Blogs

Creating a Successful and Stable IT Business

Posted on June 14, 2011 by The RangerMSP Team

While working on developing a business management software for MSPs and IT providers, we often try to think of the elements that make businesses successful and stable. Once we identify these components, we try to see if we can incorporate these elements into our software to help our customers’ IT services companies thrive.

Recently, a discussion erupted in our office over the most important business management tools. Reaching an impasse, we decided to consult the all-knowing Internet to see if we could get any additional insight into the core features of successful companies. From our search results, and hundreds, if not thousands, of hits, our initial assumption was confirmed. Whether a multimillion dollar corporation or a Mom and Pop shop, successful and stable companies know how to properly manage their cash flow.

In response to this conclusion, we would like to introduce you to our favorite ways that you can manage your company’s cash flow, thereby strengthening your managed services provider (MSP) or IT business.

1. Increasing billable time needs to be a priority.

The more work you take on for your clients, the sooner you will have the means to pay off your outstanding charges and reinvest in your IT business. To help increase billable hours, growing companies need to process service calls and inventory orders faster. Using a PSA (Professional Services Automation) software, such as our CRM, you can improve upon your company’s efficiency, response time and time management. Our solution provides a centralized system from which you can manage all of your business’ tasks, from Account management, to Contracts, labor and inventory Tickets and technician Dispatching, our PSA software helps you address your clients’ needs faster so that you can increase your billable time. Some of our favorite features that help you service more clients are our Timer and Customer Portal (Web Interface, clients). With our Timer feature, you can record activity for a given Ticket and immediately convert the Timer’s display into a Charge. This great tool is optimal for services like phone and remote support. Our Customer Portal also helps you increase your free time by reducing the number of customer calls you have to manage. With the Portal, customers can generate their own tickets,make additions to Tickets, review the status and service history of their IT Assets (hardware and software), and see the scheduled on-site technician visits without having to contact you directly. After customers update their Accounts, you immediately receive an update in your Tickets’ Inbox, so that you never have to worry about missing a customer generated Ticket or update.

2. Convert time into money

So, now that you have increased your billable hours by managing your clients’ requests more skillfully, it is crucial that you make your invoicing system as efficient as possible so that you can convert your earnings into actual and usable currency. As with helping you increase your billable and free time so you can work on more jobs, our PSA software, is also a software that provides you with the tools you need to bill clients more efficiently. With our PSA software, we provide you with three ways to immediately convert a Charge into a customer Invoice or a payment request statement. The first option allows you to send customers a Charge Report, listing all charges assessed for a particular ticket, account or asset. This report can be sent in PDF formation via email, fax, or mail. An alternative to the charge report is thewiki/Billing_Lifecycle#Using_QuickBooks_Link Quickbooks Link that converts Charges, stored in the billing modules of our PSA, into Quickbooks® Invoices. This feature allows you to create Quickbooks® Invoices directly from CRM’s Account, Ticket or Contract windows. No imports or exports are required. Moreover, it helps you keep track of all open balances by providing you with an Invoice Creation Wizard that shows you all open balances waiting to be billed. The software we offer for MSP also offers an additional feature that enables you to export Charges from the PSA to any external accounting software. Whether you want to invoice your clients using Word®, Excel® or another software, our software Export Wizard enables you to conveniently transfer any Charge to another software so that you can quickly create invoices with ease.

Having a positive cash flow is paramount to running a stable and successful company. Substantiated by our Internet search, it turns out we were right, and so are you, for wanting to increase your billable hours and free time and generate a steady cash flow. We want all businesses to have the opportunity to reach their potential and maximize their earnings. With our slew of automation features, especially those aforementioned, we know that our solution is a fully functional PSA software that can help you reach your goals.

-Success Team

PS: Not using our professional service automation (PSA) software for your business yet? Click here for a fully functional 30 day free trial and see for yourself how the software can help your company succeed!

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CRM and PSA Software: Affordable and Advantageous

Posted on June 9, 2011 by The RangerMSP Team

We thought about using the Billboard Top 100 as inspiration and bombarding you with the top-100 reasons that our CRM is the professional services automation (PSA) software solution selected by so many IT professionals to help them run their businesses, but we reconsidered when our lexicon conservation consultant called the idea excessive. We then thought about channeling our inner Dick Clark to provide you with a countdown of our top-40 favorite features, but that idea was also abandoned when one of our staffers told us that the number 40 reminds him of his deceased iguana, Alanzo. Instead of quibbling over numbers, we’ve settled on highlighting just one of the reasons that our software has become one of the leading management software solutions for small to midsized IT service providers.

