Atera’s Billing Training Webinar

Webinar transcript

Rebecca: Welcome again, everyone, to our billing webinar. Today, we’ll be covering, as the name suggests, the billing module within Atera—how to use it, and I’m very excited to go over this area of the platform with you. My name is Rebecca, and I’m a Customer Success Manager here at Atera. Joining me is Sheina, the one and only, also a Customer Success Manager here at Atera. She’ll be responsible for managing the Q&A section, answering all of your questions—all of your burning questions, as she said—and she’ll be assisting me as well. So, thank you, Sheina, for joining me today.

Okay, wonderful. So, just to go over a brief agenda of what we’ll be covering today: 

1. How to set up your customers within Atera. 

2. Setting up business hours as well as SLAs. 

3. Setting up the contracts that you’d like for each of your customers. 

4. Tickets associated with the contracts. 

5. How to create billing batches and invoices.

6. Exporting the invoices and the accounting integrations that we have offered within Atera. 

7. Relevant reports to billing and profitability. 

8. A dedicated Q&A session as Sheina already mentioned. 

Just a small housekeeping matter: please ensure to put all of your questions in the Q&A section, and general conversation can remain in the chat. That way, we’ll be able to keep organized all the different aspects that you guys are asking about. So, that would be perfect. Don’t be shy; please ask questions throughout the whole session. I might miss them during my live walkthrough of the platform, but I’ll certainly answer them in the dedicated Q&A section.

And just another plug for some of our other webinars: you can go ahead to atera.com/webinars, and you’ll be able to sign up for different webinars. We have a lot of different product-based webinars—so for our network discovery feature, for patching, the RMM side of our platform, PSA and ticketing, AIT, and more. You can also watch webinars that have already occurred—the recordings of them. We also have a very extensive knowledge base. I will ask Sheina throughout the session to post relevant knowledge base articles for the topics that we’re discussing into the chat, but in the Q&A section, we might talk about the knowledge base a little bit more. This is a great place to get step-by-step guides on how to complete anything that you’d like within Atera. We also have a newly released product roadmap, which I’ll also probably show a little bit later, which shows everything that’s recently been released within Atera as well as everything that’s coming. So, it really gives you a good insight into the direction of the products. We also have our Atera Community, and this is a great place to collaborate with fellow Atera users, IT professionals, etc. In terms of technical matters, we have our 24/7 live chat with our support team, as well as the ability to reach out by email at any time to [email protected]. ## Getting Started Okay, so without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into the platform. I will just share my other screen. Give me a moment. Okay, can everyone see the screen, and is it clear? Sheina, can you see my screen? Just making sure. Perfect. Okay, wonderful. So, here we are in our Atera platform. Just as a basic overview to understand the logic of our billing module: essentially, you’re going to set up your customers within Atera if you haven’t already. Attached to those customers, you’re going to create SLAs, billing schedules, calendars for your working hours, as well as the contracts. Then, you’ll use our ticketing system to track your working hours, as well as products that you’re selling to your customers or other expenses that come up. Finally, you will use our billing tool to create invoices to bill your customers. That’s generally how it works at a very high level. 

So, let’s go ahead and talk about how to set up a customer. We’ll go ahead and click into the customer section. Now, it’s important to mention that you can create a new customer from here. Of course, this will show you all of your customers within the platform, but throughout the whole platform, you also have the option to create a new customer as well. You can also import your customers via a CSV file, but I’m going to show you the manual way that you can create a customer one by one. We’re going to go ahead and click on “New Customer,” and here you’ll create a customer name. So, let’s do “Billing Webinar” in honor of this lovely webinar. There’s a lot of other information here, such as address, contact information, etc. I’m not going to go into that now, but it’s just basic information that is relevant. Then, you’re going to go ahead and create the contract for the customer. Now, it’s important to mention as well that you can create a contract here directly when you’re building a new customer or in the admin section in the contract section. We’ll actually cover the specifics of how to build a contract a little bit more once we get into that section, but I did want to show that there’s two methods and two places in which you can create a contract. So, we’ll give the contract a name. Let’s go for “Default Contract.” Choose a contract type. We’ll go for “Retainer Flat Fee,” the quantity, the rate, etc., etc. Again, we’ll go more into the options when we go into the admin section. Let’s go ahead and click “Next.” Now, we’re going to choose an SLA. An SLA is the service level agreement between yourself and your customer in terms of the amount of time it’ll take you to resolve issues. We’ll also talk about that a little bit more later. So, let’s go ahead for our “Default SLA.” You’re going to also select your alert threshold profile. This is the profile in which alerts will be generated for the customer based on their devices. So, we’ll choose the “Default Profile,” and then you can also create contacts within the customer. So, that’s how you’ll have your end users within the customer. So, we go ahead and create. Now, as you can see, now that I’ve built the customer, I’m directly inside of the customer’s setup, and we can see the contract that we’ve built out—the default contract. From here, we can clone it, we can edit it, we can delete it, and we could also build out a new contract. 

