Automate fixed fee billing so engineers can never skip the charge

Connor: Hello I'm Connor Fagan and welcome to 2024 another year of me being really inconsistent with making videos and I promise this year at some point I will cut my hair but with that being said you're here to understand how to do fixed fee billing inside of HaloPSA or at least I hope so because if not you might want to skip this video.

So what am I talking about well let's say you're an MSP and let's say that you charge laptop setup fees let's say you charge onboarding and offboarding fees but you're struggling with actually invoicing correctly for it. There's currently a lot of overhead where you have to manually remember to do it or you're having to quote upfront and it's a little bit arduous.

We see a lot I suppose and it kind of differs across the pond so in the UK I would say for the most part if we're charging a customer something we want to send out a quote first we want that quote to be accepted no hidden charges that type of thing. I would say across the pond though in America and Canada as well to be fair I see it quite frequently that your agreements will encapsulate you know there's always a fee for new device setups or onboarding or offboarding you and the customer have this relationship where you will just apply that charge every month and they'll kind of accept it and away you go. I'm not saying either way is right or wrong I'm just saying that is what I observe for the most part.

So how do we do it what does it look like and how does it work well let me jump into my Halo screen let me make this full screen not that one full screen this one full screen zoom in one more yeah I think that looks good enough.

So what have we done so what we do is we make a new ticket inside of HaloPSA we select the ticket type fixed fee and I'm going to type in here laptop setup and down at the bottom we have this custom field called fix fee type. Now don't get hung up on the fact you have to make a ticket for this don't get hung up that you have to make a custom field and select something just trust the process for the moment and I'm going to say this is a laptop setup that's going to apply a ticket rule to the ticket we'll cover that in a minute do not fear. And then we're going to submit the ticket and what that's going to do is that's going to queue a runbook run a runbook tell us that it applied successfully and it means I can then claim the ticket close the ticket and then I can go into invoicing ready for invoicing and you'll see here we have a laptop setup I can create the invoice for that and this will then invoice the customer that flat fee or fixed fee is how I've described it of £75 in my environment with the description laptop setup fee and all of the correct information with it.

So how have we done this and why have we done it this way well let's go through a little bit of what's actually happening and then I'll show you how we've done it. So this runbook here is essentially just issuing a product to the ticket. Now this isn't new information this is if you're an existing partner of ours this is the way I always recommended doing this. And I basically would say is hey if you've got a fixed fee for a ticket click the dots in the top right click issue product and then select the product from the list that will then apply the product and apply the charge and away you go.

Another way we've built it in the past is to you know change our workflow so we might have a form in our workflow that has an action button at the top the action button again pops up that issue product screen the engineer has to pick the product and away you go. I've never really liked it though it's always been like a you know it always comes with a with a clause and it's like yeah we can do it but this however I quite like this which is why I'm showing you how to do it.

Because we're defining at some level in Halo that this is going to happen you can't not issue this product yes you could go to products and you could you know edit it and remove it and do all of that but for the most part it's quite granular it's quite rigid. It's also me meaning sure that whenever we do a ticket of this nature and it could be driven from the self service portal it could be just handled as a part of a workflow of an automation before you know it could come in as an incident and you may have an option to make a fixed fee ticket or change it midway through there's so much control you could do with this but we've kept it really simple and really clean.

So I'm going to start with the runbook I'm going to show you how that's been built and as always there's going to be documentation in the description below. Quentin Robbie who's got to write that up in a minute but we are going to do that it's going to include basically what I've spoke about in this video but much more eloquently. So let's start with the runbook and let me show you what's happening and again this is this is really quite simple stuff we've not overbaked it for this demonstration but essentially we have a runbook called issue items. There's some spoilers in there so you don't get caught up on them yet not quite ready.

But essentially we have this very very very simple runbook the first runbook is a Halo API action to update the ticket and it's basically what it's doing is it's taking the ticket ID and it's issuing an item to it. Now the most important mechanism here is the item ID. Now the reason I say that and if I could just jump out of here very quickly is because if you use an accounting tool like QuickBooks Online like Xero you're going to want to make sure that your chart of accounts is aligned and you're going to want to make sure that you're taxing correctly. Much easier in the UK I must admit but we have a 50% spread now with America so I now have to worry about all that pain.

But essentially what it means is we can set up on here and I haven't in this environment but we could set up our tax rates we could set up our income and expense accounts we could make sure that this is going to be build to that customer correctly. Ignore the cost and pricing on here for now it's worthwhile doing it but we're having to manually override this I'll explain why in a minute but it's really important you have a product. If you're wondering where I'm getting the ID from where you see it's the ID in this column here ignore all the leading zeros or the the starting zeros. Alternatively click the product and you'll see in your URL it will say item ID equals and then the integer.

