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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,

At HarmonyPSA we have been working on another major release to bring you new features and fixes. The features included in this release will be linked to documentation on our help site. You will be able to access the full list of releases through here. 

The Password

Authentication is a sensitive subject that always seems to imply walking a fine line between security and convenience. On one hand, companies require the security that strong authentication mechanisms provide. On the other hand, end-users require the convenience of being able to seamlessly access services without spending any considerable time or effort.

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.