Clean Quotes. Tidy Invoices. No More Line Items!
Customers are looking for business outcomes, not line items with complex descriptions. As the MSP, you want to be able to track if you are making money on your contract. Lots of MSPs sell and invoice managed services contracts per user of devices, but only some have set up their contracts in such a way that they are able to consistently keep track of contract profitability. It all starts with your portfolio of products and services.
This blog aims to show you how to simplify how you sell, and invoice, managed services using bundles in Salesbuildr.
The case for bundles
Many MSPs bill customers based on the number of devices, users or tenants. They do this because it’s easy to explain and abstracts away the underlying complexity. To be able to track contract profitability, you need to make sure you keep track of everything you are being billed for in order to deliver your services. Some of the vendors will charge based on the number of devices (RMM count) and some based on the number of users (Microsoft seat count).
How do bundles work in Salesbuildr?
Salesbuildr lets you sell the outcomes that your customers are looking to achieve, without adding complexity. We do this by enabling you to package any combination of hardware, software, services and labour into one single line item on a quote.
A Salesbuildr bundle consists of a parent bundle that contains multiple line items. The parent bundle will show up on the Salesbuildr quote, the Autotask quote will contain the individual line items.
While your customer only sees and approves a single line item, Salesbuildr will synchronise all underling items as line items on your Autotask quote. You can then convert the items on the approved quote to a recurring service contract.
Bundle Contents
In this article, we will show you how to set up a per-user bundle and convert that bundle to a recurring service contract that will invoice a single line to your customer.
The goal is to create a recurring service contract where we can keep track of profitability by keeping track of the revenue, and the cost for the licences which we will be billed for.
As an example, we will create a bundle in Salesbuildr called “Managed Services per user bundle”. This bundle contains the following services:
- Managed user with a sales price of 100 and a cost price of 0
- SaaS protection with a sales price of 0 and a cost price of 10
- Antivirus with a sales price of 0 and a cost price of 10
When we add this bundle to a Salesbuildr quote, the bundle will show up as a single line item for your end customer, while the contents of the bundle will be synchronised to the Autotask quote as separate line items.
As a result, the Autotask quote looks like this:
When converting the quote, the individual line items can then easily be converted to a recurring service contract:
When we invoice this contract, we want to change the related invoice template so that it does not show recurring services with a sales price of 0. These will be the services you need to procure and reconcile on a monthly basis, to deliver the managed service to your customer.
Follow the steps in the video below to hide 0 prices line items on recurring service contract invoices.
When you generate the invoice, the managed service will show up as a single line item, aligned precisely to what your customer approved in the quote.
Watch the video below to see how to create this scenario step by step.
Reconciliations of vendor invoices
For contracts that contain 3rd party software that you are billed for, you will need to make sure that the unit prices are adjusted based on the recurring invoices from your vendor as this will enable you to keep track of profitability and make adjustments where needed.
We suggested using a solution like CloudOlive to automate the reconciliations of vendor invoices against client charges.
To discover how Salesbuildr can consolidate services whilst maintaining consistency throughout Autotask and invoicing, book a demo today, alternatively, watch our quick on-demand demo below.
