Autotask Video Courses

Hi,

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a series of video courses designed to help you supercharge your Autotask. They’re coming along nicely, but I don’t know which course to finish up and release first.

The courses will be focused on very practical, hands-on, step-by-step Autotask configuration. I will be taking the knowledge and experience I have gained over the past 6 years while traveling, speaking, consulting, and developing custom Autotask solutions. I will take this knowledge and experience, wrap it up in easy-to-digest and very informative videos, and make the videos available to watch at your own pace.

HOWEVER, I need your help. I have a few different courses I’ve been working on, and, frankly, I need to focus on one of them to get it finished and in your hands. Would you leave me a comment (below) and tell me which course you’d like me to finish first?

The courses are:

Service Desk Configuration

I’ll help you understand how to configure your Queues, Statuses, and Priorities to most effectively route tickets through your company’s procedures. I’ll show you how to use workflow rules, notifications, and escalation paths to make your entire team more efficient and to help you teach your team how tickets should flow using your unique processes.

Contracts & Billing

I will show you how to create contracts, both simple and complex. I’ll demonstrate how to use exclusions to automatically charge time entries to the correct contracts (without your techs needing to know what contract to choose), and I’ll demonstrate how to build the most common billing arrangements in Autotask. Do you do managed services with block hours? I’ll show you how to set that up. Do you do milestone billing with projects? I’ll show you how to make the milestones automatically bill when a certain part of the project is done.

LiveReports

Have you tried to make sense of Autotask LiveReports before? Do you want to get good, accurate, and timely management information out of Autotask? I’ll show you the step-by-step process I use to define and create reports. I’ll explain what types of reports are available, what the data categories are and what they mean, and I’ll share some really helpful tricks to help you quickly find the information you’re looking for.

Something else?

Is there another part of Autotask you’d like help with? You can tell me that in the comments, too.

Thanks for your input. I really appreciate you taking a few minutes to give me some feedback.

Travis

  • travisaustin says:

    Thanks in advance for your help!

  • Jay Wade says:

    Service Desk Configuration would be first on my list.

  • I think Service Desk Configuration really is the basis of Autotask.. Since workflow rules can make a huge difference in an MSP’s efficiency I say start there first. Then contracts. And Project Management would be a great one to add for down the road.

  • Service Desk Configuration. Then Contracts & Billing.

  • Roxanne Pipkin says:

    projects! (i know, new request). I guess Service Desk.

  • DDrolet says:

    Service desk for sure followed by contracts.

  • Jason says:

    Service Desk really needs to be first, Projects would be nice as well

  • Getting decent reporting for profitability is first on my list..then ways to add in useful automation with workflow applied to service desk, reporting, etc. Would love to have a monthly brag report for clients.

  • Jennifer says:

    Service desk configuration but that’s only because I’m the services coordinator. The other members of my team would vote otherwise, and any of these could be a real help to us. Thanks

    • travisaustin says:

      Thanks for the info. Feel free to pass the link on to others on your team if they’d like to voice their input.

  • Peter says:

    Used AutoTask for two years now, and that part that I feel hardest is to analyze our data.

    Sounderstand LiveReport better gets my vote!

  • Chris Ruys says:

    For us, Service Desk is the highest priority because it is so central to the efficiency of our day to day operations. Next would be reports because we under utilise them.

  • Speier says:

    LiveReports, Service Desk, Contacts and Billing. Being able to analyze Autotask provides the greatest insight into shortcomings in either product usage/offerings, missing data, required information, client reports, SLA’s, time to resolution, outstanding tickets, responsible parties, level/degree of activity, percentages of billable time and so much more… Service Desk = secondary, because although most could certainly be more efficient I’d guess most users can configure a few basic settings to allow them to accept, schedule, address, and resolve tickets (and/or they likely already have a method which may not be terribly efficient, but works nonetheless). Last Contacts and Billing, once you have a firm understanding of AT and can leverage her vast configurations, API’s, add-on’s, Service Desk and have the information from the Live Reports you can begin to roll out “contracts” which you may otherwise not be able to support (SLA’s) if you can’t pull the data or you don’t set your Service Desk up correctly/well.

  • MP says:

    Service desk would be best – thanks

  • Diederik Twickler says:

    Hi Travis, great ideas! Although Autotask does a pretty decent job in explaining the technical configuration, I always miss best-practice tips. That is what I would love to see in your videos.

    I would like to see the Service Desk covered first, in particular best-practices in how you can implement ITIL or ISM processes using Issue/Sub-Issue, Statuses, Queues, Workflow Rules, etc. Not the basics, but solid food for thought. That would be great 🙂

    As for another part of Autotask that deserves to be in the spotlight is the CMDB. Configuration Management is an important process, and Autotask is not quite optimized for it. It would be great to see how others are being successful with it.

    • Joe Markert says:

      Agreed – Service Desk is the heart of the operation and anything we can do to supercharge or onboarding of new team members and improve utilization of our existing team would rock.

    • Roy Solterbeck says:

      Yes technically we know how to make autotask do most things but best practices on things like above and how to capture your sales support time, how to report on departments and billing codes. Thanks

  • Kelly Dixon says:

    Recurring tickets for scheduling and dispatch calendar.
    We rely on this heavily to manage our 80 person field team and scheduled onsite
    service calls.

  • Larry Velez says:

    Idea: How configurations items can be kept up with reality and actually ad value.

  • Jamie Ausenbaugh says:

    Any update on the status of the video courses? We implemented Autotask about 6 months ago, but would love some help learning how to use it to its full potential. I agree with other comments here that Service Desk would be a great place to start.

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