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Professional services companies use timesheet systems; they need to know what their staff are working on. Without time recording, how would they know how much to charge each month?

Given that this is the air these companies breathe and the app stores of the world are full to the brim with timesheets systems, it is surprising how many companies we speak to simply cannot get this process right without extensive manual manipulation and post-timesheet editing.

What are the challenges associated with a growing trend in the MSP world: partial technical support, or from a client’s perspective, partial outsourcing of their technology services?

With small businesses it makes sense to pass everything over to an MSP; large organisations will have the scope to employ a full team of technology support staff and keep the problem internal. The challenge comes where a medium-sized organisation retains some technical skills in-house (say desktop support), but hires an MSP for more specialist areas such as networks or security. Where they cannot afford the depth of resource necessary to cover a topic fully, they will outsource that aspect of their internal support to a specialist MSP.

My last post was dedicated to the future of authentication. We discussed passwords, two-factor authentication and newer password-less authentication protocols.

Authentication is an important subject because, as of today, it is often a significant cost center for enterprises and MSPs.

A new survey conducted by Yubico suggests that employees spend around 11 hours per year resetting passwords. Based on the average headcount in this research of almost 15,000, Yubico estimate that the annual cost of productivity and labour loss associated with password resets per company averages £4 million annually.

On the other end, this activity is reflected almost 1-1 on an MSP’s help desk. As an MSP, you are probably spending time addressing access provisioning and password resets, which cuts into your productivity bandwidth and margins.

At Harmony we probably take the benefits of using a modern and flexible PSA too much for granted, it’s what we spend our lives perfecting.

Because of this, it always comes as a surprise when people ask us what the benefits are.

We’ve written material on this subject before, but actually not for a while. So here are 8 key benefits you should expect from your PSA, assuming you have bought one that is correctly matched and aligned to your business.

At the start of a brand new year, we're excited to present you with our latest release of Harmony PSA. As always, we have included a range of changes from general bug fixes to new feature implementations and functional improvements. The major changes are explained in this article while you will be able to read through the general bug fixes here. 

There is a great (apocryphal) story about the company who invented the plastic Rawlplug, a very successful business.

When the CEO was interviewed by a business magazine in the 1970s about his stock control processes, he just pointed to a red line on the warehouse wall, saying,

“When I can see the line from my office I order more plugs”.  

Profitability for his business was a simple calculation of sales margin coupled with having enough stock in hand to deal with the variability in periodic demand: his red line on the wall.

Hi All

If you don’t want to switch back to your SolarWinds Dashboard after clearing a ticket in Harmony, you can now just use the v4.17 web hook addition to the Rules engine.

Define your trigger and your filters as you wish (if you categorise your MSP RMM tickets in Harmony, you will have an easy time):

2018 is the year that the IASB (international Accounting Standards Board) intends to close the remaining revenue recognition loop-holes in GAAP for recurring revenue. This is through the issuing of IFRS 15 and in the US ASC 606, both dealing with tighter rules around recognising revenue. They apply more rigour to the tests than hitherto applied and must be understood by companies providing services over a period as opposed to transactionally. 

As this is not an accountancy blog, we will not cover the full detail of the legislation, more the high level points and how they may impact your current accounting treatment of these term contracts.

CMM (Capability Maturity Model) is a taxonomy that was developed to help organisations understand where they are in terms of the evolution of process quality and efficiency. Historically, it has been related to the software development processes.

But the method is also useful when considering what sort of PSA system you need depending on how mature your processes are, or where the organisation wants to advance to in its process maturity.

CMM is similar to ISO9001 definitions of repeatable and assured delivery.

PSA tools built around service desk-based operating models are notoriously bad at project management. The project area seems to be an afterthought, inserted because even MSPs need some kind of project capability, but not really integrated or thought through.

Here at Harmony, we’ve been working this problem for a few years now with the sole aim of producing a world class, practical project management area (we don’t have modules) that can support both traditional and agile project management techniques in the full business context that only an end to end PSA system can provide,