Why HaloPSA now splits Awaiting Review into five billing categories

Connor: Hello I'm back once again. I am so consistent at being inconsistent, that is me in a nutshell, but I am back today with a video on awaiting review. So for those who don't know what awaiting review is, you can enable this inside of Halo. What this allows you to do is before you generate invoices for your customers for billable ticket time, you can review it.

The problem is, and I'm going to call it version one, bear with me here. Version one, there was tons of things missing from there and it kind of sucked, so I was like yeah it's good to have it but it a little bit lukewarm. Halo then fixed it. And when I say fixed it, they fixed all the entries showing up correctly. The problem is that they didn't sort out any of the grouping, so you had these like two items, I think it was contract and non-contract or something similar, and we didn't know if there's overages if there's going to be invoiced or not.

So come on Connor Fagan coming in, I'm not sounded much here apart from spam Tim's inbox, sorry Tim, but essentially I worked a lot with the Halo team just to help them understand what I think needs to be done from an MSP perspective in terms of reviewing your tickets on a monthly basis. Now I'm not saying this is perfect yet and if it doesn't work properly don't blame me, I just try to help in this situation.

But essentially there's now five categories under awaiting review. I'm just gonna move my tiny little face out of the way here we go, coming on a journey with me to the top of the screen. There we go. So you'll now see under awaiting review five sections. You'll see no charge. You'll see non-contract prepay. You'll see contract prepay. You'll see contract prepay overage and contract prepay included.

Now the way I recommend handling this is to basically start going through each section. Don't just click away in review and try and handle it all in there. It'd be way too complicated, especially if you're getting kind of the first time you've looked at this since the change. There's going to be like thousands and thousands of actions in there.

So the first thing to do is click no charge. Now I'm going to make some entries with you both in a minute. With you both, with you all, there could be two of you there, there could be more with you all to show you how stuff gets in these categories. But essentially I would start with no charge. I would then start with any included stuff against your contracts. Then it would look at any overage. This is stuff that's going to be invoiced. And then look at non-contract prepay. This again is going to be invoiced. This is going to appear in the ready for invoicing. And the time you've kind of done top to bottom, up and then down, what you should be left with is any anomalies.

And the only thing I've seen appear in here at the minute is if someone sets a charge rate on a ticket and puts no time in it. Kind of, this is a bit of a catch-all. For the most part you should never need to worry about this middle one. This is literally a catch-all. And it's a good job it was here because I asked him to remove it and Tim said no, let's give him all the options. Respect him. The only time I've seen anything appearing here outside of the other categories is that contract rate with no charge.

So what I'm going to do today, and I've not tested this in my environment, this is another sandbox I've got recently, is I'm gonna try and simulate how tickets come in here and why they come into each category. So let's do this together. So I'm just going to make a new ticket. Let's full screen this up here. Let's do this.

You don't need to worry about what I'm doing other than the fact I'm making a ticket. Now if you got this far in the video and you can't make a ticket, you're probably jumping the gun a little bit, I'll be honest.

Oh, to keep billing categories mandatory, you see what even is this. Oh yes, I was testing for a customer.

And I'm going to close this and I'm just going to put in two hours of no charge. There we go. So now when I go to invoices, awaiting review, there should be one entry in there because I've just made it and it should appear under no charge. That is because the charge type is no charge.

Shouldn't.

Yeah good, it shouldn't as it doesn't appear under any other section. So no charge is literally showing you tickets where someone has set the action or the charge rate on the action of no charge. Remember, awaiting review will let you review each action, not a ticket. And it's very important to remember that.

So no charge is here. No charge. Brilliant. Next I'm going to do a ticket with a charge. We're just using Acorn Construction here. Now I don't think I have any agreements for this but we'll soon find out.

There we go, two hours.

So now if I go to invoices, there's obviously two. The original no charge that we had from doing the no charge rate and then non-contract prepay is now two hours to invoice. You see it here on the right hand side, two hours to invoice. And it shouldn't as it doesn't appear anywhere else.

So these are the two basically that you're going to be using a lot. If a, there's no charge, which you know could be across any ticket whether it's inside or outside an agreement, and a non-contract prepay. Now a lot of the customers that I work with, this should be pretty much always empty because we always make an agreement, whether it's included hours or zero hour contracts. We always make a contract or agreement for that.

I'm just going to whip up a very quick agreement if I knew how to use Halo. Let me just see what Terry's has got going on. Okay. Let's just give Terry everything a minute and limited hours. There we go. Unlimited hours for Terry. So Terry's Chocolates has an agreement on limited hours per month charge types. Everything's gonna get caught inside that agreement. And when did start, started in the past. Fantastic.

So now if I make a ticket for Terry's. Just an incident. Category doesn't matter.

Close this with two hours of remote support.

We should now see that we have three actions in here. Again I only done one action per ticket. But as you can see here, the Terry's isn't showing in contract prepay overage. Well actually in my case, that hasn't been shown anywhere.