So going back to that runbook very quickly. Integrations integration runbook issue item flowchart we're saying issue the item with the ID 20 there is no cost associated with us on this there is labor or you know hours and man hours but don't worry about that for now. The price this is the important mechanism this is what we're going to be billing our customer. Quantity I'm just adding one and quantity shipped is also one. The reason I've added in quantity shipped one or matching the quantity here is because if you don't it'll say it's not been delivered.

Now if you add it in manually and I'll show you the product again in a second if you add it in manually it'll always say it's been delivered. But because we're having to you know API this in we're going to have to define that metric so quantity shipped is one and that is basically that we're just issuing a product defining some static values and away you go.

The next part in here is purely a success so what we like to do now whenever we're doing these integrations on a ticket we want to post back to the ticket to say it worked. And again all this JSON payload will be in the documentation and again it's posting back to the ticket and basically says that the fixed fee has been fixed fee has been applied. And essentially it's as simple as that. It then is either a success or a failure if it's failed it goes back to the start. And the reason we've done a success on unsuccessful here is because this is just a notification message it's not that important it can't get to this stage without actually being successful.

So let's issue in a product and then you'll see on the ticket that the product is here it has the cost and the price and you'll see that the delivery is been delivered one out of one which is what we're expecting.

So how does all this gel together Connor well we slow it down a little bit you'll see that when we make this we select the fixed fee ticket. Now this doesn't have to be this mechanism again you could handle this in many ways but what we basically said is it's fixed fee and we've made a custom field down here and then when we select something it starts a rule or applies or matches a rule. Now why does it apply or match that rule I hear you thinking in your heads well that is also super simple you'll get the name this video simple.

But essentially we say the rule is match this custom single drop down field and I'll show you that in a minute and if it includes laptop setup or desktop setup I want to start a new workflow and that workflow I've called fix feed laptop desktop. That workflow is simply applying that automation at the very start. The automation we've called issue item and essentially once that automation has run it will then move the ticket to the triage stage or the in progress stage depending on what you want to do with your workflow again super simple.

Workflow for those who don't know what automations are they're simply actions that are made quick some people would call them quick actions but I like to go around the houses so issue item and all that is literally doing on here is starting the webhook integration or runbook integration called issue item that is what I demonstrated a minute ago that is what's going to apply that product. And again you could really go to town with this you could do a lot more functionality with this we're just keeping it quite simple.

Now there is one last thing that I want to mention and that's on the ticket type itself if you go down this route my advice if you're doing this is one of two things actually. You either want to override the charge rate on the ticket to be no charge or clone the actions in the workflow and make it so your engineers can't actually pick a charge type. The reason that is is because of two things if you have a break fixed customer and this is left to defaults you could be charging for remote support or on-site support I.E your double billing for the ticket.

Or if they're in contract and the customer goes hey Connor how much time did we use in January you go oh you used 10 hours and they go cool can we have the breakdown so we so we know where we're at and then you go yeah five of those hours was building laptops they're going to turn around and go well Connor I thought we paid for all of those. Oh you do so why is it caught under our contract. Ah it shouldn't be that's why I do no charge here we can still track the time we're just not accounting it against either an invoice we're not billing for it or it's not being caught against the agreement and I think that's quite important.

The last thing you want to make sure you do is that you apply defaults whenever the ticket is changed to this type. In my build as of right now we've just seen this is not that important because the ticket type is created at the start but if you have an action that turns a ticket into this ticket or a child ticket spawns you're going to want to make sure that you apply the default the default being in this environment or this build the no charge. If you don't there's a chance that this won't work correctly.

And that's basically that we make a ticket we have a custom field which is a custom dropdown if you don't know how to make that again configuration custom objects custom fields we go to our second page I've made one down here called fixed fee just click new in the top right and it's just a single selection drop down with the values in it. And the reason we need that is because on the rule the rule is watching or checking for that field equaling something or containing that value and that's it.

That's how I now do fixed fee billing for customers that need it. I hope that's helped you I I I think this is quite a clean way of doing it I think this is quite a nice solution. It reduces error it reduces overhead. I could say it's a nice little automation just to you know help things along. But for me this works. If you have any questions put them in the comments below.

As always please do subscribe to us if you aren't already it really does help the channel grow I am aiming for that beautiful 1,000 subscribers this year and that's all down to you lovely people at home watching. And that's it I've been Connor Fagan we are Renada Solutions we are trust me. If there's anything else we can help with please let us know. Have a great day have a fabulous start to 2024 and I'll hopefully see you all soon take care bye-bye.