3 ways the integration with HaloPSA makes your MSP business more successful

In this article, I will share with you how Acronis integration with HaloPSA helps MSPs address their main challenges related to business growth: maintaining strong customer relationships and outperforming competitors by automating business processes. Let me start from the beginning.

Last year, after months of development, Acronis released the HaloPSA integration in the Acronis Lighthouse Program, our Early Adopters Program for integrations.

As an Acronis product manager, I was directly involved in every step of the integration, and as with every integration, we had to overcome an array of challenges during development. The most complex challenge was ensuring we supported MSP billing in a fully automated way and supported as many billing variations as possible, including prepaid, pay as you go and prepaid with overage. Additionally, we had to ensure that Acronis consumption for MSP clients were correctly reported into HaloPSA recurring invoices.

Here are some of the questions we asked ourselves during the early stages of the integration:

• How do we correctly map Acronis SKUs to products in the PSA?

• How do we handle pay as you go and prepaid with overage billing within HaloPSA?

• How do we ensure that our MSPs are not leaving money on the table, and that all is getting correctly reported into HaloPSA (one of the most feature-rich PSAs on the market)?

Finding answers to these questions and ensuring these two systems “talk to each other” without any noise kept members of both our teams awake at night.

The release date arrived, and with a surge of anticipation and excitement, we pressed the “publish” button in our integrations marketplace. The same day, our friends at HaloPSA unveiled the Acronis-HaloPSA Lighthouse Program to their network of MSPs. The next day, upon returning to work, my eyes widened in disbelief. An avalanche of emails had flooded my inbox overnight — all from MSPs eager to join our Lighthouse Program. We had just launched one of our most anticipated integrations with a record number of eager early adopters!

The Acronis Lighthouse Program provides a white-glove onboarding service that enables MSPs to instantaneously benefit from new integration functionalities, guided by an Acronis solutions engineer and a product manager. The purpose of the Lighthouse Program is to help partners onboard with new features and gather as much feedback as possible on their new integration.

In Lighthouse, Acronis provides premium-level care for MSPs:

• Free, guided 60-minute onboarding session with Acronis experts to help MSPs set up the integration. At the end of the call, partners have a properly configured, fully featured product — not a beta version.

• Direct, personal access to Acronis solutions engineers and product managers to answer any questions MSPs might have during the first month of operating: by email or phone call if required to help resolve any issues.

• A 30-minute review call at the end of the month to collect user experience and feedback on how Acronis can make this integration even better.

In the following months, together with solutions engineers, we onboarded many MSPs with the new integration, and it became a mission-critical tool in the arsenals of a significant number of our partners.

Let me share how we help MSPs achieve three critical objectives related to growing their business, maintaining strong customer relationships, and outperforming competitors by automating business processes with the HaloPSA integration. The below insights were gathered from my conversations with MSPs during the Lighthouse Program:

1.      Reducing onboarding time for new customers and get to billing faster.

2.      Automating usage-based invoicing.

3.      Ensuring fast and accurate incident response. No more noise — see only alerts you care about.

Any MSP who uses HaloPSA and Acronis can achieve these results simply by following the steps outlined below:

"Licensing is the big one for us."

This was something we heard regularly during our Lighthouse calls. With the help of the HaloPSA integration, MSPs dramatically decreased onboarding time for clients, which meant that they could start billing sooner.

Before enabling the HaloPSA integration, the MSP navigated through a complex set of manual processes within multiple teams in the company.

A new customer has been acquired and this initiates a whole sequence:

1. The sales representative creates a ticket for the technician to create the customer tenant in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud.

2. The technician manually creates a tenant. This also involves the addition of offering items and quotas.

3. Simultaneously, a parallel process begins in HaloPSA: Once the customer has been created in HaloPSA by the technicians and the billing cycle ends, the sales team has to manually generate an invoice for the customer – copying and pasting usage numbers from the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud reporting into HaloPSA recurring invoices.

4. The saga continues when a customer requests new backup and protection services to be added for their company. The sales representative creates a ticket for the technician and must wait for the technician to implement the ticket and add the respective offering items.

These laborious processes took up to a whole week and not only demanded time and effort but also postponed the days for which the MSP could charge their customers for backup and protection services.

With the activation of the HaloPSA integration, a new era begins. Picture this journey

1. The MSP has configured automatic provisioning. Or, the technician configures a customer with no services enabled.

2. A sales representative simply adds Acronis products to HaloPSA recurring invoices, and the products are automatically provisioned for the customer during every sync — which is 15 minutes.