Our CRM and PSA software offers an easy-to-use and robust set of automation tools while maintaining an unparalleled price point. Compared to most major CRM and PSA providers, we are affordable. Period. Whether you are a multi-technician operation or a company of one, our fully functional PSA offers you an abundance of easy-to-use and powerful tools at an extremely competitive price.

The natural response to our proclamation is “If your software is really competitive and robust, how do you keep your CRM so affordable?” On your behalf, we’d like to take a minute to answer this very question

By reading our blog, to-date, you’ve probably already figured out that we aren’t into excess. We don’t believe in flashy sales pitches, or massive expo displays. We are a down-to-earth community looking to produce a product in which we believe. We happily forgo big hype for hyper inflation, enabling us to bring you a comprehensive and fully functional PSA solution at an affordable price.

Of course we would love to send our sales and marketing executives from city to city to socialize, mingle and market at road shows and PSA community events and meetings, but we choose to make you the focus of our company instead. And for you, the software’s price tag is a whole lot more important than the amount of face time you get with our company’s executives. So, instead of charging more for our CRM software in order to cover our travel budget, we keep our prices as affordable as possible by using today’s online global world to interact with our customers.

We also ensure that our software is easy to use and affordable by creating an incredibly stable and easy to navigate system. These factors help us reduce our customer support expense so that we can maintain or affordable price point without compromising the quality of our software or our customers’ experiences. Similarly, we save our customers both time and money by optimizing our customer care with a prompt email support service and by providing easy to follow user guides and video demos online.

Most importantly however, we understand that when you choose to invest in a CRM or PSA software for your IT services business, you are making the decision to invest time and money to strengthen and grow your company. You want to be able to better your response time, improve your business margins and save money by automating tasks, and, in an ideal world, the payoffs on your investment in a PSA are achieved swiftly and with ease.

Our committed, professional and experienced staff is dedicated to transforming this desire into a reality. We keep CRM’s layout and functionality user-friendly, so that our users do not have to spend weeks or months learning to navigate our PSA software. Also, we listen to our customers’ feedback so that we can constantly improve our software. The multiple, new versions of CRM that we release every year incorporate features and changes based on your input, so every new, price conscious version of CRM is increasingly tailored to you. That we can provide multiple versions of CRM a year while maintaining our affordability is due to our well-seasoned staffers whose aptitude and experience helps us serve you better, faster and more efficiently.

At our company, we care about maintaining our reputation of putting our clients first. As such, we make sure that our CRM is always fully functional, easy-to-use and affordable, so that we can truly be your partner as you automate your IT business and succeed!

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Beneficial Features for Fred

Posted on June 6, 2011 by The RangerMSP Team

For every aspect of your business, from diagnosing and resolving technical problem to providing help desk support and monitoring services, every detail matters. Unless you have the memory of Dominic O’Brien, the renowned World Memory Champion, or the ability to soak up details with the absorbency of a sponge however, managing an abundance of details is very challenging.

Recognizing this difficulty, our team added features to our professional services automation (PSA) software to help you manage your details so that you can streamline your workflow and ensure increasingly satisfied customers. Before highlighting one of these great features for you however, we would like to draw your attention to one of our client’s workflows (for the sake of today’s blog and our love for naming things, we’ll call our client Fred).

Fred’s Workflow:

As you can see from the diagram, the majority of Fred’s tickets are generated by his customers, via the CRM Email Connector or Customer Portal, or third party RMM tools.

In addition to the tickets being auto-generated by customers or other third party entities, updates to the tickets and their histories are also being made by non-employees, such as the clients, using the CRM Email Connector or Customer Portal. As such, Fred is having an awful time trying to keep track of the status of his tickets and the adjustments made to them.

In order to help out Fred, and IT services providers, managed services providers (MSPs) and computer repair professionals like him, we created two ticket views in our CRM and service management software.

In the primary view, entitled “Tickets,” we display a list of all tickets, including those that are new, pending, scheduled, cancelled and completed. Like all of our lists, Fred is able to filter the mass of tickets by status, ticket manager, ticket number, date, etc. In the second Tickets’ view, entitled “Inbox,” our software automatically places any ticket (new, pending, scheduled, etc), that has been created, updated, or amended by a non-employee.

With the Inbox view, Fred can make sure to stay up-to-date on all adjustments made to the tickets, and can easily review each ticket’s history by clicking on the ticket’s History tab.

