[44] – Autotask Implementation Series: Ticket Categories & Speed Codes (Form Templates)

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rayanne 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. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Bucianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing?

I'm doing great today, Chris. I'm just over here living the dream. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. I'd also be living the dream if I lived in Florida, but you know what?

I'm living the dream over here in the UK. It's a nice spring day, sun shining, it's still light outside. Yeah, all is good. Rayanne, what have we got on the agenda for today? Well, Chris, we've been talking about the implementation series and we've been every week trying to do a different topic.

While we're in the service desk, I thought that maybe we could spend some time talking about ticket categories and speed codes and why you might use one over the other or if you can use them in conjunction with each other. I think there's a lot of confusion out there regarding the ticket categories, what you can do with them, and the speed codes and what you can do with them. What are your thoughts on that? Great questions, and of course, as you know what I'm going to say, and this really is my absolute favorite topic because I love talking about ticket categories, I love talking about the differences between them, and like I say, there's always so much confusion around what they are, how they work, why we need them, and all that kind of thing. You really are the ticket category guy.

I mean, every time I talk to you, you're building a different type of category and you're doing something different with them. Anyway, I'm really, really looking forward to this discussion because I know that there's a lot of people out there with a ton of questions and some people don't even realize that ticket categories are what they are and that they can be customized and you can create them as often as you'd like. I guess let's start by saying that we've both used the word speed code and that's kind of the old Autotask where you can see that we've been around in this product for a long time. So they're actually now called form templates, which actually I prefer the name speed code to be fair. So, but yeah, for the new sort of listeners, I know they still do kind of say speed code from time to time, you know, in the product, but they're really called form templates now.

So let's take a look at the difference. So a speed code really allows you to, or a form template, I should be saying, you know, pre-fill in information in fields within a ticket. So for example, you could say, you know, instead of your engineers having to click on, you know, the status and actually select the word new or select, you know, what queue something goes into, you can have a speed code to kind of pre-fill all of that stuff in and to automatically populate the fields that are on the ticket screen already. So that's what a form template allows you to do. So you have form templates for all different entities.

So things like the actual ticket creation itself, and then you also have a speed code or a form template for time entries. And you can do different things with those based on which of those you're using. So if you're using a speed code, then, you know, for a time entry, then you can automatically have it fill in how much time you've spent. You can have it fill in the notes to the customer, select whether it sends an email to the customer, all that kind of good stuff. So form templates, speed codes, very versatile, allow you to kind of pre-populate a lot of the stuff on the tickets.

Right. And I think it should also be noted that speed codes or form templates are not just for tickets anymore. Right. Once you get in there into the form templates, and it's in the admin section under system wide settings, you know, you can create, you know, a form template or a speed code for opportunities, project notes, recurring tickets, now quote, service calls, the time entry, as well as the ticket itself. There's a lot of different ways that you can automate.

And one of the things I like about the speed codes or form templates is if you use them, then you have a lot of uniformity in your company. If you have a specific set of wording that you want to land on the summary notes for an ad move change, for instance, or a purchase of something else, or a password reset, you may want specific wording that doesn't change from one technician to the next. You have them use the speed code, it'll populate everything, it'll even populate the amount of time if you want a certain amount of time set for it. There's a lot of things that the speed code does. Sorry, didn't mean to jump in, but continue on with your thoughts.

And that's great. And it's good that you mentioned, you know, that they are on other entities, not just the tickets and time entry. So like you say, it is on opportunities and quotes and all that kind of good thing. And one of the things to mention is while we're talking about them on the ticket side is I have a speed code or form template that I set up for almost every customer. And that is a time entry one that says very simply, it just adds five minutes of time.

And then in the summary notes, it says something along the lines of, you know, we tried to call you, you weren't available. So we left a message. So it's those phone calls that you're making to the customer when you call them, you get the voicemail, they're not there. You know, you don't want to have to type that stuff all the time, every single time you leave a message. And that's a really good example of using a speed code.

So we just call it telephone message or voice message or something to that effect. You select that speed code in the time entry. It fills everything in, adds five minutes, you click save and close, done. Your time entry is done. It's created.

The customer gets that notification. So that's a really good example of where you would use a speed code in a time entry. So let's now look at what is the difference between a speed code and the ticket categories. And there is quite a lot of difference between the two of them. So really, like I said earlier on, with a speed code or form template, it allows you to pre-populate the fields that are there on the ticket already.

So things like status and even the ticket title and the description and all of that kind of stuff, you can pre-fill all of that in. So that's what you can do with your form template. What you can do with the categories, you can completely customize all of that information. For example, you might say, well, you know what? When my engineer selects the status field, I don't want to show a whole list of all of my statuses.

I just want to show three statuses, right? I want to show the new, the in-progress and the complete. That's all I want to show for this type of category. So your category could be something like password reset. Then you're going to say, you know, for a password reset, you probably wouldn't have a status called waiting parts or waiting materials.