Okay, so now let’s go ahead and talk about the configuration of some of the various tools and pieces that we talked about. You’re going to go ahead into your admin section, which is where mostly everything is configured within Atera. So, admin, and then you’re going to go ahead into your business administration section.

Starting with our business hours, these are the calendars that you create based on your technicians’ working schedules. Based on those calendars, you’ll link to your service level agreements so that the non-working hours don’t influence the accomplishment of completing those SLAs. So, we’re going to scroll down. These are all our existing calendars; we have quite a few. But let’s make a new calendar together. So, we’ll give it a name. Let’s stick on theme with the “Billing Webinar.” And then, for each of the days, you can select if this is included within the calendar. So, let’s go Monday to Friday, and you could adjust the schedule for each day. 9 to 6 sounds about right for me, so we’re going to keep that as is, and we’ll go ahead and save this calendar. 

Perfect. Now, once you’ve created the business hours, we’re going to link that to a service level agreement. So, again, you can see all of your SLAs here. Let’s go ahead and build a new SLA. “Billing Webinar” once again as the name. And we’re going to choose our relevant calendar. So, here we have our “Billing Webinar” calendar. You can add a description or any other information. And then, very simply, you have the SLA for the first response time—self-explanatory—the time it takes to send that first response to the ticket, as well as the time that it takes to close the ticket. And for each of these, you have the impact level—everything from no impact to a crisis. So, for example, let’s just say for my first response time for a no impact ticket, that would be 48 hours, and then the time it would take to close that ticket is 5 days. Whereas for a crisis, let’s say the first response time would be 30 minutes, and the close ticket time would be 2 hours—a little ambitious, but we’re ambitious people. So, we’re going to go ahead and save that, and of course, you can fill in all of the relevant impact levels. 

Now, once you’ve created your business hours and your SLA, now you’re going to go ahead and create your contracts. You’re kind of working your way up. So, these are all of your existing contracts. Once again, we’re going to go ahead and create a new contract. Each contract is attached to a specific customer, meaning if you want to create the same contract for multiple customers, you’ll either need to clone the contract or just recreate it one by one. So, we’re going to go ahead and choose our customer—”Frogs Coding”—and then we’re going to give the contract a name. So, let’s go with “Billing Webinar.” I’m predictable, aren’t I? The start date will be today. The end date is when the contract between yourself and the customer is over, so you can adjust that as needed, but we’ll just keep it as two years from now—no, three years from now. We can choose if it’s whether it’s active or not. So, for the most part, I assume you would make it active. Whether this is the default contract, so essentially, if this is selected, that means that by default, when you choose this customer when you’re creating a ticket, then this contract will be selected. Of course, you can also change it, but it’ll just save you a click. You can also select whether the contract is taxable, and you can set up different tax rates within the platform as well, either here or in another section of the admin part of the platform. And here is where you would actually choose a contract type. So, what we have selected here is the “Retainer or Flat Fee” option. This is what we generally recommend our customers to use as it guarantees consistent income from your customers on a month-to-month basis or however often you are charging them or invoicing them. However, we do have quite a few other options here. We have an “Hourly Rate” contract, “Block Hours or Money,” which is where you’ve pre-selected an amount of hours that you’re working for the customer or a certain amount of money that you’re going to work for the customer. We also have “Based on Services,” so remote monitoring of a specific number of devices, or a “Project-Based” contract. If you’re unclear about what any of these contract types are, there’s always a handy-dandy explanation on the right-hand side, so you could just adjust accordingly and read up on it. But let’s stick with the “Retainer Flat Fee” option. The quantity in this case is not as relevant, but for example, if you were choosing “Block Hours,” that would be a more relevant field. So, we’ll just keep it as one. The billing period—this means after the end of the period is when you’ll be able to invoice for this contract. So, you can adjust this as needed. So, let’s just say you want to bill on a weekly basis or invoice on a weekly basis or on a monthly basis. Let’s stick with a monthly basis. And then you’ll select the rate associated with this retainer fee contract. So, as you can see, we have quite a few rates. I’m going to go ahead and select the—um, which one is it—360 plan for the customer, which is at $4,000. From here, you could also add a rate, so if something is not existing yet, you could add it here, or you can also add it in another section of the admin part of the platform, which I’ll show briefly. Then you’ll attach the relevant SLA, add any notes or other information, and then go ahead and click “Save.” now, as I mentioned, because each contract is individual for the customer, to save you the time and the effort, if your contracts are similar from customer to customer, you can clone the contract and attach it to a different customer. So, I’ve added this for my “Four Dogs Coding” customer, but I also want to have this contract set up for “Aloe.” So, I can go ahead and clone that. I also have to give it a name, but that’s how that works. You can also edit the contract at any time or click into it and take a look at what’s included. 

