Managing MSP Contracts and subscription services

[Support Team]

RangerMSP User Question*

I would like to know the best way to create a recurring item for monthly and annual licences such as antivirus, security appliance subscriptions and Office 365 renewals.

Could you give me your suggestions on this?

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* Question received by email and shared here for the benefit of our users.

[Support Team]

Answer


In general such recurring items can be managed as Recurring Contracts or Assets.

From billing aspects, Recurring Contracts is probably the recommended way especially for monthly services, as Contracts can be easily renewed to the next period. You should add the services (antivirus renewal/subscriptions/Office365 renewal etc.) as Contract-Price Charges for the Contract to represent its recurring price.

The Charges then can be invoiced using the integration with an accounting system (QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online or Xero).

Using the Batch Copy Contracts feature you can easily renew Contracts to the next period (like next month) and all Contract-Price Charges will be copied automatically to the next period (month/year/etc.). So, in short with a few clicks you can have hundreds of customer subscriptions/recurring-terms renewed, and become ready-for-invoicing (that can also be done in batch).

Besides, in case you are only interested in tracking such expiration dates, you may consider using Assets. You can add each service/product as an Asset and use Asset warranty expiration date to represent the service expiration.
You can add recurring (monthly/yearly) Tasks with reminders using Pending tab under the Asset. The reminder will pop up prior the warranty expiration date.

You can read more about tracking Asset warranties here.