So what you can do with that ticket category is you can say, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to completely remove that status out of the dropdown so that I only get the ones that I specifically want. So that's one of the things you can do with it. The other thing- That's a good question about that because just to clarify for the listeners, so yes, you can, you know, remove certain, you know, work types from the ticket category, but can't you also choose a ticket work type and still have that entire field not even seen on that ticket? So this way, if it's a change password or a password reset or a move ad change or something, you know, then you can choose everything that you want. And then not only does the technician not have to fill it out, but they don't even have the option of changing it.

So you can really narrow down exactly what you want the technicians to see on that ticket. And it might just be the customer's name and the counter and the summary notes. So it can really, really lock them down. Absolutely. Yeah.

So you can completely remove fields altogether. Like you say, you know, you can choose to say for ads, moves, and changes, we don't need them to always pick what issue type and sub-issue type it is. So we can pre-fill them in and then just completely remove those fields. Or likewise, you might say for a particular category. So maybe on a password reset, you want to have the, you know, sub-issue type being a required field.

They have to choose which, you know, which application they change in the password for. And then you can make that a required field just for that category. And it's not required for anything else. So it's so versatile in what you can do. So you can, everything you can do with the speed codes and with the form templates.

So being able to pre-populate all of those fields, you can do that still with the ticket categories, but you can do more with it. So you can remove fields, you can customize fields, you can change, you can move them up and down as well. And, you know, one of the things I do a lot is for everyone that's used Autotask for any length of time will know that you have to scroll a fair way down on the ticket to find the queue. Why don't we just take that queue drop-down field and move it to the top of the ticket so we can move it right to the very top. So what I do is I then create a whole new section that says required fields right at the very top of the ticket that says, well, right at the very top underneath the customer details.

And then all I do is say required fields and I put all the required fields there so that the user isn't having to scroll all the way down to find them. And I mean, the great thing is from there, you can then have user-defined fields as well. So you can specifically say that if this is a password reset ticket category, I can actually set up a user-defined field that is specific for that ticket category so that it won't show up in any other ticket category. And again, I can make it required, I can make it not required, I can have it as a drop-down, whatever I want. So they are so, so versatile on what you can do with ticket categories.

Can I point out once again, that ticket categories or categories are not just for tickets because you can also create categories for projects and opportunities, right? Are there any others? Any other? Configuration items as well. Okay.

Yeah. And I think from what I saw on the new release that's coming out, which may or may not be out by the time this podcast airs, there will be categories for companies as well. So for the CRM, you know, where you can ticket categories, or sorry, company categories, I guess, for companies specifically. So again, you might say, I only want to show specific fields or specific information based on what kind of company it is. You know, and I think over time, Autotask is going to go that way with all of the entities throughout the entire product.

Well, that makes sense, you know, because you should be able to customize it instead of just having a screen full of information that you're just trying to find the one piece that you want. You should be able to, you know, customize everything just like you can customize the dashboards and the widgets, right? So that you're seeing only the information that's important to you. And the other really cool thing you can do with ticket categories, which I absolutely love is when you set up user defined fields, for example, you can choose whether those show up on the client portal. And then you can set up an equivalent of a ticket category on the client portal so that when the customer fills in those user defined fields, you know, from the customer portal, it will automatically populate your user defined fields inside your ticket as well.

Some really cool stuff. Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure that the customer portal is next on our implementation series. It absolutely is. And you know, weirdly, I know a lot of people don't like the client portal and a lot of people have a lot of things to say about it, but I quite like it. I think it's pretty cool.

There's a fair amount you can do with it. So we'll certainly talk about that on another episode. We offer the client portal, but not everybody takes advantage of it. I mean, I bet you I could count on one hand the number of clients that we have that actually use the portal to look at their tickets and submit tickets. Most of the people submit tickets right through the email parser.

Absolutely. And it's still worth talking about because it's got some good features in it and I kind of quite like it. But for the reason, you know, like I just mentioned about you being able to link the request types on the client portal directly into a ticket category and have those user defined fields display on there as well. And a perfect use case of that would be, you know, maybe if the customer is selecting a request type called hardware, maybe they want to buy some new hardware or something. So what you can then do is you can present to them some user defined fields with a dropdown that says, you know, do you want a mouse?

Do you want a keyboard? Do you want this? Do you want this? And they can select all of those things from the client portal and submit the tickets. And that will come through, populate all of those fields inside that ticket category.

And you'll see all of that stuff displayed in there. Can we go back to the ticket categories and the suite codes for a minute? I had this conversation with an MSP recently, and they really wanted to narrow down and simplify for the technicians who are creating tickets, the things that they could choose. So naturally I suggested, well, let's, you know, let's take a look at the ticket categories and really, you know, hone in on the things that you want them to be able to see and change. So we started going down that route and they said, you know, hey, this is great.

You know what we could do? We could set up a ticket category for every person in the office, and then we can just do one for the different types of work they're going to do. So each person would have four or five different ticket categories, right? So, so think, picture this, so you've got 10 people in the company. Each person has their own ticket categories, not one, but four of them.

So I thought, well, wait a minute, you know, I think you're going a little overboard here on the categories. You know, what if we were to create a ticket category for the types of work and create speed codes for the people, you know, or something like that? How would you have handled that? Yeah. And for those who can't see, I've literally got my head in my hands when you were saying that because I am, I've seen that so many times and don't do that.

