Why Pax8 subscriptions never show up as products in HaloPSA

Connor: So you want to use the Pax8 integration or you want to know how to set the Pax8 integration up? Well today I'm going to run through two parts of this video. Part one is going to be setting up this integration inside HaloPSA and part two is how we leverage that integration when it comes down to recurring invoicing to make our lives much easier.

Now before I get too far into this video I will just point out at the start that Renada is not an MSP. We kind of are, we're an MSP for MSPs. Anyway, but what I mean is we don't sell licences to our customers. So my Pax8 is going to be very empty. I have put a few free subscriptions on there, some NFLs, just to hopefully demonstrate how this can work. And obviously in your environment if you are selling a bunch of, you know, 365 licences, et cetera, you will have a lot more to do than I will today. But with that being said let's get stuck into it. So I'm just going to change the scene over to scene number one. I will one day get a stream deck to make this all more efficient. But for now let's get stuck into this.

So the first thing we need to do is go into Halo, actually go down to Configuration in the bottom left hand corner. I'm going to zoom in a little bit, go down to Integrations and then you will be at the integration page. You could either scroll down and find Pax8 or you can search at the top at Pax8 and then click on the little plus. Now this little plus isn't actually enabling or disabling the feature, what it's doing is showing you the feature in the side menu or not. So if you end up not using the Pax8 integration don't just think by clicking this off it will stop everything. It won't. If you have to disconnect from that integration. So it's going to press the little plus which will make it turn red and then I'm going to go and click on Pax8.

And it basically needs two things: it is the client ID and it needs the client secret. Now these are sourced from Pax8 itself. So let's go and set these up.

So let's jump into Pax8 and the first thing you want to do is click on Users on the left hand side. You want to click on your user. I believe if you're not a partner admin then I think you'll need to use somebody else's account. But again, I'm not 100% validate that. All I know is you need to click on yourself and make sure the role is partner admin.

From there you need to click on Developer Apps in the middle and then on the right hand side you want to click Create. You've then got to sign your life away. Obviously it's really important that you read all of this, and I'm not going to do that. I've already read it in full detail.

Right, I'm just going to sign my life away and the developer app name I'm just going to call that HaloPSA. None of this bit really matters so far. You can type in there whatever you want really. And then it's going to spit out a client ID and a client secret. So I'm just going to go ahead and copy the client ID and post that into Halo.

And then going to copy the client secret and paste that into Halo and I'm going to click Test Configuration. Now what's about to happen, oh okay, if you get Unsuccessful, which is what used to happen, they've clearly changed something and you have to basically close this developer app page. And what used to happen is you would press Test and it would say, you know, Incorrect Login or Misconfiguration or whatever it said. But closing this developer app window will fix that problem. So if you do notice that just make sure that you've closed this box inside of Pax8 and then that should work.

Now once you've done that and you get a Successful Test or Test Successful, and you need to move down to Customers. Now the Pax8 integration is in my opinion the best integration inside of HaloPSA because it doesn't actually require you to pull in all of your customers. Now if you've done no integrations before that will mean nothing to you, but just note that Pax8, I think, is the only integration that works like this. Now what you'll see is that it says Map Customers. Do not need to be imported in this integration. It's the only one for my knowledge unless you override it.

So the first thing you want to do is Click Generate Mappings. What this is doing is this is trying to match customer names inside of Pax8 with customer names inside of HaloPSA. Now inside of my Pax8 I have my companies and the company is called Renada Solutions Limited, whereas inside of my Halo, if I just go to Organisation, my organisation is called HaloPSA Test. I'm in my sandbox environment. That is why when I click Generate Mappings nothing happened.

Just going to go back to that Pax8 integration. If nothing happens and you don't get any customers here and you've probably got a problem, but usually you'll get some customers because the names will be homogenised across your platforms. Now if they don't match what you need to do is go ahead and click on the Plus on the right hand side next to the word Add.

And you want to start from top to bottom in my recommendation. So we're going to start by select Renada Solutions Limited. That then says, okay, we have Renada Solutions Limited as a customer inside of Pax8. Who do we want to match them to inside of Halo?

And I'm just going to type in Renada YouTube Customer. Again, it doesn't really matter. Sorry, I have really itchy eyes today. Must be allergies. Sorry, slight jump cut. Again, it doesn't really matter what you match it to as long as you think they are the right customers. Now what I recommend to some of my customers is during this process is let's actually take the time to, you know, sort out the mismatch names. It could be a good time for a bit of data cleansing depending on how bad it's got. And again, we're all familiar with this: years after year, season after season, our customer names start to drift and change, and before you know it, Renada Solutions Limited has six different spellings across six different platforms. So again, it's really up to you. But what I'm going to say is I'm going to map Renada Solutions Limited to Renada Solutions Limited to the Halo customer Renada YouTube Customer.

