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The BrightGauge Blog

Job Opening: Software Support Specialist

(Please note: This position has been filled as of June 1, 2015) BrightGauge, founded in 2010, is a SaaS based Business Analytics Software Platform based in Coral Gables, FL and San Francisco, CA that ...
(Please note: This position has been filled as of June 1, 2015) BrightGauge, founded in 2010, is a SaaS based Business Analytics Software Platform based in Coral Gables, FL and San Francisco, CA that focuses on the worldwide Managed Services and IT Services industry. After growing from zero customers to several hundred customers across 6 continents in just one year, BrightGauge is looking to hire a full time Software Support expert to help support its fast growing user base. This role primarily entails working directly with BrightGauge customers from all over the world to handle support questions (both technical and non-technical) and handle consulting engagements. This position will report directly to one of the Co-Founders and will provide room for development growth as the 8 person BrightGauge team grows!! Requirements: An interest in web application software platforms and technology in general Passion for good customer service Very reliable and caring for customer’s success Knowledge of MS-SQL and MySQL Databases and ability to write queries. Strong written communication skills. Ability to have a great time at work. Nice to haves: Interest in programming languages like Python or PHP Knowledge of HTML/CSS Humor (well a good sense of one) Position Details You will work with awesome people every day and an even better customer base. Full time position with salary and full benefits (medical, 401K, etc) Hours of operation 8:30am -5:30pm EST though off hours work to support worldwide market will be a regular occurrence Cover letters must be included with all resumes and be submitted to info@brightgauge.com
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MSP Key Performance Indicators: Trending Revenue By Category

This is one of my favorite metrics to measure. The number on it’s own doesn’t tell you much, however, it is a great trending indicator. At Compuquip, we were all about converting our legacy clients to Managed Services, the magic MRR. So we monitored this on a regular basis to track our progress. We broke it down into 4 categories: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Anything that we billed for a fixed scope, on a monthly basis, based on a long term contract was considered MRR. This is probably more broad than other companies might categorize it but to be honest, it was a pain to break it out even further. We sold our services as a single monthly “all you can eat” fee. So if a customer signed up we would consider it MRR. Even if it meant staffing was included (more on that another time). Professional Services Revenue Any other services that wasn’t a monthly contract fell into our Professional Services bucket. That meant any project revenue, fixed fee or not, T&M work, pre-billed work, non-contractual staffing, etc. (This tended to be the most difficult to predict and plan for but we eventually found our baseline) Hardware & Software (aka Procurement) Anything that we “marked up and resold” from a 3rd party manufacturer that was not monthly recurring would land in this bucket. Typical margin was in the 15.0% - 16.5% range. I’m sure we could have charged more but our process was to charge a 20% gross margin as the default and anything that went below 15% required Management approval. Some of the larger deals, above $100,000, tended to bring down the average. Sales people were paid on the spread so the more they charged the more they made. Other Revenue Everything else fell to this category. All the the 3rd party referral fees, shipping and handling, rebates, etc. I know some companies would bundle shipping & handling into Hardware/Software but I wanted a true picture of the revenue for that line item. Plus, Other Revenue was compensated differently. an example of tracking Revenue by Category in BrightGauge Everyone seems to track financial statements a little different and it wasn’t until we became part of HTG Peer Groups that we standardized based on the template provided by Service Leadership. I believe the key is to develop the metrics you want to measure. Start with the baseline to see how you’re performing and then as you take action to adjust your business, monitor the progress. This isn’t rocket science, but without knowing where you’re starting from it’s very difficult to know how you’re performing. Revenue By Category is a great metric to help understand which direction the ship is going. To put it in perspective, at Compuquip we historically had a revenue split that looked like: Managed Services (MRR) - 40% Professional Services - 20% Hardware/Software - 38% Other Revenue - 2% This blog is part of our Internal Metrics That Matter For MSPs blog series; you can download the free white paper here:

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MSP Key Performance Indicators: Past Due Invoices