Taxes and Rates Okay, perfect. Now, a few other pieces which I mentioned before. So, within this business administration section of the admin platform, you can go ahead and click on “Taxes,” and you can add a tax type accordingly. You can also add contract rates over here, and you can also see the relation. So, this is all the contracts that are associated with these rates. Here are all the existing ones, and you can, of course, add new rates. You can also add products and expenses. So, you have your contract rates, and you also have fees for products that you’re offering your customers or expenses for labor or other things that you’re carrying out for them. You’ll be able to add it here very simply—the rates, the amount, category, description, etc. 

One other piece to mention about the contract setup is the contract expiration. When you click on this, you’ll be taken to your settings page. Essentially, this is, as we said, the contract was set to expire—the one that we set up together—on July 17, 2027, I believe. This is telling me that one week before the contract is set to expire, I will get an email. I will get an email to this email address, and I can add as many email addresses as I would like. Then, I will go ahead and create a new contract so that I don’t have any expired contracts on my account. You could, of course, adjust this as you would like to never receive this information or to receive a bit more notification in advance. 

Great. Okay, so now that we’ve talked about how to set up everything within the contracts, let’s go ahead and talk about the ticketing aspect of tracking rates and working time, etc. You’re going to click out of the admin section and click into “Tickets.” 

Okay, perfect. As I mentioned before, with the new customers, you can also click on “New Ticket” throughout the whole platform, but I just wanted to show the ticketing page. We’re going to go ahead and create a new ticket. Each ticket is linked to a customer and then a contact or an end user within that customer. So, we’re going to go ahead and select “Four Dogs Coding.” Our contact will be Aaron, and we’ll give the ticket a title. In this case, let’s go with “Printer Problems.” As you can see, when I selected the customer “Four Dogs Coding,” the contract “Billing Webinar” automatically was populated because that was our default contract. Here we’ll add any information that we want—a description, so a write-out of what the customer needs. So, the customer’s printer isn’t working. On the right-hand side, you have some more additional information. You have the technician assigned to the ticket, the type of ticket, the contract which we already discussed, and as well the impact. This, of course, influences the SLA, so make sure to select that accordingly. So, let’s keep it as a no-impact ticket, and we’ll go ahead and click “Create.” As you can see, we have seven days because this is a no-impact ticket.

