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Next up in our series of posts introducing you to the people behind the scenes at Harmony, is Vinay, one of our Senior Developers. Vinay has been working on Harmony since the very beginning and there's little he doesn't know about the software - he's often the first port of call for staff in-house at Harmony who have queries! An all-round tech superhero, Vinay shares a little bit about his life, and the inevitability of his career in software...

Next up in our series of blog posts introducing you to a little bit of 'behind the scenes' life at HarmonyPSA, we chat to our CEO Steve Duckworth about his unlikely segue into PSA software following a career in engineering and banking, and how this experience has helped him create Harmony, a PSA that stands out from the crowd...

Those of you who know about the full-stack PSA market (that is Professional Service Automation solutions with integrated service desk) will also know that for the past 20 odd years, the market has been dominated by two large players to the extent that should be viewed as a duopoly.

These early solutions embody thinking that goes back 30 years and so should be considered first-generation PSA systems. They were built to address the first generation MSP world that exploded into life to support the advent of personal and business computing in the 1980s and 1990s.

So, I’m starting this blog with a question, as a business owner, should you care about using the balance sheet to make your monthly profit and loss account more accurate?

Probably most of you reading this will say No and stop reading now, and that would have been fine until ASC606 came along.

If you bill everything monthly and you only bill for work completed in the month, then under ASC606, you don’t need to care about using balance sheet suspense accounting as part of your financial accounting view. True, at year end, your accountant may well make some corrections to ensure you don’t pay too much corporation tax, but really yours is a business model that can stick with cash-book accounting and be happy.

Try searching the internet for Agile Service Delivery and you will find pages and pages of learned papers, blog posts and channel articles.

It is certainly a much written about topic for MSPs and service organisations. Everyone pitching in with how you can take the “Agile Manifesto” and related frameworks, terms and methods developed for software development and apply them to service delivery.

Great, but actually much of this stuff reads in a surprisingly abstract way, underpinned of course by strict adherence to the use of the approved terminology so loved by agile practitioners.  

Maybe you already have some idea that buying a PSA tool could save you money.

That notwithstanding, we thought we would have a go at presenting what we believe to be the top 10 reasons to buy a PSA system (OK, specifically Harmony) that can both save you money AND simultaneously drive growth in your business.

We’re happy to announce another great major release with more features and improvements: HarmonyPSA v4.16. This blog post explains all the major changes and provides you with references to our help site for more information. 

A common challenge for IT Solution Providers selling Managed Services contracts is pricing their offerings correctly.

While most Managed Service Providers (MSPs) broadly know what they need to charge for their services to be profitable, the real challenge comes when you meet with a prospective client and they ask you for a specific quote.

How can you know how many computers this prospect has? How many servers? What software are they running? All of these factors will contribute towards the quote you give the prospect for ongoing Managed Services.

The way you can find out the answers to these questions is to perform a customer assessment.

If you’re a small business, the answer may well be:

”a spreadsheet”.

But more correctly, you are probably using one of the low cost cloud accounting packages designed for small businesses and you’re now wondering why this blog is asking such a stupid question.

Simple revenue and cost accounting (based upon direct cash-flows only), sometimes known as cash-book accounting, is not accounting in the sense your accountant would use the word when he or she is preparing theirinvoice.