Business Services · MSPs, IT support and managed services
Time tracked against the client and the ticket, a portal clients raise requests and send files through, statements of work signed electronically, and monthly contracts that invoice themselves with the overage on the same line.
One job, end to end
The Deferred Work Vault
The firewall replacement they deferred, the backup project quoted after the last incident, the licences you flagged as end-of-life. Repriced and resurfaced — and the second conversation goes better than the first.
Captured with its photograph and its measurement, repriced nightly at today’s cost, ranked by what is most likely to be recovered, and resurfaced when the customer is actually ready. Not a list somebody is supposed to work.
How the Vault works →What ends up in it, in this trade
The OnSight Agent
It knows your job types, price book, crews and pricing program. Two an it & managed services business asks for on the first day:
“When a client goes over their contracted hours, tell them before the invoice does.”
Compares logged time against the block, emails the client at eighty percent, and puts the overage on the next invoice priced from the clock.
“Turn every closed ticket over two hours into billable time on the contract.”
Reads the entries against the ticket, prices them at the contract rate, and attaches them to the month’s invoice rather than a separate one.
More in this branch
The engagement
“FY26 year end” collects work for nine months. “Managed bookkeeping” runs until somebody cancels it. Neither has a start time or a crew, which is why a scheduling system can never quite hold one.
Rates
A partner’s hour is not a junior’s hour. One client negotiated a discount three years ago that is still honoured. The annual accounts are priced differently from advisory for that same client. Those are rules, not a number.
Rules are effective-dated and resolved at the date the work happened, never today. Re-bill a quarter you closed in March and it prices at March’s rates, which is the only answer a client will accept.
Most specific wins
When somebody logs an hour the rate arrives filled in, and the screen says why — “this client, manager · $135”. It can be overridden, because no resolver knows about a deal done on the phone. But a rate nobody can explain is a rate that gets overridden every time, and that is where realization quietly goes.
Time
That sounds obvious and it is the structural thing most field-service software gets wrong: every hour has to belong to a scheduled appointment, so somebody on a phone call has nowhere to put twenty minutes. Here it is two ends, an activity and a note, with the rate already filled in.
The screen has to be nearly free to use, because an hour nobody logs is an hour the firm cannot bill, cannot cost and cannot learn from.
The moment that pays for the feature
Outside the agreed scope. The engagement covers year end, accounts prep and the tax return. This entry says advisory.
It is logged, flagged, and not refused — then somebody rings the client that afternoon, while they still remember asking. By billing day that conversation is unwinnable.
Month end
Flagged time gets a third and fourth option that most systems never offer, because most systems only know how to bill something or not bill it.
| Decision | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Bill as an extra | Revenue the firm would otherwise have lost. The client already agreed, in the call somebody made on the day. |
| We absorb it | A deliberate gift, recorded at the time. The hour is marked non-billable so it cannot slip onto next month’s invoice. |
| Hold | Not this month. It stays in work in progress for the next run. |
| Write off | The firm eats it — and has to say why. Blank will not do. |
An extra is revenue recovered. An absorption is a decision made while the client was still on the phone. A write-off three weeks later is what happens when nobody was ever asked. Reported as one number they all look like “we lost some money”, which is why most firms sit somewhere in the high eighties on realization and cannot say why.
And the number that re-prices a client
Recorded to billed is the biller. Billed to collected is credit control. Recorded itself is whether anybody logged their time at all. And on a fixed fee none of it shows the real problem — a $6,500 year end that took 14.5 hours is an effective $448 an hour, and one that runs long falls through the floor while realization still reads 100%.
Anything not yet billed reads as a dash, never 0%. Unbilled is a different fact from unrecovered, and a false zero would sink every current engagement to the bottom of the table.
Tickets
Every ticket carries two clocks — first response and resolution — run against the tier on that client’s engagement rather than against one company-wide promise.
The clock stops when it is the client’s turn, and the paused minutes are stored, so the arithmetic can be shown rather than asserted. When a report says you met the target, it can prove it.
What stops a clock, and what does not
An internal note counting as a response is how an SLA report comes to claim something the client would dispute.
True-up
It sits on the agreement, counts both, and produces an exceptions list — never an adjustment.
| Counted | Under management | Contracted | Exception |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seats | 47 | 40 | 7 unbilled |
| Servers | 4 | 6 | 2 overbilled |
Ticket intake is manual today — there is no email or portal pipe into it yet. The clocks, the tiers and the true-up are live; that one is not, and is not claimed here.
Book a demo
See it running an it & managed services business, not a generic one.
Thirty minutes on data that looks like yours, with the arithmetic run on your own job count and average ticket. No card, and no obligation to switch anything.