As we click into the ticket, we can now see that we can complete a couple of additional things. Of course, we can see the back-and-forth between myself and the end user, any activity within the ticket. Now, we also have the time tracker. Currently, on this account, my time tracker is set up to be on a manual basis, meaning I manually start and stop the time tracker to keep track of all the time I’m spending on each ticket. This could definitely be adjusted. I’ll show you how. You also have the option to automatically start the time tracker every time you enter a ticket. If you are doing it on a manual basis, you can also add manual time entries—whatever method is preferred or a combination of the two of starting and stopping the time tracker and adding manual time entries. So, here, let’s just say we wanted to add a 15-minute period working on the ticket, description, and you could add the dates, whether it’s billable or not, the rate, and the technician. Great. Now, in this case, what we’ve actually done is we’ve had to go on-site to the customer, and we’ve seen that the printer is broken, so we need to replace that printer. So, we need to add some products and expenses to this ticket. How do we do that? We go into our actions, “Products and Expenses.” We’re going to go ahead and add the product. So, we replaced their printer with a Brother printer, which is $300. This is a product we created already in our products section, but you could also add a new product directly from here—the price which is built in based on the product, but you could adjust that if needed, any discount you’ve provided, some notes. You could also here attach a file, so a receipt of the product, etc., and then you’ll just go ahead and add, and it will be connected to this ticket. Now, in addition to purchasing a printer, we also visited the customer, so we’re also going to have to pay for gas for that. So, we’re putting in gas as an expense. Price per item, the quantity is 25, let’s say, and again, you can add any additional attachments or notes. So, there we go. Now we have everything related to the expenses attached to the ticket. We can go ahead and exit that out. Once we’ve gone ahead and solved the ticket, we’ve let the customer know, we will move this ticket status to “Closed.” Only once the ticket is closed can the contract associated with the ticket be invoiced for. So, make sure to close or resolve your tickets in order to invoice for the expenses associated with that ticket.

Okay, excellent. Now, just a few pieces I wanted to emphasize in terms of the ticket settings that are relevant here. If we go back into our admin page under “My Account” and “Account Settings,” and we’re going to jump to the “Tickets” tab, here is where you could adjust when the ticket is accessed, what the ticket timer will behave as such. So, as I said, we currently have the ticket timer to be off manually, a manual mode where you would turn it on and off manually, but you could also set the ticket timer to automatically start when you enter into a ticket. Again, whatever workflow works best for you and your technicians can be selected here. The other relevant piece is about time entries. The first option is you could select or deselect “Time spent working on a ticket is billable.” I assume if you’re here, then you want that to be selected. You could also choose the default duration when adding a time entry. I don’t know if you recall, but when I went to go ahead and manually add a time entry, automatically, this is what was showing me as the time—15 minutes. So, I can adjust this here as needed. You also have the option to complete ticket rounding. This means that if I were to work on the ticket for five minutes, it would automatically round it up to a quarter of an hour. If I selected another option, it would round it up to that time, or I could choose to not have ticket rounding. So, it depends on what works for you and your agreement with your customers. Any changes that I’ve made here all need to go ahead and save, and that will save any of the relevant settings that we just discussed.

Okay, so now let’s actually talk about the billing portion of this. How are we invoicing these expenses, these contracts? Going ahead into our billing section. As I mentioned, the billing of your customers is very much dependent on tickets—keeping track of the amount of time you’re working on the tickets as well as attaching any products and expenses to those tickets. However, if there’s ever a case where you don’t have a ticket and you’ve done some work that’s offline, off the ticket system, you can go ahead and create an ad hoc invoice. Here, you’ll add the customer’s information and then you’ll add any relevant category. For example, the labor category, and then you’ll have an option of all of your rates and products, the quantity, and you’ll be able to create an invoice directly from here, which you’ll be able to save, email, create a PDF, etc. 

Great. Now generally, our best practice is to again use your tickets to create invoice batches based on the contracts associated with the tickets. So, we’re going to go ahead and do that. Here is where we’re going to create the new invoice batch. An invoice batch can include anywhere from one invoice or one contract to many, so it doesn’t need to be multiple contracts at once. It depends on your workflow. All of your invoice batches will appear here, so you could find them again and make adjustments as needed. But again, we’re going to create a new invoice batch. Okay, excellent. So here we can see all of our relevant contracts, and what I want to do in this case is create an invoice batch for “Four Dogs Coding” for the month of June. Actually, we’ll do “Four Dogs Coding” and “Aloe.” So, we’re going to call this our “June Billing Batch.” As you can see, some information about the batch of the bills to create—hours worked, billable amount, etc., etc. And here we can see the two customers as well as all of the contracts associated with this invoice batch that we’re creating. Now, here you have a couple of different options. You can choose to create one invoice per customer, which I will select. So, we can see now that the amount of invoices to create has gone down to two because this is for two customers. You could also choose to group the invoice lines by contract, ticket, or time entry. So, I’m going to go ahead and click “Contract,” but again, whatever works best for you. And you’re going to go ahead and click “Generate Invoices.”

