HaloPSA can raise tickets automatically before contracts expire

Hi there, it's been a minute since my last video, but I'm conscious that some people find these valuable, so I thought I would jump in with one today. As the title suggests, this is all about automated tickets. It's not quite as fancy as the title may allude to, depending on how fancy I make the title, of course. But HaloPSA has a mechanism for automated tickets. It's not used a bunch, but those who do use it from our experience get a lot of value out of it. So I'm going to make this as short and as sweet as possible. Let's jump straight into it.

So HaloPSA, my face is going to be in the way, but I trust by now if you're following my channel you know where the config button is in the bottom left-hand side of your Halo screen. So click on that. Please go to tickets, and in this menu you are going to find the button—yes, you can see it—called automated tickets. Once you're in here, you can either click on this text or press new in the top right, and then you're on the new template for your automated tickets.

You can make groups for these if you wanted to group your automated tickets. To do this, these groups actually follow the same groups as ticket templates. So if you see here on a ticket template we have groups. If you're curious where to find them before we jump too far in, go to advanced settings at the very bottom, scroll all the way down, and what I call the dungeon of things—lookup codes go in here—and then scroll down to Auto request groups. What does Auto request groups mean? I hear you saying, no idea, honestly. I don't know. These are here, I don't. All I know is this is where they are. I can't give you any more insight on this, but click through in the top right, give it a name, and away you go.

So going back to config, tickets, and automated tickets, let's click on make a new one here and let's give it a name. And let's put in here—I don't know—let's say agreement expirations, okay. Then we can select a group to put them in. I'm just going to do MSP projects again, make a group that makes sense. And then the secret source of all this is the automation criteria.

Now I started this video by saying it's not overly amazing. I can't remember what word I said verbatim, but it's not amazing, but there's stuff in here and they are expanding on this over time. One of the main things that I use this for is well, two things really: agreements and recurring invoices. I will jump into each criteria very briefly. Again, I don't want to put you all to sleep, but essentially what we can do is we can say I want to make an automated ticket based on agreements, okay. And what we can do in here is then we can click add and we can start picking values of what we want to look at. So we can say—we can say—we can say let's look at only fixed agreements, so we don't want any prepaid to be called in this automated ticket. Let's also look at days before the contract end date, and press save. And what we can then do in here is we can say days before the contract end date is 30. So 30 days before the contract end date—it's a tongue twister—make an automated ticket.

If we're leveraging the next call date, so let's say we use the next call date field in Halo, we can also automatically increase the next call date if we're doing this. That's a little bit subjective, depending on how you want to leverage it. But we'll touch on that in a minute. So this is basically saying 30 days before the contract is due to expire or end, then make us an automated ticket. And this can be leveraged quite well really, because what we can do in here is we could have a separate ticket type. So let's say we could make one called—let's just say Finance, right? Or you could have a sales one, or a—you know, what's the word—searching for—I'm searching for—account manager ticket type, or whatever you need, basically. And we can essentially make these tickets the same way you would any other ticket inside of Halo. Add a to-do list to it, add a child if you want to. You know, add children tickets to it. But essentially I'm just going to do Finance. I'm going to take contract reference, um, that will take the agreement reference through. And I'll then basically say I don't know—expires soon, okay. I can do—this is new when it's made. It goes to the sales team. It goes to unassigned so the sales team can pick the ticket, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We can start a workflow. We can do all the things we can do on most tickets. And I can do Priority One—whatever, doesn't matter, okay. And then save. Pardon me. And then basically now we have this automated ticket that's going to be created based on a trigger of something.

Now I'm pretty sure at present this works on the old NH server, so I'm pretty sure these will run once a day. So they'll run at midnight, depending on the region you're in or around there. And as a part of that schedule, I'm pretty sure this is when these will be will be fired, essentially. As I mentioned, there's other things you can do in here. I'll just type in test and pick a group—doesn't really matter. We can also pick agreements, and we could do the next call date. So if you have evergreen contracts and you don't want an end date on it because they are, you know, forever green, um, then we can do the next call date and we can say is equal to. Um, that's interesting. I thought we could do more with that. I can days before the next call date. That's what I'm searching for. I was like, what is equal to, um, you know, again, 30. So 30 days before the next call date, make this automated ticket. Not even sure why next call date is a static value, but it is what it is.

You can do the same with status. So you know, only show us this for live or expired agreements. Just to be clear, I'm fairly positive—99% sure—I need to test it, but if an agreement end date passes and I'll demonstrate this very quickly. If I have this agreement here called "Hey, I know we're professionals" and I set this to be live, but the end date was yesterday, and what we're going to notice with this is that the agreement is red in the top left, which means it's expired. Or is, yeah, expired. But the status of this is still live down here.

You can leverage this here as well by going edit, columns, native agreement, and we can add in here status, and then refresh. Refresh here. So you can see this is live, even though it's red, which does mean it's expired. Which is interesting. So not exactly sure what that's looking at. Again, I don't really use the statuses. I just go by dates really, and that's kind of how I work with these things.

So that's basically it for agreements. Back to automated tickets, we can yeah, pick the contract end date. We can pick the next call date if we're using call date. We can say add more parameters in here. So if you do define your contract types—again, it's good for reporting, but not much else other than this—we can say if it's equal to, I don't know what this build is—Halo consultation—and the labor type is fixed, and it's 30 days before contract, then make a ticket. And this could then be a bit more defined—expire soon, Halo consultation, right?

And this is this is a nice little feature, and there is more to this though. We use this sometimes for assets as well. So we could say if we have an asset, we can leverage the warranty start and end date or the labor warranty start and end date. And if you wasn't familiar, you can set these on assets if you enable it. So again, if you do have a lot of assets that you know you're selling warranty on, again, we can say days before the warranty end date—we want to make sure it's equal to or less than 30. So we can again go out to our customers and try and upsell warranty or say actually, you're coming out of warranty. Your device is now 25 years old. I'm not sure it's worth extending it, but it's a conversation you have with your partners. And then finally, we can do this with articles as well.

Now, if you use article revisions, you can do days before the next review date. I'm going to be honest, I have never used or tested this, so please do at your own will. But that's basically it. I thought I would just show you today very quickly that automated tickets exist in Halo. It's not a massively used feature, and I don't really build it very often. It's not really a part of the workflow stuff we do. But again, you know, knowledge is power. So yeah, that's automated tickets. Hope you have a beautiful day, a lovely evening. I've been kind of f again, see to you all soon. Bye-bye.