Don't set up a different ticket category for every single person because, well, you may get away with it if you had a couple of people within the company, but you know, as soon as you start scaling and getting 30, 40, 50, 60 people, you're going to have hundreds of different ticket categories and they're not designed for that purpose anyway. So a ticket category is really designed for a type of work or a type of ticket that you're doing. So for example, a password reset. So that's a perfect example or a customer onboarding or customer offboarding. So, you know, because when you then said, if this is a customer onboarding ticket, here's a whole bunch of things that I need to fill in.

You know, I need to fill in these user defined fields and there's also can then be a checklist in there where you can check off various things that you need to do when you're onboarding a customer. So keep them for those kinds of things for, you know, customer onboarding, customer offboarding, password resets, as moves changes, those sorts of things, rather than kind of doing it for each individual user or each individual person within the company. I totally agree with that because I have seen some lists of categories and, and speed codes that go on for miles and miles. And there's no way somebody could remember all of those speed codes, you know, the little few digits or letters or numbers or whatever, if you've got hundreds of them, they are no longer speedy. Right?

Non-speed codes. This is not the definition of speedy. So yeah, I think try to keep, keep them as simple and organized as possible. If you're doing high level at the category, you know, maybe perhaps middle level at the speed code, try not to really make one speed code or one category for every possible scenario in your business. Right?

So go for the high, higher level stuff and, and then you can sort the rest. Absolutely. Yeah. I fully agree. And, you know, most of the time now I don't actually even use speed codes for the creation of the ticket.

So I don't really use them when it comes to things like time entries on, on tickets and actually a perfect example where I use speed codes or form templates every day in my business as well. When I do my consulting calls, you know, I do the calls over zoom and I record the calls. I send those recordings to the client so that they have the ability to, to go back and look at the recording and do those kinds of things. And all I do is I have a speed code that says the changes, the status of the tickets to recording sent. It also automatically adds the, you know, makes it an hour because that's normally how long the sessions are.

And then it has some blurb inside the summary notes that says your recording is attached. And all I do is copy and paste the zoom link into there so that they, they have the ability to go and download that. And I click save and close and the ticket is created or the time entry is created and I do those. And, and one or two other small ones that I use, but yeah, I literally probably have maybe five maximum of, of speed codes or form templates that I use on, on time entries. And then I've changed to using categories specifically when it comes to actually creating the ticket.

I don't create the ticket using a speed code because I just find that a lot of the stuff you can do with a speed code, certainly on the creation of the ticket you can do in the category anyway. Right. Right. I agree. the speed codes and started, you know, using the ticket categories because I just have more options. I have everything in the category.

I can create my checklist, you know, and, and put everything right in there, but I just find there's more options and, you know, and as my company gets larger and larger, I want to take a lot of the decision-making away from my staff. Awesome. Is there anything else that we need to talk about for the categories and speed codes? Is there anything that we left off? No, I think we've pretty much covered it all.

Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, there's a lot you can do with them. There's a lot of customization you can do with them, you know, and for any of our listeners that are struggling with it, reach out to one of us, either myself or, or Ryanne, and we can talk you through and show you how to use ticket categories more effectively in your business. And we'll be able to kind of show you the best use of them and when to use ticket categories versus speed codes and all those kinds of things. Awesome.

So next week, we're going to continue up or maybe even wrap up the entire service desk, unless there are more topics in the service desk that we need to cover. But next week, I think we're, we're moving on to the customer portal, how to set it up, some of the options that you have, security features, all of that stuff. So that should be fun. I'm looking forward to that. Absolutely.

And then we're almost at the end of the series. So then we've got a, another few episodes that we're going to talk about the project management and reporting side as well. Reporting is my jam. So yeah, I like the reporting. Yeah, absolutely.

That's exactly right up your street. So maybe I'll let you present that one on your own. So yeah, so there's lots more to still come. If any of our listeners want, you know, want us to cover anything specific, or you want us to talk about something that you're confused about, or want us to go over something again, hit our website. There is an area there where you can, you can leave a voice message, or if you'd like to come on the podcast, then, you know, by all means, reach out to us.

And we're more than happy to have any MSP, any of our listeners on the podcast, if you want to sort of pick our brains and get us to, to answer some of your questions on the podcast. That sounds like fun. Maybe even one of these days, you know, we'll do like a PSA makeover for one of our listeners. And we could probably do a whole series on that. Absolutely.

So Rayanne said it first, so you heard it here first, PSA makeovers is something that Rayanne will offer. No, I'm kidding. We will absolutely do it for you. And you know what, we'd actually love to have guests on the podcast. We've had a few vendors recently, but it'd be really good to kind of hear from an MSP, hear how you guys are using the system.

You know, like we said, pick our brains and, and we can talk about whatever you need to talk about. So what a fun episode this has been, Rayanne. It was, it was. Thank you. That was great information about the categories.

Yeah, it's, it's really been fun recording this with you. 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. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Rayanne.

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.