Now, once the invoice batch has been generated, each of the contract items can be edited. So, you can change the status, you can email the invoice, again as the options were before, you could add items. And then once you’re satisfied with everything here, you can go ahead and export the invoice. So, here we have four options, starting with a general CSV file. This is for anyone who doesn’t have one of these tools, and so you can take the information and invoice your customers accordingly from there. We also have an integration with both QuickBooks Online and Xero. This is available for our second-tier plan, so the Growth plan and higher, so keep that in mind. You could also export the invoice to a file compatible with QuickBooks Desktop. We don’t have an integration with them, but you can export the information from Atera into QuickBooks Desktop if you would like. Great. So, once you select the export, it will export into the invoicing tool, and then you’ll be able to actually go ahead and invoice or bill your customer.

So, now we’re going to go ahead and actually talk a little bit about the accounting integrations that we just discussed. So, back into our admin section, back into business administration, accounting. As I mentioned, we have integration available for our second-tier plan and higher with either QuickBooks Online or Xero. I’m going to quickly demonstrate how to set up the integration with Xero, but just so you know, the setup wizard is, I think, even identical between the QuickBooks and the Xero integration. However, I’ll also ask Sheina to post the how-to article for both the Xero and QuickBooks integration so you guys can take a look and see if there are any minute differences. So, you see both options. We’re going to go ahead and click “Connect” for Xero. Sometimes this just takes a moment. Bear with me. There we go. Now, in terms of the setup wizard, it’s quite simple, but I highly recommend reading over everything extensively and double-checking everything over extensively before you make the integration just so that you make sure that everything is matched and aligned. Essentially, how it works is that once your Atera account is integrated with QuickBooks or Xero, you’ll experience the same behavior. This means that taxes, products, and rates will all be managed directly on your billing tool—directly on QuickBooks or directly on Xero. So, you won’t be able to create rates, create tax rates, anything like that within Atera; that will all be managed within your accounting tool. You also have to make sure to match all of your products and rates that you’d like to bring from Atera into, in this case, Xero, and the same with your customers. 

So, let’s go ahead and select “Next.” The first step after just reading through all the instructions there is to match the products from Atera into Xero. Here, we would see the product within Atera, and we could either match it to an existing product within Xero or we could just create it in Xero. So, let’s just say you don’t have anything in Xero yet; this could be a good option. Also, the option to create all within Xero. Once you’ve gone through and checked through this list extensively, you’ll go ahead and click “Next.” There are many unmatched products and rates here. In your case, I’m sure there won’t be, but this is a demo account, so there’s quite a few things going on. Great. Now the next step is matching your customers from Atera into Xero. Again, you have the same options to select the equivalent customer within Xero or to create the customer from Atera into Xero. Again, it’s going to let me know that I have some missing customers that haven’t been matched. One other step that you can do is import customers from Xero into Atera so that your customers are matching and you don’t miss any information. These are all of my Xero customers. I can add all of them or on a one-by-one basis any of these customers into Atera. Now you’ll have an overview and summary of everything. If anything doesn’t look right, I’d highly recommend going back and making adjustments. Once you complete the integration, you won’t be able to change the matching of the products and rates. You will, however, be able to complete the matching of your customers and make any adjustments or import customers from Xero into Atera, as of course, customers are quite a transient thing that changes over time. So, we’ll go ahead and click “Done.” We get this success wizard animation—very exciting. Then you’ll see the integration has been completed. If I click on “Manage Taxes” or “Products,” that will take me directly to Xero as now it’ll all be managed through Xero. If I click on “Match Customers” or “Import Customers,” then I’ll either be taken to the matching wizard or the importing wizard as we’ve seen in the process before. And of course, if I want to remove this integration, I can just click on “Disconnect from Xero.” Keep in mind you can only connect to Xero or QuickBooks Online at a time. I can’t imagine that most of you have both of them, but just wanted to make that clear.

