Unofficial Spiceworks

‘more than you might first think!’ by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252)

IT Service Providers have needs not dissimilar to those of IT Departments in medium to large organisations where costs and time need to be attributed to the departments or cost centres, for MSP this is Customers.

Being able to track and account, also attribute these costs is critical to MSP business profitability, in order for accounting and invoicing to be adequately attributed and reimburse all costs associated with delivering services to clients. The second part of this attribution of costs is derived from accurate and detailed record keeping. For many MSPs this can be difficult to get and get right.

As described in the previous article, MSPs doing more with Spiceworks – Part 1, there was extensive use of Custom Attributes to make changes to IT Services to enhance record keeping. Likewise, in this article Custom Attributes are a critical part of the methodology to enhance the cost accounting and record keeping through Helpdesk operations. This plays heavily, once again, on one of the great features of Spiceworks for MSPs, the configurability and versatility of Spiceworks. Out of the box Spiceworks has many excellent features and functions, but the ability to make a few customisations to further enhance Spiceworks usability and enhance functionality is a unique and valuable aspect of Spiceworks, not just for MSPs but IT Pros all over, wanting to do more with less and make their IT day easier.

At the heart of this week’s article is another useful How-to: Tracking Costs for Service, Repairs & Maintenance using Spiceworks. This How-to is written from an MSP point of view, but the principal and methodology can be usefully deployed for monitoring and accounting departmental costs in a larger business or individual businesses costs too.

The first section of the how-to deals with the Custom Attributes used to good effect to enhance the Helpdesk ticket records to allow for reporting a number of additional metrics for accounting and cost attribution.

The attached image as included in the how-to, shows some samples of the attributes added for both this methodology and also those shown in the how-to discussed in the previous article “Use Spiceworks to record IT Services consumed, on-sold and provided directly to clients”.

This article and the associated methodology described in the how-to links to the previous methodology in a few interesting ways. One of the main ways is the embedded feature of Helpdesk tickets which allows you to ‘Relate to’ a ticket, inventory items and devices, as well as linking a ticket directly to an IT Service.

Yes that’s right, in the same way you can link a ticket to an inventory item or device, when you begin typing in the ‘Related to’ field of a ticket you are presented with a list of devices and IT Services that you can ‘Relate to’ the ticket. What a great feature. So using this technique you can, not just track costs associated with maintenance and service, but any costs associated in time or materials with IT Services too.

Secondly the methodology where IT Services and Helpdesk tickets both have Custom Attributes for recording ‘Customers’, these Customer ‘Enumeration’ attributes have the same list of Customers in their enumeration values, which makes reporting a lot easier. Keep in mind that the ‘Customer’ enumeration attribute could just as easily be used for Departments.

The how-to goes on to describe how these new Custom Attributes are to be used for reporting. Detailing how to find the exact field names and how to use them for reporting, either using the embedded Spiceworks reporting engine or reporting outside Spiceworks if needs require.

In order for this methodology to be accurate and effective you need to develop work practices where all services and service delivered to client and/or departments is recorded in association to a ticket. Whether it is maintenance of a server or workstation, or remedial actions to ensure the operation and performance of an IT Service, everything should generate a ticket. So regardless whether it is a ticket raised by a client or a department in your organisation, or a routine maintenance task, that involves no client input at all, having a ticket associated with the task or service ensures it and all the time and components involved in the service are accounted for.

In our case, since developing an integrated business model using Spiceworks as our core technical business system, all services of any type delivered to any client for any reason, are ticketed in the Spiceworks Helpdesk system. This allows us unprecedented ability to accurately account and report on all client based activities, while more accurately than ever tracking and monitoring our In-house activities at the same time. Spiceworks has made immeasurable difference to the economics and profitability of our business.

Again we have highlighted the versatility and configurability of Spiceworks, making your IT life easier.

For more details about how MSPs can and are using Spiceworks, have a look at the Spiceworks MSP Guide.

See you next time…

This is a Guest Post by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252) of Lawrie Dalman Consulting from Australia.