5 Practical financial KPI reports your MSP business automation tool should have

As a managed service provider, taking a data-driven approach is crucial to staying ahead of the curve and navigating a fiercely competitive industry. One of the most effective ways to ensure growth of your business is by leveraging financial KPI reporting with an MSP business automation tool. These reports empower your MSP business to continuously measure performance, analyze trends and drive data-backed decision making. Equipped with the latest performance metrics, you can optimize operations, boost profitability and deliver enhanced services to clients.  

To foster informed decisions and improved sustained growth, we recommend five integral sales and billing KPI insights that your MSP business automation tool should have. For example, Acronis Advanced Automation solution leverages all five essential KPI reports out of the box. They include: 

Customer Revenue is an invaluable report that helps your MSP business deeply understand and maximize their financial relationships with clients. By breaking down monthly client spend, the report empowers you to analyze revenue trends, identify growth opportunities and customize client engagement effectively. One benefit of the report is that you can examine recurring, nonrecurring and value-added reseller (VAR) revenues that includes revenue coming from products your MSP business buys and resells to end customers. Conversely, you can also analyze non-VAR revenue that includes managed services, expertise and ticket-time work. These findings help your service pivot offerings to align more closely with client needs — potentially unlocking new revenue streams.  

The report provides crucial insights, including contracts pending, invoicing and the number of workloads per each contract, to help your MSP business better manage cash flow and optimize service delivery. This data enables you to anticipate future revenue, streamline timely invoicing and align resources with greater efficiency. Additionally, your MSP business can uncover unbilled services by comparing the total endpoints under management against billed workloads. This information gives your business unique opportunities to increase revenue. 

With the report, you can dissect revenue per user and time spent on clients, billing and operations. You can leverage different billing models to invoice clients. These metrics provide your business with comprehensive insights into client profitability and service efficiency. This information is most useful for evaluating pricing strategies, refining service offerings and divulging the impact of your services. Your MSP business can benchmark pricing, concentrate on your most lucrative services, and narrow the focus on your most profitable clients by examining the average hourly rate and income per contract item. 

In a gross profit summary report, MSP founders, leaders and key stakeholders can regularly come together and examine profitability trends. A key benefit of the gross profit summary is that it allows you to see your most and least profitable clients. This empowers your MSP business to focus resources, time and efforts toward high-value clients that may be open to adding to their service offering in the future. Gross profit reports can help you reduce churn by ensuring your most prized and profitable clients experience operational consistency and quality services.  

Conversely, you can identify less profitable clients and pivot resources into more promising opportunities. Using a data-driven approach, gross profit summaries prevent your MSP business from investing resources toward your least profitable clients — ones less likely to yield a healthy return on investment.  

Your team can analyze fluctuations in gross profit and break down how different revenue flows contribute to profit. This includes identifying areas of service such as contracts, sales items and labor that are most profitable to help your MSP business improve resource allocation and make better investment decisions.  

MSP leadership teams should take advantage of business automation tool reports and convene on a regular basis to review, evaluate and act on KPI metrics on a per-client level. Through these discussions, your MSP business can accurately track revenue, costs, profit and profit margin for each client. This granularity enables you to investigate profit trends and address underlying factors influencing profitability. For instance, gross-profit-per-customer reports generated by Acronis Advanced Automation help your MSP business gain a deep understanding of which client relationships are most beneficial by drilling down into insights on your individual clients. From this information, you can tailor your account management strategies backed by analysis and data patterns in report findings. 

When comparing gross profit from one customer to the next, your MSP business gets a better grasp on performance industry benchmarks depending on your clients’ firmographic segmentation. This information is particularly valuable in helping you narrow down on target buyers. Gross profit per customer reports let MSPs compare revenue, costs, profits and profit margin against known industry benchmarks. These valuable insights facilitate and influence your business decisions on targeting specific vertical markets, regions or companies of a particular size. 

Analyzing gross profit on a regular cadence ensures your MSP business’s generated revenue exceeds costs of services and operating expenses. Insights on costs reveal critical areas in need of improvement that guide cost management and help you refine processes. At a high level, gross profit per customer gives your MSP leaders visibility into health indicators of the business and plays a key role in the long-term growth and sustainability of your MSP business. 