Wonderful. Now, the last piece I did want to mention about billing within Atera is our reports. So, let’s go ahead and click on “Reports.” One piece to mention is that we have two types of reports: we have our classic reports and our advanced reports. Our classic reports are available for all of you guys, no matter the plan that you’re on. They’re fully available, and that’s what we’ll take a look at today. But note that we also have advanced reports, which are customizable reports where you can choose whichever variables, information, filtering you would like, and you can create reports or dashboards personal to you and to your customers. That is available in our third-tier plan and higher.

So, let’s go ahead and click on our classic reports, and we’re going to scroll down to the profitability section. This is the section for all of your billing-related reports. Everything here is super relevant. Of course, other reports are relevant too, but not for profitability and billing. Just quickly to run through what each of these reports is: – Customer Profitability Report: Shows you on a per-customer basis how profitable your customer is. Here you can see your top retainer customers—your customers that are earning you the most—and your lowest retaining customers—your customers who are earning you the least. Maybe this will allow you to reconsider which customers you want to continue working with and which ones you might want to drop because they’re more work than they’re worth. – Timesheet Report: Available time hours report. We’ll go into that in a little bit more detail in a second. – Customer Periodic Report: Gives you some general good information on a per-customer basis about the general information about the customer’s health as well as activity. – Products and Expenses Report: Self-explanatory—shows the customers’ products and expenses. – Block Contract Balance: For your block hours or block money contracts to see how much money has been used, how many hours have been used. This is a good place for you to check if the contract is running out and if you’d like to top that up. 

Great. So, let’s go ahead and actually take a look at the timesheet report. As you can see on the left-hand side, we have all of these filters and selections that we can make. So, we’re going to filter by the ticket resolve date. We’re going to choose a time period, so I’m going to choose the last 120 days. You can filter by a specific technician or view for all of your technicians. The timesheet—same, you can view for all of your customers or just one of your customers. If you do select a customer, you can choose any of the contracts associated with that customer to be even more specific. But in our case, I’m going to select all of the customers. You can choose which information you’d like to see within the timesheet report. Would you like to see the ticket rates and amounts? Would you like to see all the tickets in the selected time period? And would you like to do the ticket rounding? So, in this case, I’ll select these top two options, and we’ll go ahead and click “Generate.” Okay, so now we see the timesheet. You can see information about the ticket and the contract. You can see whether the ticket has been resolved or not, as well as the resolution date. If the ticket is billable or not, whether or not the ticket has been invoiced. Keep in mind that this is whether the contract associated with the ticket has been exported, but in terms of it actually being invoiced, in terms of you actually receiving the money for that service, that you’ll have to track elsewhere. Also, the rate associated with the contract will appear here too in terms of how much the ticket actually earned you. Great. Now, one other thing to mention is that you could export this as an Excel or a PDF file, as is the case for most of our reports. You could also schedule this report, which is also the case for all of our reports. So, if you need to adjust any of the filters, you can do so, or we can keep it as is in this case. You’ll go ahead and click “Schedule.” Let’s again use our trusty “Billing Webinar” description. You can choose which technician you’d like to send it to, so we can send it to multiple of our technicians if we’d like. Then you can attach as many schedules to this report as you would like to send it on a recurring basis. So, let’s say we want to send this every Wednesday at 10 a.m., twice a month. Go ahead and select that and apply, and now the schedule is attached to the report. It will automatically be sent at that frequency, and of course, you can add multiple schedules if you would like. Okay, that is it for the live demo. Let’s see what we have in terms of some questions. Just taking a look, so give me a moment. 

Okay, Ian, I see that you’re asking about converting your account from an IT department model to the MSP model. This is a great question. As Ian is mentioning, we have two products. We have our internal IT department product, which is more suitable for those kinds of customers, as well as our MSP model. The billing module is only available within the MSP platform. If you are interested in moving over from the ITD to the MSP because that’s what you’re looking for, it will be a full move over, meaning all of your customers, all of your information will move to the MSP account or the MSP product rather. But it’s a quick switch that we can make, so please send an email or I will reach out to you after in terms of figuring out who can assist you with that. That would be on the customer success team, so I will follow up with you after this meeting or after this webinar. 

