Client agreements, tickets and seat counts, kept together.

A managed service provider looks after other firms’ laptops, servers, firewalls, mailboxes and backups for a fixed monthly fee, and that fee rests on a count of users or devices. The count must be right. Tickets come from email, phone, a portal and monitoring agents, each carrying a response target written into the client’s agreement. Targets differ by plan.

Most providers keep agreements in a shared folder, tickets in a service desk tool, devices in a remote monitoring console and invoices in an accounting package. None of them agree. This software keeps the client, plan, device, ticket and bill together, so the monthly invoice is built from what was actually covered. The bill follows the facts.

The service desk opens tickets, assigns them by skill and watches response clocks while a queue of mixed work builds. A password reset, a failed nightly backup and a new starter laptop each need different handling, and technicians log time against the ticket, sometimes from a client’s server room. Monitoring agents open tickets of their own, and many are noise that someone must close, such as a disk warning that clears itself. Patch windows are agreed with each client, and any skipped window gets a reason noted beside it by the engineer who owned it. Noise costs hours.

Account managers hold the agreements and run quarterly reviews. Finance reconciles seat counts and licence resale against what each client was billed, so ten mailboxes added mid-month get caught before the invoice goes out. Projects such as a tenant migration, a Wi-Fi access point rollout or an office move run beside the support work and are billed on their own terms. Projects run alongside.