Managed services providers (MSPs) increasingly need a way to accurately bill for time used, which means looking at professional services automation (PSA).
That’s according to Computicate, a provider of PSA software as a service.
Martijn van der Schaaf, blogging for Computicate, notes that even small amounts of time can add up to significant costs if miscalculated.
“As an MSP owner, you want to be able to track billable time to the minute,” he says.
“If you have five employees working for you and if each misses tracking 30 minutes of their billable time every day, you’ll lose 150 minutes of billable time each working day.”
A workaround for an out-of-the-box solution is to combine a bunch of time-tracking tools, and patch all the time entries with PSA software, he says.
When accuracy in tracking ticket time is the first priority, companies can either use an MSP ticketing system with an easy time-entry feature — such as Zendesk or SolarWinds.
“These tools use these time entries to populate their timesheets, which are later used for billing or payroll,” he said.
However, it means that staff need to consistently and religiously enter start and finish times.
A tool like Zapier can integrate ticketing with time tracking so new accounts automatically log a new time entry, for example, van der Schaaf said.
The added advantage of using a PSA solution’s ticketing and time tracking features is that it is fully integrated in day-to-day operations, including service level agreements (SLAs) and travel time tracking if necessary.
“Realistically, about 65-70% of your technicians’ time should be billable at the least,” he said.
Click here to read Computicate’s full ‘cheat sheet’ on automating time tracking for MSPs.
(Photo by Emma Matthews Digital Content Production on Unsplash)
