Manage your MSP’s business reporting and find the waste

As an MSP, you want to provide high-quality service to your clients, build trust, and create a sustainable and competitive business. But accomplishing all of that is trickier than it seems. Whether you’re a one-person MSP or on a team of hundreds, there are always tradeoffs to make when it comes to time management while running a business.

MSP leadership has to focus on service delivery and the business itself, including employee performance, profitability, and many other metrics. Staying efficient is one of the most challenging parts of running a successful MSP. 

The key to finding balance? Finding the right MSP monitoring tool for your business metrics. 

All of your most critical business metrics are hidden within your ConnectWise PSA ticket data — you just have to know where to look. With data visualization, monitoring the right metrics with the right tools, you can identify inefficiencies and find the waste.

Let’s explore 3 ways MSPs can leverage their MSP monitoring tools to become more time-efficient and drive more value for clients.  

Manage Exceptions, Not Processes

Your MSP collects an overwhelming volume of data in your PSA. Calculating metrics like utilization rate, kill rates of tickets, effective rates, and agreement profitability margins can rapidly get out of hand when trying to get insight into your performance.

A best practice for leveraging the value of this data for day-to-day operations is to establish baseline goals for important metrics and then managing the exceptions. 

Establish your baseline metrics and goals for sustainability and growth, and see how actionable management and monitoring of business metrics becomes. With your baseline in place, you can focus on meaningful daily work without diving into spreadsheets to monitor mountains of data.

MSP automation tools let your staff trust the data will be accurate without needing to spend hours each week collecting data and manually creating reports.

Use Historical Data for Future Success

Unearthing insights from ConnectWise PSA data has massive potential to help MSPs understand trends in their internal performance metrics and make projections. The ability to see and drill into trends in your business metrics completely changes the way you can monitor and plan around your short and long-term goals.

For example, once your business is tracking the metrics and has built up some historical data, you can evaluate trends over time. Leadership can set a goal or a standard, and when the metrics start to deviate from that standard.

Questions your MSP can explore with historical PSA data include: 

• Are your staff spending more time on internal overhead than working with clients?
• Are clients creating more support tickets than your staff can handle each week?
•  Is the profitability of client agreements trending down month over month?

 With the benefit of historical data, your MSP can make more informed decisions and projections for the future of the organization.

Prioritize Client-Facing Activities Over Internal Work

Internal administrative tasks can eat up valuable time for MSPs and their staff. Whether it’s generating reports, manually tracking service metrics, or dealing with billing issues, these activities often overshadow the core objective of providing value to clients. 

MSPs can find themselves caught in a cycle where internal workload detracts from time that could be better spent enhancing client relationships and delivering quality service.

When you have accurate reporting for performance and trends over time, you can pinpoint where your team spends their time. MSPs can quickly identify where staff members aren’t reaching the right ratio of internal overhead work to billable client-facing service, and can drill down into the team’s workflow to see where the problems arise. 

With this level of insight, you can get to the root of the problem and take action on a solution. 

With data-driven visibility into how your business operates, you can make changes that benefit your staff’s time efficiency. Making improvements to your internal processes ensures your team will be both better and faster at their jobs.

Transform how your MSP leverages business metrics 

Using the data you already have in your organization to reduce wasted time and resources sounds great, right? 

But how do you make sense of all that data? 

For MSPs with ConnectWise PSA in their tech stack, there’s Cognition360. Leverage the wealth of ticket data in your PSA to make better decisions and create better business outcomes for the future. 

Fast and accurate automated reports take the reporting load off your production server and give your MSP the insights to make better decisions. Want to plan a 12-month project or measure and benchmark performance against a new goal? Cognition360 helps you quickly drill into the data to get you the details you need to take the next steps, smarter.

Want to see how Cognition360 works for yourself? Check out our on-demand demo today.