As an MSP, we work so hard to deliver a quality service to our clients and nothing would irritate me more than past due invoices. Cash is the lifeblood of any business and having aging receivables can put a serious crunch on cash flow. This metric is simple; easy to pull from most systems and highly recommended reviewing it weekly. But this is one metric that it’s more important what you do AFTER you review than just staring at the metric each week. a sample BrightGauge report for tracking Accounts Receivable Aging Detail A few obvious ways to address this proactively was collecting in advance or ACH but in the event those won’t work for you, here are a few things we did to monitor and address Past Due Invoices: Credit Applications – We had a policy that any new clients would have to fill out a credit application form ahead of time for us to check their credit worthiness. But in reality we rarely did that. Sales people were so excited about closing a deal that the credit process would get skipped. And let’s be honest, as a manager when someone had a signed contract but no credit application you tend to look the other way and approve the contract. Who wouldn’t? Accounting Team Follow Up – We had 1 individual that was dedicated to following up on all of our receivables on a regular basis. I realize not everyone can have a dedicated person, in that case make it a priority to whomever does the “Accounting Function” within your team. Someone should be responsible for the status of all the invoices and making sure they have been received by the client and are in the approval process. If anything is off the normal process it should be brought to Management’s attention. Tie Commission To Collections – This was a brilliant move my father did very early on at Compuquip. If any receivable was paid after 90 days you lost your commission as a sales rep. (To clarify, I didn’t like the rule as a sales rep but loved it as a manager). It naturally turned the sales folks into mini-credit officers. Not that we wanted them focusing on credit but we wanted them to at least consider it given that their compensation was ultimately tied to it. Set A Process To Review Regularly – In every sales meeting we always had an agenda item for “AR Past Dues” which we reviewed all invoices over 60 days based on a report someone in Accounting would prepare for us. Each sales rep received a complete report of all their client outstanding invoices and they had to come prepared with an explanation on how they planned to resolve the issue. Like any area of your business, it’s a matter of setting a process to measure the metric to help drive action within your organization and eventually improve the metric. This blog is part of our Internal Metrics That Matter For MSPs blog series; you can download the white paper here.

Launching BrightGauge Implementation & Customization Services

Today marks the official launch of BrightGauge Consulting, a new set of services we’re offering our customers to help them get the most of out of their PSA & RMM data. Over the past few years we’ve delivered consulting services on an ad hoc basis but after talking with our key customers, it was apparent that a formal set of services was needed to help our community maximize the value of their data with BrightGauge. What is available from our consulting team? Implementation Services - If you sign up for BrightGauge and want us to lead the setup effort, we can do so at a very cost effective rate. We’ll lead calls with your internal team, do dedicated training, and setup your first few reports & custom gauges. JumpStarts - Many clients just need a quick jump start with some custom metrics built within our Gauge Builder and Reports Scheduled to their team. We can take in your high level requirements and quickly build metrics that we know we will drive value for your business. Custom Fields Delivery - Many MSPs have unique KPIs or unique User Defined Fields that are not within the standard BrightGauge datasets. We can help you build those fields with custom SQL queries or a custom API calls from your cloud based Data Source. Who’s doing the Consulting? What’s really great about our experienced team is we have the MSP industry expertise to know exactly what you’re looking for in just a few short conversations. Between myself (Brian Dosal) and my brother Eric Dosal, we can help refine your requirements and help you define the scope of work. Next, our talented technical team has over 2 years of experience working with our current Connectwise, Kaseya, and LabTech databases as well as the AutoTask, Connectwise, and Kaseya. This makes our consulting work efficient pack a big punch in a short period of time. Should you need Business Process Consulting, we can introduce you to one of our consulting partners who specializes in making sure your processes and systems match up to the KPIs you require. How to engage with BrightGauge Consulting? First, you must be a current BrightGauge customer in order to work in a consulting engagement. Next, just send an email to support [at] brightgauge [dot] com with your interest and we will work with you to define your scope and price your engagement.

Line Graphs Help Visualize Trends

When I think about the line graphs the first picture that comes to mind is the hospital. The vitals, and specifically heart function, is measured by a line graph moving across a 1-2 second time frame. It makes for a quick representation to the caretakers of what the trending health is for the patient. In the same respect, this is the strength of the line graph; trending visualization. For example, you may have seen a line graph that shows the average time to response on a day-over-day basis over a period of time. Days run from left to right across the horizontal (x) axis and minutes run bottom to top along the vertical (y) axis. Data points (in this case, the time it takes to respond to a ticket request) are plotted and then the dots connected. Line graph usage makes sense for this kind of data for several reasons: It’s easy to spot general trends over time, such as an ongoing increase or decrease in the resolution time; It’s easy to spot anomalies that might bear a closer look, such as a significant increase in response to ticket time during a month where times are improving; It’s easy to locate specific information, such as the day of the week in which the lag time was the highest; and If there is a recognizable trend, it is possible to extrapolate values not covered in the graph. Another advantage of a line graph is that it is easy to clearly represent multiple data sets for comparison. For example, if we wanted to compare the daily ticket response time with the number of engineers working in the NOC, this could be accomplished by simply plotting a second line. Different data sets are typically represented by visually different lines: either different colors or one solid line and one dashed, for example. Of course, that’s just one illustration. A line graph can be used in the same way to show the relationship between any two variables: Sales versus pending sales pipeline, for instance, or average time to resolution versus ticket count which you can see in the image below from one of our gauges. The power of grasping trending information with a quick look at a line graph is very beneficial to a business owner or employee. It lets you forecast where assets need to be deployed in the future. Being able to do so will turn a typical business weakness into a strength that will leave competitors behind.