I'm saying yep, they are the same entity. And what's really cool now is in most integrations you've got to click Import Customers. Now you don't have to do it in this integration. And what that normally does is it will sync the ID from the Pax8 customer into Halo and map it into the database. Now you don't need to do that because when you import subscriptions that process happens at the start.

If you was using Pax8 as your source of truth, let's say you had no customers inside of Halo yet, but all of your customers existed inside of Pax8, then you could just leave all the mappings alone, click Import Customers and it will carbon copy, if you will, Pax8 into HaloPSA. And the added benefit then is that they are then linked together.

For me in my environment I don't need to do anything else. I've mapped to the only customer I've got inside of Pax8 or company into HaloPSA. And then all I've now got to do is go down to Subscriptions and click Import Subscriptions.

This will then show me that Renada Solutions Limited has two subscriptions and I'm going to click Start. And you will see on the left hand side they both say Done.

So if I now go to Renada YouTube Customer and go to my Subscriptions, you will see that I have an Exclaimer Signature Cloud Two and I will have a SentinelOne Complete NFR One.

What you will see, because they are NFR, is that there is no sell price. Now, just to note, the Pax8 integration is currently not expose the purchase price. You'll never get your purchase price from Pax8 into HaloPSA. But you will get your sell price.

So just to reiterate that: when you pull these subscriptions from Pax8 into Halo, they're going to exist under the Subscriptions page of that customer and you're only going to be able to see the sell price and not the purchase price. Okay.

Just jumping back to Configuration, Integrations and Pax8.

If you do ever add a new customer in Pax8 and the names are different, and we even need to click Generate Mappings or Add a Mapping to match those customers up, so you can sync those subscriptions.

Then finally at the bottom, what you want to do is Enable the Halo Integrator for the Pax8 integration. Now you've got two options here: you've got Customers and you've got Subscriptions. My advice is you only sync Subscriptions and make the customer side of things a manual task. The only reason that I say that is because if someone does happen to make a customer inside Pax8 and inside of Halo and the names don't match, they will end up with duplicates. You'll end up with duplicate customers inside of Halo. Now depending on how many integrations you have set up, you can obviously see how that could become a problem very quickly.

So where it's not a two-way or synchronous integration, i.e., this isn't if you make a customer in Halo it doesn't push to Pax8, it is Pax8 to Halo, and I would say just set up Subscriptions and make that Customer part manual.

This will then sync once a day, I believe it's midnight of the time zone that you're in, and that will then pull the subscriptions down from Pax8 and update your customers entity inside of Halo.

So that is step one. That is setting up the integration.

Step two, that was four. Step two is how we leverage these subscriptions onto recurring invoices. So let's go ahead and go to an Invoice and I'm just going to make a new Recurring Invoice.

So currently we've set up a subscription under Renada YouTube Customer. So I'm just going to select that customer and then I'm going to go and add a Recurring Product. Now a common misconception, and I say a misconception in my opinion it should do this but it doesn't, is that once you enable that Pax8 integration, all of those subscriptions are going to appear inside of Halo. Whilst that statement is true, they don't appear as products. So you will not find any of your Pax8 subscriptions inside of Halo.

However, what you can do from Pax8 is go down to Subscriptions and you can export or download all of your products that you resell and then you can import those into Halo.

Again, it's down to how you want to display that information. What I usually recommend is when customers start creating their recurring invoices, that they actually manually make them. But that's up to you.

So just to be clear, even though my customer Renada YouTube Customer has subscriptions, where are they here? Has Exclaimer Signature and SentinelOne, they will not exist in my Product section inside of Halo. We have to make them manually and design all the costs manually.

So I'm just going to make, I'm just going to go ahead and copy SentinelOne Complete NFR. I'm just going to go to Products. Let me say this is a Recurring Item and I'm going to make a new Recurring Item. I'm going to call this a SentinelOne Complete NFR. And all I care about right now is that this is a Recurring Product is ticked Yes.

The cost price, I'm gonna say that this price of this costs the price of this to my customer is five pounds and the cost to me is three pounds.

And again I always recommend setting these as a global and when you're making these products, and that way you can always edit them later. You'll notice on the right hand side we have Recurring Price and Recurring Cost and you'll know these two check boxes. The really good thing about this is, let's say that the SentinelOne cost actually goes up and it's now four pounds to you, you can very easily select this, change it to four, and then update that item cost on every single Recurring Invoice in a single click of the button. The same goes down to Price. If your cost goes up and you marry that with your price, you could then say actually no, now it costs our customers six pounds per month, update the price on every single invoice. We can override these down here. I'm not going to go through that right now but that is making that product.