Okay, Allison, can the tech choose a contract when they work on a ticket? Yes, absolutely. As you saw when the ticket was being created, the contract was selected. Maybe you’re asking if the contract can be changed once the ticket has already been started to be worked on. Let me take a look. Yes, it can absolutely be changed. Let me share my screen again. One sec. Okay, so here we are on a ticket that’s already been created. I’m the technician; I’m working on this ticket. I can go ahead and change the contract as needed. Okay, so we’re just switching between screens, so I apologize for the delay. 

Allison, you’re also asking if you have a customer with multiple sites, would you invoice separately? How would you set that up? So, how I would recommend doing that is to either create multiple customers for the different sites or you can create as many contracts as you would like for the same customer. So, you can have a contract that’s called “Four Dogs Coding California” for “Four Dogs Coding New York,” and then you could create contracts based on that. You can create as many contracts as you would like for the same customer.

Allison, I also see that you asked, “How does the invoice know what income account to post to?” I’m not really sure I understand that. If you’d like to post a clarification, otherwise I’ll follow up after the session. 

Mario, I see that you asked, “Is there a way to import products and expenses from an Excel CSV file?” At the moment, that is not possible. That is actually an excellent feature request, and I highly recommend that you share that on our features board. I’ll actually show you how to do that just in case anyone isn’t aware. Okay, so this is actually a great place to show because… Oh wait, let me share my window. Sorry.

Okay, so on the bottom right corner, we have our new help menu. Of course, something similar existed before, but we’ve kind of revamped it. Here you can see the “Share Ideas and Feedback,” and this is our features board. This is a great place for you to suggest any ideas that don’t currently exist within Atera. So Mario, I highly suggest posting your suggestion here or seeing if someone else has requested it and then adding a comment or upvoting that idea. Our product team directly uses this board to inform their decisions about how they’re going to develop the product next, so please make your voice heard. While we’re on the subject, I did mention some resources at the beginning of the session, so I did want to mention that all of those and more are accessible from our new help menu. We have our help center. One article which I’ll highly recommend, and Sheina might have posted it already, so apologies if she did, but I’ll also ask her to post it in the chat, is the billing module overview. This is a very extensive way or a very simple way to see everything that you need to do with billing. So from here, you can click on all of the knowledge base articles related to almost all topics related to billing, and it’ll just redirect you to the correct topic. We also have our Atera Community, which I mentioned as well, which is a great place to collaborate and get involved. We have product updates, so this is where you can see our new product releases. You’ll also be able to view webinars, sign up for any live events that are occurring, and you’ll be able to view Atera’s roadmap. Here you’ll be able to see all of our newest released features. You’ll also be able to see anything that’s coming soon—features that are coming really soon—and then anything that’s planned, so on a slightly longer-term basis, what you can expect on the platform. You can also view this by product area. For example, let’s just say we’re talking about the ticketing PSA side of things, so you can see anything related to that on the product roadmap. This is a great way to again have visibility over what’s to come in the product.

Great. Going back, let me see. Sheina, you killed it—lots of great answers here. Just want to see if there’s anything else relevant I’d like to share with the whole group.

Okay, P, I see that you asked, “We invoice our customers based on a flat monthly fee. They receive a set number of help desk and on-site hours each month. What is the best way to track that in Atera? We currently use separate block hours contracts for help desk and on-site support.” I’m not sure if I’m entirely clear here because I see “flat monthly fee,” so that is making me think that you should choose the flat rate retainer option in terms of the contract. But then you also mention using the block hours contract. I would generally recommend the retainer option as it covers a monthly set amount with your customers. But if you want more information and you want to discuss that a bit more in-depth, please send me an email to [email protected], and we can go from there. Or I’ll also follow up with you after the session, but I hope that answers that. Just looking through to see if there’s anything else. 

Okay, I think that we have answered everything now. As I said before, if you have any follow-up questions about anything that was covered here, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. If there was something that we accidentally missed, I apologize. We’ll follow up with you after the session, or your customer success manager will directly. So yeah, thank you very much everyone for joining. Thank you, Sheina, so much for all of your excellent assistance, and it was great to see everyone here. Hope to see you in future webinars. 

