Blog

Not all heroes wear capes. Many MSP business owners work countless hours providing highly skilled services to their clients – yet, unfortunately the more time you spend doing tech support the less time you’re spending growing your company.

Handling date and time is a perennial software problem; exacerbated by the fact that most programming languages do not differentiate between a date and a datetime.

In order to deal with this, we explicitly recognise and code for the fact that there are typically three different things being talked about when discussing time:

[1]  Time zone aware datetime

These are a point in time (usually stored as UTC) which, when presented to the user, will show the equivalent datetime in their time zone. The programmer also has to account for the fact that datetimes entered will come in from the perspective of that user so need to be converted back to UTC for storage.

The HarmonyPSA team has brought our customers yet another stack of great features and bug fixes in the latest version of HarmonyPSA, v4.15. The following release notes will list and explain all the major changes within Harmony v4.15.

An updated list of all our releases can be found here. All v4 users will be getting the full release of and please get in touch if you would like the latest release earlier.

Hands up who still has critical dependencies on spreadsheets as part of their invoicing process?

Pause to watch a sea of hands go up…

Whether the amount is recorded on a central spreadsheet from the contract, or spreadsheets are used to circulate time for pre-billing approval, a surprising number of large and otherwise sophisticated companies still have some critical spreadsheets as part of their invoicing procedures.

You pride yourself on knowing your stuff.

Technically, as an MSP owner, you know exactly what to do 99% of the time and if you don’t, you can find out in seconds via Google and multiple data and vendor sources.

We forget how lucky we are with technology and the amazing tools and opportunities it opens for us.

When I see my daughter researching resources in seconds for GCSE revision I compare it to the latest tech I had access to when studying for my O levels - micro-fiche searches at the local library. It’s why working in and with technology is such a great business to be in – it’s an enabler of the highest order, transforming our lives at an ever-increasing rate.

I recently travelled for a speaking engagement in the United States. I was speaking at a conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, attended by an audience of small business IT Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and IT Solution Providers.

The trip was a fun one for me. I had the opportunity to sit and talk with MSPs from across the United States, and apart from the differences in the English language between the UK and USA (I was teased for talking about “Rooters” rather than “Rowe-ters”, for instance) I was struck by the similarities in challenges that MSPs on both sides of the Atlantic face.

MSPs in the UK and the USA both struggle to hire and retain good quality staff, for instance. On both sides of the pond, MSPs find a challenge in motivating their engineering staff to record their time correctly. Oh, and the frustration of client's nickel and diming (or as we’d say in the UK, “being skinflints”) MSPs on purchasing is the same worldwide.

We are truly thrilled to announce that HarmonyPSA has won a Channel Partners Choice Award ⁽¹⁾ for our innovation in channel programs. We have been working with one of our closest partners Acmeo GmbH in developing a truly valuable channel program that we are proud of. We have focused on providing support for our partners not just in regards to our products but how they can improve their businesses and specifically marketing.

Winning work is hard enough, delivering can also be challenge. However, surprisingly, the hardest problem many organisations face is getting the contract set up correctly in potentially multiple systems.

Let’s take a look at a typical scenario for a technology company.

You win a new customer with a project to deliver, combined with an ongoing support contract.

As a minimum, how many times does that order (or parts of it) need to be modelled in their internal systems?

Few people would argue against the statement that one of the tenets of IT Managed Services is scalability.

An IT Solution Provider or Managed Service Provider (MSP) should be able to scale their business to serve more clients without necessarily adding additional staff every time they win a new client.

For instance, one service desk engineer can manage dozens or even hundreds of client servers or workstations from his desk, using remote monitoring and maintenance (RMM) tools. Another service desk engineer can simultaneously help multiple end-users through remote desktop and online chat facilities.