In the fast-paced and highly competitive landscape of managed services, adopting a data-driven approach is paramount to staying ahead of the curve. To ensure the continuous growth of your business, harnessing the power of financial KPI reporting through an MSP business automation tool is a game changer. These insightful reports empower your MSP business to measure performance, identify trends and make data-backed decisions that drive success.

By equipping yourself with the latest performance metrics, you can optimize operations, enhance profitability and deliver exceptional services to your clients. To foster informed decisions and sustainable growth, we highly recommend your business automation tool should have these essential sales and billing KPI reports.

1. Customer revenue reports that compare VAR versus non-VAR revenue

By dissecting monthly client spend, a customer revenue report empowers you to analyze revenue trends, identify lucrative growth opportunities and effectively tailor client engagement strategies.

One of the key advantages of this type of report is its ability to provide a comprehensive breakdown of recurring, nonrecurring and value-added reseller (VAR) revenues. This includes revenue generated from products that your MSP business purchases and resells to end customers. Additionally, you can also analyze non-VAR revenue, which encompasses managed services, expertise and ticket-time work. These valuable findings allow your business to pivot its offerings and align them more closely with the specific needs of your clients, potentially unlocking new and untapped revenue streams.

2. Gross profit summaries that identify your most profitable clients

A gross profit summary report provides MSP founders, leaders, and key stakeholders with a snapshot of profitability trends. One of the key advantages of this report is its ability to highlight your most and least profitable clients. This crucial insight empowers your MSP business to allocate resources, time and efforts towards high-value clients who may be receptive to expanding their service offerings in the future.

You could also reduce churn by ensuring that your most valued and profitable clients receive consistent operational excellence and high-quality services. On the flip side, you can identify less profitable clients and redirect resources towards more promising opportunities.

Furthermore, your team can analyze fluctuations in gross profit and delve into how different revenue streams contribute to overall profitability. Gross-profit-per-customer reports provide your MSP business with invaluable insights into the profitability of individual client relationships. By delving deep into these reports, you can tailor your account management strategies based on thorough analysis and data patterns.

Comparing gross profit across different customers allows your MSP business to gain a better understanding of performance industry benchmarks, while analyzing gross profit ensures that you generate revenue that surpasses the costs of services and operating expenses.

3. Profitability reports that help you anticipate future revenue

With a predictive profitability report, you have the ability to forecast future revenue per client, assuming no new sales are made. These reports are particularly valuable in tracking revenue drops caused by contract expiration and monitoring the expiration dates of individual items within a contract. This report empowers your MSP business to proactively anticipate and prepare for sudden shifts in revenue when your clients’ contracts or contract items expire.

By leveraging predictive profitability reports, you can stay ahead of the game and effectively anticipate changes in revenue, ensuring your business remains agile and adaptable in the face of contract expirations and evolving client needs.

4. Time sheets that keep billable hours concise

As your technicians tackle numerous client requests throughout the day, they often spend short intervals of time resolving each issue while also juggling internal activities. Unfortunately, these actions are difficult to track and often go unlogged, resulting in inaccurate billing and missed opportunities to bill for valuable time. This ultimately costs your MSP business revenue.

Time sheets give your MSP businesses a glimpse into how your technicians allocate their time. Regardless of your maturity and size, bottlenecks are bound to arise. Time sheets offer visibility into identifying overstrained staff, delegating objectives, pinpointing gaps and optimizing the way technicians spend their time. This ensures proper logging and billing to avoid discrepancies and mitigate missed billable time that can contribute to lost revenue.

For example, analyzing time sheet patterns allows you to identify consistent resource-intensive tasks and evaluate their necessity. This analysis is particularly enlightening for growing MSPs seeking to automate and streamline repetitive, low-value activities. By improving time management, your MSP business can achieve operational efficiency, maximize productivity and drive revenue growth, all while bolstering overall client satisfaction.

Embracing the power of financial KPI reports for your MSP business

By utilizing business automation financial KPI reports, your MSP can unlock valuable insights to optimize resource allocation and propel your MSP business towards greater efficiency and revenue success. This empowers your MSP business to make data-driven decisions based on the latest financial metrics and quantitative insights.

The idea is that you can eliminate guesswork while you develop business strategies and pivot services in a direction to better suit the needs of your clients. Your MSP also builds a closer understanding of their needs by analyzing and interpreting customer behavior, business performance and market trend data — to reduce lost revenue and churn. This data helps you keep a pulse on the financial health of your MSP business.

When data serves as a backbone to support critical business decisions, you not only identify areas for improvement, but also drive future investments for your services and technology stack to help improve efficiency, enhance performance and differentiate your services in a competitive market.