Sheina: Thank you so much, Rebecca. That was amazing and so detailed. If I didn’t get to some of your questions, I’m going to stay on for a couple of minutes. Rebecca, you can launch the survey I just did. 

Rebecca: Thank you for joining me. 

Sheina: Oh my god, no, no, it’s fine. While I try to answer some more questions, I can also have customer success managers reach out if you have more questions. Sure, you can email Rebecca, you can email myself, you can ask on the community. We’ll remain online for a couple more minutes, but for anyone who needs to hop off, the official aspect of the webinar has ended. So thank you everyone for joining.

Rebecca: Is there a plan to integrate with QuickBooks Desktop? That’s a great question. I will need to get back to you on that. Currently, that’s not part of the roadmap, but it’s definitely something that you can put as a feature request. 

Sheina: Yeah, definitely put that as a feature request. I don’t believe that it’s on any current plans at the moment, but make your voice heard and maybe that will change.

Rebecca: Mario, I don’t understand what you’re asking here, so feel free to clarify as well. And in case it wasn’t clear, I’ve launched the survey, so everyone can take two minutes to just answer and share your feedback about the session. If it was helpful, if there was something that was missing, it really helps us to know what you guys need in order to be successful with Atera. 

Sheina: Zar, you asked, “Is it possible to send timesheets directly to QuickBooks instead of exporting them individually?” So in terms of the timesheet, that is the report, so that would be sent to you by email. But I assume that you’re referring to the invoices. So essentially, you would create batches of invoices to export them into QuickBooks, so there’s no need to do it on an individual basis. You could export all of your relevant contracts for the month or however often you’d like to do so at the same time, so it doesn’t need to be on an individual basis. I hope that answered that question. 

Rebecca: Mario, the product updates request—sure, I can show again. So I assume you’re referring to the features request board. I’ll stop sharing your question so I can share my screen again. Okay, so to access the features request board, you click on the question mark menu widget, “Share Ideas and Feedback,” and then you’ll be taken to the feedback board which is where you submit your requests and ideas. 

Sheina: You’re welcome, Mario. My pleasure. 

Rebecca: Zar, you said, “My customers like the timesheets along with the invoice to see what services were performed.” That’s a good point. At the moment, you’ll need to do those two processes separately. However, as I showed within the demonstration, you can schedule the report—the timesheet report—to be sent on a recurring basis, and you could actually send that to your customers from Atera directly. So you can just set that up in the background and then you won’t have to do it on a manual basis. But again, if that’s still not fitting your needs, please feel free to submit your request on the features board. We’d love to hear it. 

Julio, you asked, “While we are still learning to use the billing module, is there a way to view the preview before they’re sent to the customer?” I would recommend exporting the invoices as CSV files or into your accounting integration if you have that set up, and then you can view that before anything is sent to your customer. The only step in which it will be sent to your customer is once it’s actually sent to your customer from either the CSV file or from the accounting integration. So you do have time to play around and learn.

Allison, you asked about being able to set multiple statuses for tickets as it moves through people in the organization. The status of the ticket can, of course, be changed at any time by any stakeholders within your Atera account, but you can’t have multiple statuses. There are two different types of statuses within the ticket, so maybe that could suit your needs. For example, let me share my screen again. So with this ticket, you can see that you have the activity status as well as the ticket status. Perhaps you can leverage both of them and use them for different purposes, but generally, you have one ticket status and one activity status at a time. Hope that answered that. 

Allison, I don’t understand your other question, “How does the invoice know what income account to post to?” So again, feel free to follow up with us about that after the session at [email protected]. 

Sheina: Thank you, Sheina, for adding the product feedback internally as well. Amazing. 

Rebecca: Okay, it is now—I don’t know what time it is because we’re all coming from different time zones—but I’m now going to go ahead and end the session. You are more than welcome to stay on to complete the survey, take a look at other questions that people have left, and answers that Sheina has written out. Sheina, if you want to stay on also and answer any other questions, but I think we’ve completed all the questions. Thank you again for joining us. Please feel free to be in touch with any follow-up questions, and have a great morning, afternoon, evening, night—wherever you are in the world.