Using CommitCRM for MSP

[rorrock]

I have been looking at CommitCRM as a replacement for our Existing helpdesk as we are looking for a CRM product.
However we are more of an MSP than and Break/Fix operation and the whole having to add charges seperartely to notes will make it harder for me to get the guys to put their time against work.
Our current system allows them to put time worked against notes, and this is idea..
It's the only hurdle stopping us from roling out CommitCRM.. Has anyone else come accross this and how did they get around it?

Rob

[Support Team]

Hi Rob,

Welcome and thank you for asking.

Why not simply using Charges as your Notes?

Everything related to a Ticket - Notes and Charges are displayed together under the Ticket History tab.

Ask technicians to log their Notes and time entries using a single entry - A Charge record.
Even if you're not going to charge and bill the customer for this time you should probably still use Charge records to log everything.

In many cases those Charges will be automatically set as Not Billable.

So you will end up with Notes that also tracks Time, all using the Charge entries.

Again, under the Ticket History you see everything in a chronological order.

This way things are simple - Charge records are always used, you decide whether to bill your customers for these or whether its covered by your MSP system, and - you always have the ability to analyze profitability as you have all time entries logged into the system. You will then be able to know how much time was spent by employees during a time period, how much time has been invested to service your customers, etc.

PS: As an MSP you may already be using an RMM system. If this is the case it's possible that you can already integrate it with RangerMSP.

Hope this helps.
Dina

[rorrock]

We use BOMGAR currently...
Has the interface changed in 5.6.
We found the charges section a bit clunkly and awkard to use compare to our current system kayoko..

Rob

[Support Team]

Thanks Rob.

As far as I know the system you use is a classic Help Desk one, while it may be a good system it's not a fully functional CRM or PSA system.
I recommend that you give it a try and see how it all works for you.

Thanks,
Dina

[networkconcepts]

Rob,

We are a small company with a mix of customers consisting of Break Fix, Hybrid to full MSP. We use the “Contracts” in CommitCRM for all customers and the Engineers do not see the difference from one account to the next because it is all behind the scenes. We have a 3 Tier Help Desk that supports over 200 businesses and a Retail Store. The Techs enter every ticket the same according to thier Tier level and the Contracts section in CommitCRM does the adjustment on the account. We synch it with QuickBooks and it is done. Trust me it is worth a try, it saved us thousands of dollars and multiple headaches.

Tyler Pritchard
MCSE, MCSA, MCDBA, CCNA
Network Concepts

[raymond]

sometimes you have to rethink how you do things... in this case, we use charges for all our documentation/notes. To do this, we have set up a number of charge items for each employee ranging from on-site and remote work to non-billed and notes -- the key is to simply set up the charges for these notes/non-billable items as a zero charge (set in the items list). The bugger here is that the account manager (the one who ultimately goes through all the tickets and closes them/marks them as billable) has to manually mark each non-billable item/note as billable then billed... this is because techs never mark items as billable and EVERYTHING in our CommitCRM setup eventually gets billed (even if the client doesn't see it on an invoice that we we know EVERTHING gets processed and never falls between the cracks).

For the CommitCRM folks, two things that would make this stuff sooooooo much easier would be to allow us to customize contracts so that we can default ALL contracts to mark things as unbillable (we've been waiting for this feature for about 3 years now!) and to allow us to mark fields in accounts, tickets and charges as required (we have too many situations where fields are not properly getting entered and we really need to be able to require specific fields before closing/saving an item)

anyhow, give the product a fair shake... it doesn't fit all situations but I think you will be hard pressed to find another on the market at a better value...

//ray

[hayden]

For us, we always do a history note. I have contracts setup for most customers with custom pricing. For people on contract, I have certain items at $0. So when a history note is created, they must always create a charge from this history note. this allows me to log time without billing the customer. This works very well and also lets you create internal/external notes (history internal, charges external).

I hope this makes sense.