Okay, is that because that customer is broken billing.

Yes it is. There is a default pay as you go.

So again, this is where it can really help you troubleshoot if your agreements are working correctly or not. So I'll just slow down. Now I've understood what's happened there. So essentially I'm expecting any ticket from Terry's Chocolate Orange to be caught by an agreement and it's not. It's not showing me under any of these contract settings. It's showing me under non-contract.

So the first thing I do is go, that's interesting. Why hasn't this ticket for Terry's been caught against an agreement? The first thing I always do is you just saw is go to the customer, Terry's Chocolates, go to the billing section and scroll down to billing plan combinations.

Now when I do my builds I handle all of these at the agreement level. However, if you were to handle it outside or was to delete an agreement, sometimes they can get stuck in here. So just bear that in mind. Now what this is telling me, sorry, this scroll wheel is horrific on this new mouse.

Um, every site, every ticket type, by default, as in sequence one, again this is tiered waterfall, the first sequence is going to go as pay as you go. Nothing in my environment right now is going to hit the contract.

So I'm just going to do is scroll down and delete that pay as you go.

I'm just going to go back to that ticket, which is this one here for Terry's, and I'm just going to click recalculate billing.

And now you'll see it says contract hours, two hours. If you wondered why I was pausing for then, I was kind of waiting for the screen to refresh. About, okay, there we go. And I missed it.

Um, so now if I go to invoices, awaiting review, I still have three. However, this time the third one is showing me an agreement but it's showing me no hours to invoice.

If I go to contract prepay at the bottom and click included, it will show me that this action on this ticket is now included in that agreement. There's zero hours to invoice. We're not going to invoice them anything. And two hours of the action on that ticket are getting caught against the agreement.

It will also show in contract prepay because this is a, what's the word I'm looking for, an accumulation at both the overage and the included plus any anomalies.

The last one I'm going to try and simulate, stimulate, simulate, demonstrate that, that's what I'm going to demonstrate is the contract prepay overage. So if I make an agreement for this, should be fun. Uh, let's do Mario and Luigi. Luigi's Pizza Palace.

I hate this mouse. Any good wireless mouse recommendations? This Razer Pro Click awful. Right, zero hours per period, number of periods, no end date. When did it start?

Ah, January the 1st. Okay. What gets caught by this agreement? Again, zero hours per month. Okay, what gets caught by this? Everything. Let's assume this is a break fix customer but we want to be able to track under an agreement what they do, what they don't have, what recurring invoices they have, what they do per period, just at a glance, rather than having to run reports.

This is why I sometimes build these zero hour agreements. It really depends on the time scale we're working towards, the outcome we're going to get from it, and there's many ways or reasons why I would and wouldn't build this way. But essentially Mario's and Luigi's has a zero hours contract that encapsulates everything.

Now I'm just going to go and check before I do a ticket that Mario and Luigi's Pizza Palace has nothing set up in here.

Okay, looking good.

Mario and Luigi's.

Submit.

Close. Still on site support. Two hours.

Go to invoices.

That again.

Has now shown me a few things. So I can see Mario and Luigi's Pizza Palace. This action on this ticket has been caught against this agreement. But this time it's saying hours to invoice.

Now I know because I know it's going to appear in the overage section because it's a zero hour agreement or contract but it has no time encapsulation. So it's not like they're getting five hours a month or unlimited hours per month. It is just a break fixed contract, pay as you go contract if you will. And it's being caught here.

Now when it comes down to reviewing these things, um, the only time, so if you didn't know, you can select the little tick in the top left and click edit. The only time you want to use do not bill is either if you're in non-contract prepay or contract overage and you don't want to invoice them. You never really want to do do not bill in no charge or in contract prepay as it will basically not log it against the agreement.

What you'll want to just do is click review. So just to reiterate on that one. Review should be fine for everyone unless there is overage that you do not want to invoice for, in which case you would then do yes, do not bill. Do not invoice this customer for this time.

And that is pretty much it to be honest. Um, I quite like the changes. I think they're quite easy to get your head around once you understand what it is they're actually doing.

So for one last time: no charge is actions on tickets with no charge. Non-contract prepay is actions on tickets that aren't being caught by an agreement or contract. Contract prepay is an encapsulation of both contract prepay overage and contract prepay included. Contract prepay overage is any time on a ticket that is being logged against an agreement but it's going over their time. It could be outside of the working hours, could be overage in time. Included is exactly that. The time is being caught, handled, or the bill is being caught and handled by the agreement. We're not going to invoice for this time. This is fully included.

And that is pretty much it. Any questions, you know where to find me. I hope this helps some of you understand this. I have requested a few more features from Halo to make this a little bit better. For instance, controlling the filter on when so we can actually filter by the date. And if I get an update I will put it in the description below. I fell in that, have a lovely day. I've been Connor and I'll see you all soon. Cheers. Bye.