3. Depending on how the products are added to the recurring invoice, they set the billing mode and quotas (if necessary).

4. At each successive sync, services and offering items are correctly configured.

5. If the customer requests more servers or workstations, the sales representative simply adds them to the HaloPSA invoice, and the quota in Acronis gets updated, if necessary.

When business processes are no longer entangled in manual intricacies, MSPs ensure they do not leave money on the table.

Imagine a thriving MSP managing 200 clients, each relying on Acronis for their backup and protection needs.

As the end of the billing cycle approaches, a dedicated individual would have to do the heavy lifting with invoicing the customer in HaloPSA. This person must add Acronis offering items in HaloPSA, manually copy usage from Acronis reporting, and paste it into the HaloPSA invoice — a process that demands time and precision. But the true challenge begins when this individual has to double- and triple-check the numbers before pasting them into the invoice. This painstaking process extends over half a working day every month to invoice clients for Acronis products.

Typically, an MSP has at least 12–13 tools in their arsenal. Imagine having to do this manually for all these tools!

With the introduction of the HaloPSA integration, the manual billing process has become a relic of the past. Now, when the end of a billing cycle arrives, Acronis backup and protection usage is reported directly into HaloPSA recurring invoices. No more need for double checking and manually entering data from platform to platform.

The technician, once dedicated to manual invoicing, now has their working process digitally transformed. The entire invoicing process, from offering items addition to usage data reporting, is automated, freeing up valuable time and resources. What used to take half a working day for the technician is now done with the click of a button.

If the MSP sells Acronis services in quota (for example, prepaid storage), the integration will take the units from the usage and create a hard quota. Using quota with overage? No problem. With the integration, billing is even easier, because we calculate the overage for you and put it in on a separate line item.

Integrating Acronis with your HaloPSA streamlines your billing process by providing accuracy in tracking the backup and cyber protection services provided to each customer. This not only reduces billing errors, but also ensures that you capture all revenue opportunities.

One of the MSPs we onboarded had a dedicated technician who would monitor Acronis alerts in a separate email inbox. This manual task not only consumed company resources but also limited the technician from channeling his capacity into more strategic contributions.

Enabling alert-ticket mapping was simple — we mapped the Acronis alerts that the MSP needed to see as tickets in HaloPSA and then mapped the Acronis customers for which the MSP wanted to see tickets in HaloPSA.

From that moment on, Acronis alerts appeared as tickets within the HaloPSA ServiceDesk where they would be automatically assigned to the proper support technician with the right prioritization, expediting the incident response workflow. This not only minimized incident response times but also ensured that potential issues were addressed proactively.

The person responsible for monitoring the 700 daily emails was then assigned to a more productive position, freeing them up for more valuable contributions.

Your HaloPSA platform is your control center for client support. When it is seamlessly integrated with your Acronis instance, you gain immediate access to client data and any potential issues. This integration between Acronis and HaloPSA speeds up issue resolution and enhances your support team's ability to provide rapid, informed responses.

MSPs would often tell me at the beginning of a meeting, “We do not want to enable the Acronis and HaloPSA integration yet and receive 1,000 tickets per day. Our technicians are busy enough.”

One of the capabilities of the Acronis integration with HaloPSA is the ability to select only the alert types you want and need and having them appear as tickets in your HaloPSA ServiceDesk. For instance, the Backup Failed alert is crucial, compared to User Renamed, and an MSP would want support technicians to have all Backup Failed alerts at the top of their inboxes.

This granularity ensures that no important alert goes unnoticed and every issue is addressed promptly.

Efficiency is a currency in IT services. Companies that operate with advanced levels of automation have a higher level of maturity.

By eliminating the need for manual data entry, reconciling data across Acronis and HaloPSA, and limiting with data management complexities, MSPs save valuable time and reduce operational costs. Moreover, providing transparency in customer billing and invoicing fosters trust, as your clients are reassured that their critical data is in safe hands and any issues are promptly addressed.

In conclusion, integrating Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with your HaloPSA is not just about connecting these two systems. It is about making sure that your MSP business does not leave money on the table by sticking to manual processes and leaving space for human mistakes. The integration ensures that your client list expands and your services and product offerings scale accordingly, without the need for major system overhauls or transitions.

Are you ready to elevate your MSP services to the next level? Start by integrating Acronis with your HaloPSA platform today!

Using another PSA solution? Check here to see if we have an integration.