As tickets are created or altered by Fred’s customers or third party entities, the software pushes the new or changed ticket to the top of the Inbox View. In doing so, the software eliminates Fred’s need to scavenge through his mass of tickets to find changes, alerts and requests from customers. Fred can now rest assured that he can respond immediately to any ticket items being created or adjusted by his clients because this support software Inbox View makes each client and third party’s initiated action a priority for Fred.

Moreover, to make sure that Fred and his technicians stay current on all amendments made to the tickets, our CRM and PSA software provides an Alert Server module to notify employees about updates made to the database. Also, if Fred, or one of his employees, sends an email response to a customer/third party initiated ticket, an email thread is automatically generated through the CRM Email Connector that is stored in the Ticket History. Through these features, our CRM not only organizes client initiated actions in the Inbox View, but also keeps the entire history of all employee and customer actions and interactions immediately accessible to Fred and his staff.

The Inbox View also enables each privileged employee to view the Inbox tickets without marking the tickets as “Read.” Only once the Ticket Manager views a ticket, does the software remove the bold envelope indication alongside the ticket content, indicating that the ticket has been “Read.”

Through this precautionary feature, Fred, and other IT professionals, can be sure that their account and ticket managers will be responsible for their clients’ needs.

By providing the Inbox View, we ensure that IT services providers, like Fred, never again have to search through a backlog of information to sort out details and changes pertaining to a ticket or asset supplied by their customers or third parties. Moreover, all privileged employees are kept informed in order to ensure a more efficient and streamlined workflow and more satisfied customers.

So, while our CRM and PSA software can’t transform you into the next World Memory Champion, we can help your business become a more detail oriented operation that can easily impress customers with its meticulous and efficient service.

For more information about the Inbox View, please click on the following links:
Inbox View User Guide

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Moving Forward

Posted on June 1, 2011 by The RangerMSP Team

GigaOM is one of our office’s favorite reads and most visited tech blogs. Yesterday, Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, Inc and GigaOM’s executive editor, wrote about Adam Singolda’s Economics of Good Enough.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Adam Singolda, he is the founder and CEO of Taboola, a New-York based video recommendation company. Singolda started Taboola after serving in the Israeli Army for seven years, working on data mining and solving “unsolvable problems.” From Singolda’s business and army experiences, he developed the Economics of Good Enough which he shared with students at MIT’s Sloan School of Business. In a nutshell, Malik summarizes the Good Enough philosophy in the following one-liners:

  • “Succeed with what you have.”
  • “Failing is a part of the process, not the end of it.”
  • “Golden moments don’t exist.”
  • “Creativity. New world requires new tools.”
  • “Networking. Not as a Rolodex but to create opportunities.”

    • In essence, Singolda’s philosophy is guided by the understanding that today’s tech industry is growing and evolving incredibly quickly. Opportunities to grow, change and attract new customers are constantly available. Competition however, is equally as present and abundant. The resulting challenge is that the potential to succeed is always increasing, as is the potential to fail.

    Keeping the new economic climate in mind, we find Singolda’s philosophy very helpful. If we want to be competitive in today’s market, we have to keep moving forward. In light of the dynamics of today’s market, we don’t have the luxury of taking our time to make decisions in order to avoid failure. Small setbacks in the face of constant innovation is to be expected and embraced. We all have to adapt to the challenges of the new face of competition if we want to succeed.

    So, what does this mean for our CRM software?

    Well, since launching the first edition of the software, we have been vigilant in releasing new and improved versions of our professional services automation (PSA) software on a regular basis. Instead of just broadening the scope of our CRM’s features and functionality with our next version however, we are “Networking” to create collaborative opportunities for new and exciting integrations, and a new realm of functionality for our users.

    We are moving forward and we are taking this CRM and PSA software and the community to the next level of competitiveness. Not only are we improving the ease-of-use and functionality of our business automation technologies, but we are also adding additional layers of features to make the software more competitive and your business more prepared to stake a claim in today’s market.

    Stay tuned for news from us about how, together with our CRM and PSA software, we can all move forward!

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    Let the Blogging Begin!

    Posted on May 31, 2011 by The RangerMSP Team

    Since we launched our CRM and PSA software in 2004, we’ve known that a day would come when we would have to actively promote our professional services automation (PSA) software, but we were kind of hoping that we could keep pushing that day off.