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MSP Key Performance Indicators: Cash Is King

This is the first in a series of blog posts on the topic of the key metrics we used at Compuquip to manage our MSP business. My father used to have a t-shirt that he wore all the time that said “Happiness is a Positive Cash Flow” and the key chain that had his office keys said “Cash is King”. So I guess you can say that managing cash has been instilled in me since I was very young. Cash is the lifeblood of any business. If you have no cash, you have no business; simple as that. Cash is an important metric that needs to be monitored regularly. Every day I monitor the cash on hand across all of our accounts across all of the Dosal Capital operating companies. Every morning by 11:00am I get a detailed breakdown of the cash balance in our accounts. I realize not everyone can have someone else run the report, but at a minimum you should be checking it daily to make sure nothing is off. Another safeguard to keep an eye on cash, is signing all the checks yourself. Every single check produced by our companies is signed by me or my brother, regardless of the size. We have some that are less than $10 and others that are over $1,000,000. It’s a great way to keep an eye on the flow of cash out of your business and make sure everything is accurate. I strongly urge every business owner, MSP or not, to keep a close eye on cash because of how vital it is. During times that we thought cash may be a little tight we moved to weekly cash projection reports that our team would prepare. This would factor in what receivables we expect to collect in the next week or two and what checks needed to be cut. This ties in very nicely to our next blog post about Invoice Management, specifically Invoices Over 60 Days Past Due. This blog is part of our Internal Metrics That Matter For MSPs blog series that you can download here: Download White Paper

Internal Metrics Follow Up

I’ve been humbled with all the feedback on my recent whitepaper “Internal Metrics That Matter for MSPs”. What started out as an idea during a conversation with a my friend Richard Tubb, has really taken on a life of it’s own. After many requests I’ve decided to expand on the themes from the original white paper. But first, a few thoughts on metrics in general. There are so many different metrics to use to manage a business. Actually I think there is too much noise about metrics and it can be overwhelming. Since I speak with most MSPs before they sign up with BrightGauge, I have a good idea on the metric questions people have. The conversation typically goes like this: MSP Prospect: “What metrics do you have out of the box?” Me: “What metrics are important to you, I’m sure we report on it?” MSP Prospect: “I don’t know, what comes as a default?” Many of them are not sure what metrics to be looking at and some are looking to us to tell them. Our reporting platform is completely customizable, so if you wanted to review the most unique and complicated metric, we can probably get to the data and report on it. During my 11 year run as an MSP there were a lot of metrics we used to manage our business. We had 4 monster NOC screen monitors that we posted a bunch of metrics to share with the team. But what’s the value in that? Did anyone really look at it? Was there any action taken? In the future posts I’m going to breakdown into more details the key metrics we used to manage our MSP. We’ll kick things off next week with a metric that is key to every MSP, or any business for that matter, CASH ON HAND!

