Did you Attend our Recent Billing Webinar? Here’s your “Accounting Made Easy” Webinar Highlights!

Interested in how to integrate your Atera dashboard with accounting and billing, including how to create contracts, link to tickets, support invoices and create reports? You’re in the right place! Our recent webinar made Accounting seem simple, and perhaps even… fun? Keep reading to relive the best moments!

Creating customers and contracts

Creating customers is the basis of your Atera account. From the Customer dashboard you can see all the information that you need about existing customers, and create a new customer by filling in a one page form. You’ll then be prompted to add a contract, and you can save different templates to make it really simple to get new customers onboarded into the system.

Think about whether you want to set a start and end date for the contract, and then you can also configure alerts for when it’s time to talk to your customer about renewal, choosing as many email accounts as necessary to send that information to, so that nothing falls through the cracks. Lastly, choose the SLA that you want to associate with that customer, whether you want to create something custom, or use the default SLA that you’ve built in the past. This will cover working hours, response times, and other relevant metrics that govern your relationship with the customer. You can also customize each account with their logo and more, and also add your own logo to whitelabel the invoices that your customer will receive.

From within the Customer dashboard, you’ll be able to view all contracts by navigating to the contract tab. You can duplicate contracts, edit them, make them active or inactive, and any other configuration you need. Some contracts included with Atera are the Retainer Flat Fee contract which is great for managed service accounts, Hourly contracts for break/fix service provision, Block Hours for a set number of hours, and also contracts for specific tasks such as Remote Monitoring or Online Backup. Set your rate, and click save.

Connecting contracts and tickets

Now your customers and contracts have been created, it’s time to turn your thoughts to tickets. You can see a Ticket view directly from your Tickets dashboard, and simply click Create New Ticket. Assign a contract, technician and type, and add whatever additional detail you want to include. This ticket will now be linked to that specific customer and contract. You can choose whether to register the ticket creation time automatically to link directly to billing and your SLA, or to turn that feature off. You can track all your time entries, to ensure your customer has granular insight into the work that has been done.

Another great invoicing feature is the ability to add products and expenses directly to the ticket, for example if something needed to be fixed or replaced as part of the work.

End of the month? (or not?) Time for billing!

Head to Billing, and you can see at a glance all of the contracts which can be billed. Choose to bundle them all together into one invoicing process at the end of the month, or pick a specific contract to bill for at your convenience, or on customer request. You can join together all contracts from a single customer to provide them one invoice, or separate them out, for example if customers are invoicing you from different departments and the work is taken from disparate budgets.

Click edit on any contract to view all the information and make sure it’s correct, then email the invoice to the customer directly or create a PDF. At any point, view the status of your contracts, from draft or exported, to paid, or saved.

Atera has integrations with QuickBooks and Xero to make billing and accounting even simpler. The first time you connect your accounts, you’ll need to go through the Wizard to integrate the two products and get the right customers from the accounting software into Atera, but it takes just a matter of minutes and it’s really easy to do. Once this is done, you can export invoices directly into the accounting software, too.

Benefiting from customer and internal reports

Finally, our reports are a great way to get a bird’s eye view of how profitable you are on a customer or contract basis. You can use the Timesheet report which will show how many hours you’ve worked on a customer over a specific time period, how many tickets were open and closed, information about each ticket such as which technician worked on that issue, or which contract it was linked to.

Don’t forget to try our Profitability Report, where you can see how much you’ve made from each customer during a certain time period, easily comparing customers to see which are the most profitable. Use the Top Retainer report to get the same kind of data based on managed service accounts. We also have a Product and Expenses report, and Block Contracts Balance Report, showing you how much time is remaining in terms of open hours with customers, allowing you to have better conversations about usage with your customers.

Want to see how billing works in more detail, and see a demo of using the Atera billing system? Watch the full webinar right here, and reach out with any questions!