    We are incredibly proud of our CRM, of that there is no question. Our CRM software is a robust PSA solution for small to midsized IT services professionals that never compromises features for affordability or ease of use for quality of workforce management tools. Up until now, the software’s sales have been mostly driven by customer referrals, and we’ve been content watching our customer base develop without having to incorporate routine sales into our business model. It’s not that we have a problem with sales teams or salesmen. It’s just that we are first and foremost IT professionals. We got our start servicing local law firms, and still see ourselves as software developers.

    A quick visit to our office would make it clear to you that we are bona fide IT guys. Our corporate culture, for example, is anything but corporate. We don’t wear suits. The men in our company don’t even own ties, unless stained neckties, circa 1992, count. Our break room is stocked with as much sugar as coffee and, sometimes, we find it easier to speak in three letter acronyms than full words. So, we’ve decided to stay true to our tee-shirt wearing, anti-suit philosophy, and to steer clear of standard, sales force operations.

    As such, we’ve decided to forgo cold calls and massive email campaigns and, instead, adopt a much more organic way of communicating the quality and value of our product to the public: a blog. A blog is the perfect way to give you insight into our company, our team, our CRM, the ways in which our product transforms our customers’ companies, and our thoughts on industry related news.

    There really is no better way to learn about us, how we work, our product, and our integrations with various third party software development companies than by tuning in and getting behind the scenes information about us, our PSA software solution, our current projects and our thoughts about related topics.

    So, here it is: our blog — a regular transmission of ways in which our PSA software can best service you and your customers, along with other interesting and related factoids.

    We look forward to exploring our CRM software and other industry-related resources and news with you in the future. Until then, just remember that our CRM is the automation software that helps small to midsized IT services providers be successful!

    Until next time,
    Success Team

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    The New and Improved Rolodex

    Posted on January 3, 2011 by The RangerMSP Team

    Back in the olden days, like way back in 1993, the Rolodex was just about the most important office item. While it couldn’t resolve pressing debates like whether or not kangaroos can walk backwards, a Rolodex was the keeper of all important relationship information. From basic contact details, like phone numbers and addresses, to birthdays, account numbers, and other relationship details, a detailed Rolodex card held all information pivotal to the building and maintenance of any personal or working relationship. Simply put, a Rolodex was a testament to your relationships.

    In all fields, people understood the value of a Rolodex. In fact, the Rolodex became so iconic, that people developed relationships with their Rolodexes, saying things like “I’m going to take my Rolodex with me when I leave” and “I think I have him in my Rolodex.” Well-maintained and thorough Rolodexes that lawsuits were even filed by companies looking to recover Rolodexes maintained by former employees. No joke! The simple, organized wheel of contacts and relationship details were of such value to companies that they were willing to fight for access to former employees’ databases of contacts.

    Today, although we have retired the handwritten, white, contact cards and the powerful Rolodex wheel, a well-maintained, detailed and organized accounting of contacts, their details and relationship-strengthening information is no less important. In fact, with the ever expanding assortment of contacts, leads and details we have at our fingertips, between social media platforms, websites, blogs, etc., managing contacts and their details has become even more crucial.

    While recognizing the importance of contact management, many people face a related challenge when that they use multiple software solutions to manage the many aspects of their lives. It’s difficult and time consuming to manage contacts in multiple platforms! There’s an accounting platform, email server platform, a business automation solution platform, and so on. The number of duplicates, data entry errors and general frustrations that arise from overseeing multiple contact databases is staggering.

    With our CRM and PSA software, IT support providers can avoid the headache and hassle involved in contemporary contact database management. The software lets you easily import, export, link and sync contacts between various platforms, including QuickBooks, Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and various remote monitoring and management (RMM) solutions.

    Instead of complicating your life with multiple contact databases, turn your Accounts module into your contemporary business Rolodex by instantly adding contacts from any software platform to the CRM software!

    You can import or export contacts from either the home screen or the Accounts window.

    From the home screen, select Tools > Import and Export > Import Accounts.

    The Accounts Import Wizard window will open to guide you through the rest of the importing process.

    Accounts 2

    Similarly, from the Accounts window, select Accounts > Tools > Import & Export > Import Accounts.

    The same Account Import Wizard window will pop up to guide you through the process of importing your contacts from various platforms.

    Once you have imported all of your contacts into our CRM and PSA software, you can manage everything, from basic contact details, to important relationships, a history of all interactions, special notes, related documents, etc. By building a comprehensive overview of your relationship with each of your contacts in the software, you can rest assured that you are not only going to have the information you need to easily strengthen and build upon your current relationships, but you will have the tools and information you need to make our CRM the new and improved Rolodex!

    Until next time,
    Success Team

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