What is the best way to enter a per device or per user recurring services contract? Let's say I have a business with eight users @ $60.00 per user. I have this "Managed Services" plan entered as service at a cost of $40.00 and the price to the customer at $60.00. In that $40.00 is the cost of my PSA, RMM, AV, etc. plus 4 hours of remote support time each month (for the client as a whole, not per user!).

If I go over the four hours of support, I want to get an alert and be able to see the profitability of the client for that month go down if I have to work additional hours under that contract. At the same time, I don't want to break this out on an invoice. It seems like it would be a combination of recurring services with a retainer by hours. I'm thinking about creating two contracts: one for recurring services and one for retainer by hours with $0.00 charge for the hours but it's going to be problematic for billing/invoicing.

Any time you include pre-paid labour in a contract, it becomes harder to manage. You then need to be using a strict policy of recording all support hours worked and reconciling that monthly, which in my view, is more hassle than it's worth.

 

On 3/18/2019 at 9:05 PM, David said:

Any time you include pre-paid labour in a contract, it becomes harder to manage. You then need to be using a strict policy of recording all support hours worked and reconciling that monthly, which in my view, is more hassle than it's worth.

Considering this tool is targeted to Managed Services Providers, I would think regardless of per user or per device pricing that you would be able to track profitability of the services offered to clients.

Let's say this was an all you can eat contract. At some point if you're spending too much time billing hours against the contract, you'll want to know when the customer is not profitable and take some kind of action.

If it's a Karl Palachuk offering, we'll have: RMM costs, AV costs, O365 licensing, etc. that will need to be tracked. Somewhere in the back-end we need to track these against our per user/device licensing. Otherwise we're busting this out in Excel which I do, but that's the job of a PSA.

Hi Tyson,

We have been using the PSA for more than a year now, and I have asked the same question a few times. We are still looking for a way to handle "Packages" we build for our clients almost exactly what you described above.

The other item I am looking for is how to pay for the items in a package we put together for our clients. (i.e.  Package includes Pulseway, AV and backups.) Some items we pay monthly and some yearly.  We currently use Excel to track which clients have which packages, and then pay our monthly and yearly fees from there.

I am with you. This is exactly the type of work the PSA should do for us. If I forget to add a contract in the PSA, I am not charging for the services, or if I forget to add the contract to the Excel sheet, I am not paying for the licenses. Now lets add a new employee changing a contract and not changing the Excel.  I am not billing or I am in trouble with someone for not paying for a license. (Starting to become unmanageable).

 

So, I am starting to look at Reports and "Custom Fields" for the contracts. I am hoping for a report that shows what contracts were billed, and then what "Parts" are used to makeup the contract.  I will then deal with hours after that.

Tyson, if you find a better way to deal with this (or anyone else), please PING me.

Gary