that's something that they wanna hear, because, yeah, all the time I'm getting that kind of question from people.

Right, you know, and things are even worse here in the States with sales tax, with every state having something different taxed, and then we have all of these plug-in applications that will manage the sales tax for you, and I find that they often cause more problems than they solve, so, yeah, I think, I agree, it could be an entire episode all on its own. I mean, you guys have some crazy, crazy tax rules over there in the US, and, you know, I work with a bunch of American customers, and, you know, I sit there scratching my head, and I'm like, why have you got all the, you know, it's just way too confusing. You've got state tax and city tax, and this tax and that tax, and these things aren't taxable. You know, over here in the UK, everything's taxable. Products, services, everything, and it's taxable at one rate, at 20%, and that's it.

So, you know, which is great, right, because it makes it so much easier. You set one rate, one tax rate, and that's it. Everything, you know, products, services, doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter where you're selling it to in the country, it's taxable. There's something to be said for the simplicity in that, you know, and there's been a group in the United States for years trying to push a flat tax, you know, just a tax on everything. You know, it doesn't matter if you're buying a house, a car, you know, or a stick of gum, you're paying the same tax rates, so, yeah.

So I think, you know, what's really left on this, and I think a lot of our listeners probably want to know. Yeah, so let's start to plan out the rest of this series so that they can follow along. Absolutely, so next up, you know, next week's episode, we're going to start talking about the service delivery side, so start talking about the service desk, you know, what it entails. We'll go back over queues and statuses and ticket categories, you know, and also talk about the customer portal, because that's changed a lot over the last, you know, certainly the last year or so in Autotask. You know, and then we'll talk about the, you know, project management at the same time as that, as a separate episode.

You know, and then we'll start to go into things like procurement and inventory and all of these kinds of things. And as you said earlier on, I mean, you know, that can be talked about as a topic on its own, because it really does, it kind of fits at the beginning of the process, really, but it can be, and most of the time is set up actually completely independently of everything else as well. Okay, so that sounds like a great plan for the rest of this series. So I am looking forward to it, and I know that we're going to have a couple of guests from time to time pop in. So anyway, I think so far, this has been a really great series, and we're getting a lot of positive feedback.

So thanks to everybody, all of our listeners, we really appreciate you. Yeah, thanks to everyone for listening. And Rayanne, thanks to you for showing up every week and, you know, talking to me. And it's always fun when you talk to a friend and, you know, it's like, I always look forward to recording these episodes every week because, you know, I just get to chat about things I love so much and a topic I really enjoy, so. Right, and with the pandemic, I mean, you know, we were actually planning to see each other live and in person at DattoCon last year, and well, that didn't happen.

So, you know, truth be told, I really look forward to these podcasts every week myself. So I get a chance to catch up with my good friend on the other side of the, you know, not the other side of the world, but certainly, you know, you're what, six hours ahead of us, five hours? Five hours ahead, yeah. So, I mean, it does feel like the other side of the world though sometimes, right? I know, I know.

One day we will all be able to get back to traveling and I hope to come over there and visit with you and Tracy. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, you know, I'm looking forward to getting back over to the US for sure and, you know, back into conference land and, you know, and having a real proper face-to-face discussion and a nice beverage, right? Of some sort or another, whatever that might be. So, yeah, I mean, I really enjoy this and, you know, I know we always, you know, talk offline about, you know, how many people are listening to this and I know there's a good few people that do listen to it and they appreciate what we do.

So, you know, massive thanks go out to all of our listeners and really, you know, we do want to make this as, you know, as useful for you guys as listeners as possible. So, if there's stuff that you want us to talk about or there's something you don't understand, you know, if you visit our website, you can leave us a message or just ping one of us individually a message and we'll absolutely talk about it and we'll make sure we get it covered along with all the wonderful guests that we've got coming up in future episodes as well. Yeah, I mean, this has been a really fun episode. I've enjoyed recording this, Rayanne. So, you know, really all that's left for me to say now is your PSA is the key to your MSP success.

So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Rayanne. Thanks, Chris. See you next week. 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.