Then we need to go to Invoices and I'm going to add a Recurring Item. Let me just add the customer of Renada YouTube Customer and they're going to add a Recurring Item of SentinelOne Complete NFR and I'm just going to say the quantity is one.

Now so far in this process right now we've not used the Pax8 integration at all. The Pax8 integration, we've manually made a product and we've manually added that product to the Recurring Invoice.

Now the real nice bit about these integrations with distributors in Halo, in my opinion, is they're quite flexible. What I mean by that is we can use the same integration or the same subscription quantity across multiple line items. So I'm just going to add Business Premium Monthly. I'm going to add one of those as well.

Now the way we leverage the integration and keep all this stuff married up is by editing the line item with the SentinelOne NFR and we dictate where we want the quantity to be calculated from.

And I'm going to say I want the quantity to be calculated from the Subscription.

And then I can click Add on the right hand side and then you select what subscription you want to update that line item with. And I'm going to say the SentinelOne Complete NFR.

We can then say they get X amount free a month. Let's say they currently have 10, you could say five, if those are free, that way it would only show five on the invoice line.

We can add a Minimum Quantity. So let's say actually when you sign up, that customer, you go, you know what, you're below our minimums. But if you commit to five Business Premiums or whatever, we will honour that, so you can make sure that there's always a minimum of five on here.

And the last bit, or the bit we're all here for, is the Prorata Section. Now I believe Pax8 charge you Prorata from the date the change occurred. So let's say we've got a 30-day month and the licence costs 30 pounds, 30 dollars. If you add it on the 15th for the month, Pax8 is going to charge you 15. That's how I believe Pax8 operates.

Typically I don't touch this inside of Halo. I leave it as the top one: Prorata from the Date the Change Occurred. This way you incrementally bill your customers depending on what day they had that service in the month.

You want to bill for the entire period, you could do Include Changes in the Next Invoice, so this would be for the full month.

You can even immediately invoice for changes, so if they, you know, add something middle of the month, you could immediately invoice for that change.

Or you can Exclude the Changes from the Next Invoice. So I'll leave you to play with this one. My recommendation personally, to be fair to be kind, is the Prorata from the Date the Change Occurred, and press Save.

Scroll to the bottom and press Save. And currently you'll see it as zero. As soon as I press Save again, a quantity will now be pulled from that subscription under the customer Renada YouTube Customer.

Finally, I mentioned that we can leverage these quantities in different ways. So let's say that I'm actually going to remove Business Premium. I'm just going to say I'm going to add a generic product and I'm going to say Managed Service Charges. Okay, back in time.

Now the way my company bills Managed Service Charges, we don't, but stay with me, is based on the number of users they have. So I'm just going to do Calculate Quantity from Subscription. Now I don't want to do Users inside of HaloPSA because that number could go up and down if we make a test user, we don't want to be billing for that. It becomes a bit of a, you know, tight one to manage. But what I can tell you is in this scenario, if Exclaimer sees that person as a user or a mailbox, we want to be billing for that.

Now again, take this with a pinch of salt. I probably wouldn't apply this to this one here. But as you're seeing, you can start to actually say, hang on a minute, we could base it on the number of Business Premium, Business Standard and E3 licences, and that count then dictates the monthly Managed Service Charge. I'm just going to say it's Exclaimer and I'm going to press Save and then Save again. Price is 55, it doesn't matter. And then press Save and then my Managed Service Charges will then be dictated by the number of Exclaimer licences the company has. And you can add these together. I could say actually I want it to be both Exclaimer and SentinelOne, so I can go ahead and press Save.

That should then be now three because we have two Exclaimer and one SentinelOne. So you can really start to juggle with these subscriptions to, you know, have some really accurate billing depending on what you need. But that's basically it.

It's not amazing integration. It's okay and it's reliable. Is all I can tell you. I don't really have many issues with it. There's been a couple of bugs in the beta versions, but that's why we set Unstable. But essentially, you need to set up the integration, you need to pull in all the subscriptions to your customers, you need to make your Recurring Invoices manually, and then you want to tie the quantities of those subscriptions to the line item quantities in your Recurring Invoices.

I hope this helps you. That's as much as you can do with it as of right now. And the last thing you could do is you could run a report to compare your CSP or Office 365 licence quantities to your Pax8 quantities if you want to see a video on that please let me know. As always, I've been Connor. I hope this video helped someone out. Have a lovely day and I'll speak to you soon. Take care. Goodbye.