Measures, Dimensions & More

Our new Custom Gauge Builder in our 3.0 Release brings a lot of power to “slice & dice” data easily and intuitively. To achieve our goals of simplicity and much utility, we have introduced some standard data visualization terms and functions which we describe below: Measures A measure is a value that is aggregated from an existing raw field within your dataset (count of tickets, average time to resolution, total revenue... these are all measures). In the context of data visualization, measures typically map to the Y axis of a chart. Measures also typically refer to quantitative data, such as number of tickets opened, average time to respond, utilization rates, etc. For instance, you might calculate the Average Response Time per day over 90 Days. In this case, the Response Time field is your measure because you want to get the average response time across the date range you selected (which brings us to Dimensions). Dimensions Dimensions are the slicing and dicing of a Measure. They usually refer to categorical data, such as engineer name, ticket status, or even units of time (i.e. day, week, month). Generally, dimensions are used to group quantitative data (measures) into useful categories (i.e. number of tickets closed by engineer). These fields typically map to the X axis in a line chart or vertical bar chart. In the example above about Average Response Time Per Day Over 90 Days, the 90 days is your Dimension. And for a non date range graph like “Tickets Closed by Engineer”, the Engineer is your dimension since you are trying to Measure the # of Tickets Closed against that dimension. Aggregation Functions Aggregation functions within BrightGauge perform a calculation on a set of values you have selected and result in a single value. For example, a measure that contains the values 2, 5, 4, 1, 6 aggregated as a SUM results in a single value: 18. How this applies to a bar chart using (PSA as a datasource for example) is as follows. If you have 100 Service Tickets from 25 End Users in your data source, you probably want to view the total number of Service Tickets created by each End User so that you can decide which End Users are opening up the most Service Tickets. In this example, you would select Service Ticket IDs as your Measure and apply the COUNT Aggregation Function. And you would select the End User field as a Dimension so you can view the Count of Service tickets per End User. BrightGauge provides a set of predefined aggregations that are shown in the table below: Filters Filtering is very important within the BrightGauge Gauge Builder. Depending on the field type you will be allowed to do different styles of filter. To learn more about how BrightGauge can help you with your data visualization needs you can request a demo with our team.

Measuring Client Profitability

Do all clients have to be profitable clients? I say yes and no! Let me explain... Of course we’re all in business to turn a profit (unless of course you’re running your MSP as a charity). But profit is just one factor of the right type of client. During my time running our MSP, I came to realize that profit was very important but it wasn’t the only measure to determine the right client. What about referrals? Or brand recognition? Or community impact? But since we know client profit is a critical part of assessing our clients and understanding our business it’s important to measure how each of our clients are performing. One easy way to monitor client profitability is to use the BrightGauge Agreement Profitability Gauge which I have shown below. This gauge was developed based on a manual report we used to run every month to determine the profitability of our customers. Finally we can view the information in more real time and not have to run the report at month end. This is the type of information that can be tremendously valuable to you as an MSP as you make business decisions on which are the right type of clients.

BrightGauge is Hiring! Front End Developer

(Please note: This position has been filled as of June 1, 2015) BrightGauge is looking for a talented Front End Web Developer to help us continue to grow our core feature sets of rich data visualization and interactive business analytics. This developer will work within our great product team environment, that already includes 1 Front End Developer and an excellent Designer, to develop amazing solutions and commit code on a bi-weekly basis to the application. Required Excellent HTML, CSS skills (cross browser consistency) Experience in developing cross-browser and cross-platform compatible solutions Exceptional JavaScript programming skills Experience with JQuery Experience working with git Excellent communication skills Understanding of working in Agile environment Technologies “Nice to haves” LESS Backbone.js Underscore Templates Bootstrap PHP Familiarity Position Details Base Salary will depend on experience Full time position with full benefits (medical, 401K, etc) Position in Coral Gables, FL Hours of operation 8:30am -5:30pm EST though off hours work to support worldwide market will be a regular occurrence Relocate help available for the right candidate About BrightGauge BrightGauge Software is a web-based business-analytics platform that enables managed IT services providers (MSPs) to generate customizable performance reports and dashboards based on their unique data sources. Founded in 2010 with a focus on the IT Services industries, BrightGauge has become a leader in simplifying data visualization and analysis for its fast growing worldwide customers. Contact Information Brian Dosal - info [at] brightgauge [dot] com

LabTech Software Custom Backup Reporting

One of the most popular requests from our existing LabTech Software customers as well as prospects is our ability to provide reporting on their backups systems. The challenge with this type of reporting is that everyone wants to see the information a little bit differently and there are many different backup systems MSPs are using. Fortunately, Labtech has a very close integration with ShadowProtect Backup Software which many of our customers are using. So we polled these customers and with their help, have created some sweet new gauges to show Backup Success/Failures. In regards to visualization options, some of our customers want to use a table format to give a quick summary and others prefer to provide the report in a bar chart format to show back ups over time. As you can see from the screenshots below, with BrightGauge you can customize exactly how the gauge is viewed for your client’s reports or your own internal report. And there are additional customizations available in the “chart design” on the left side of the image. To learn more please visit web.brightgauge.com/request-a-demo and we can set up a time to connect. LabTech Custom Backup Bar Chart Gauge LabTech Custom Backup Table Gauge

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