For most MSPs, one of the main causes of drops in revenue can be attributed to expiring contracts due to a lack of visibility on contract dates. For example, Acronis Advanced Automation generates handy predictive profitability reports that factor in future revenue per existing contracts and items not yet billed — in other words, you can predict future revenue per client if you want to assume there are no new sales. Additionally, predictive profitability reports are most useful to not only keep track of revenue drops caused by contract expiration but also track the expiration dates of individual items within a contract.  

For instance, you have a twelve-month contract that offers five products and services; however, one specific item is only included for the first three months. In this example, your MSP business can gain critical visibility into revenue, cost and profit drop at any point in time with the report — particularly, you can examine potential fluctuations surrounding the first three months. Predictive profitability is a practical report that enables you to stay on the ball and anticipate sudden shifts in revenue when your clients’ contracts or contract items expire.  

With Acronis Advanced Automation, predictive insights help fortify future financial stability. A key feature of the Predictive Profitability Report is its predictive chart that illustrates projected future costs, revenue and profit per client. This forward-looking data is based on your current contract information and items to be billed. Equipped with this information, your MSP business can make informed decisions vital to long-term financial planning, anticipate shifting financial trends and help future-proof success. Also, the report proactively supports strong client relationship management to gain more opportunities to accelerate growth. 

An important benefit of the Predictive Profitability Report is its ability to alert MSPs to potential future drops in revenue. By highlighting these scenarios, you can take preemptive action to engage in contract renewals, renegotiations or find new business opportunities to mitigate revenue loss. This foresight is key for maintaining a stable and profitable client base. 

According to our industry leaders, as a rule of thumb, MSPs strive to have 80%–85% of their technicians’ time and workload logged. But without automation solutions, this goal is nearly impossible to achieve. 

As your technicians work throughout the day, they will encounter dozens of client requests, spend short intervals of time solving each problem and utilize extra time toward internal activities. These actions aren’t easily trackable and can’t be properly logged, leading to inaccurate billing and missed billable time that ultimately costs your MSP business revenue.   

Time sheets provide your MSP business with a gateway to seeing how your technicians spend time. Bottlenecks are bound to arise regardless of your maturity and size. Time sheets offer visibility to identify overstrained staff, delegate objectives, pinpoint gaps and optimize the way technicians spend time — to ensure proper logging and billing that will enhance revenue.  

For instance, you can analyze time sheet patterns to spot consistent resource-intensive tasks and evaluate whether these initiatives are a necessity. Particularly, this analysis is an eye opener for growing MSPs wanting to automate and streamline repetitive, low-value activities. By improving time management, your MSP business can master operational efficiency, maximize productivity and drive revenue growth — by bolstering overall client satisfaction. 

Notably, these five essential KPI reports are all found in Acronis Advanced Automation to provide growing MSPs accurate, concise and readable financial and billing KPIs at their fingertips. Ensure your MSP business eliminates losing money due to expiring contracts, inefficiencies and churn. Acronis Advanced Automation provides MSPs pre-built, out-of-the-box reports and a dashboard with key financial and billing KPIs to guide predictions on future revenue — saving you time and simplifying operational efficiency.  

Unlike other business automation solutions, Acronis Advanced Automation gives you visibility into NPS and SLA metrics to help you safeguard client loyalty, improve quality of services and achieve attainable goals. Acronis Advanced Automation empowers your MSP business to compete in a fast-paced MSP world by equipping you with your business’s latest insights to help you develop and navigate business strategies led by data-driven decisions. 

KPI reporting is one of many handy capabilities that Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud and Advanced Automation offers, including automated billing, CRM, service desk and time tracking. It is the market’s only solution that offers an integrated, unified interface to deploy, manage and administer holistic cyber protection, endpoint management and business automation services.  

Get a one-on-one demo of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud and Advanced Automation. Ask our experts your burning questions about the leading MSP-focused strategies on streamlining operations, boosting productivity and fortifying cyber defense.