You're sitting on a goldmine and don't know it.
Every ticket your team closes, every agreement you've invoiced, every hour logged in ConnectWise; it's all data. And buried inside that data are the answers to a question every MSP owner is asking: “Why aren't my margins where I want them to be?”
The data is already in ConnectWise. The opportunity is making it easier to surface, organize, and present that information in a way that aligns with how finance teams work.
Your Agreements Are Telling You Something
Start here: pull your managed service agreements and ask a simple question: How much labor am I actually delivering to each client versus what I'm billing for?
Most MSPs who do this exercise for the first time are surprised by what they find. Some clients are over-using your services relative to what they’re paying for. Others are quieter and don’t need all the time they are paying for. The aggregate looks fine. The client-level detail tells a completely different story because your profitable clients are subsidizing your under-performers.
According to data from hundreds of MSP’s who use the MSPCFO platform, the average MSP has roughly 8% of revenue recoverable in their five most over-served clients, while their five most under-served clients represent 13% of total revenue at risk. That's a double exposure problem hiding in plain sight.
In ConnectWise, the data you need is there: time entries, ticket volume, agreement types, work roles, revenues. The challenge is connecting it in a way that gives you a clear picture of agreement-level profitability.
Four Metrics Worth Pulling Today
If you want to start finding margin in your ConnectWise data, focus on these:
- Labor revenue per endpoint: How much managed services revenue are you generating relative to the size of each client environment?
- Billable per hour by client: Are you capturing the right rate for the work being done, or is blended rate dragging you down?
- Tickets per endpoint: Which clients are generating disproportionate ticket volume relative to their size?
- Hours per ticket: Where is your team spending more time than the work should require?
These four numbers, benchmarked against your own portfolio averages, will surface your outliers fast. And your outliers are where your EBITDA opportunity lives.
We go deeper on all four in our whitepaper, MSP’S Roadmap to EBITA Growth— a practical guide to finding and fixing margin leaks inside your existing client base.
NOTE: To get accurate and actionable numbers, ensure your labor revenue number excludes recurring products, tools, agents, and any other product you deliver as part of your Managed Services.
The Real Question Isn't Volume — It's Root Cause
Here's where most MSPs get stuck. ConnectWise can show you that a client is generating excessive tickets. What it won't tell you automatically is why; and the why matters enormously.
Is it outdated pricing that hasn't kept pace with a growing environment? Out-of-scope work your team has been absorbing without billing? Chronic technical issues that a well-scoped project could eliminate? A client whose environment is simply never going to be efficient?
Each of those scenarios requires a completely different response. Getting to the right answer requires layering your financial data on top of your operational data and reading them together.
Your Next Step
The margin you're looking for isn't on the other side of your next sales push. It's inside the clients you already have, and the answers are within the ConnectWise data you're generating every single day.
Start by pulling your top five most ticket-heavy clients and comparing their hours delivered against what they're paying for. Odds are, you'll have your first conversation starter before the end of the week.
MSPCFO connects directly to ConnectWise PSATM and organizes your operational and financial data into the agreement profitability and efficiency views that MSP owners actually need. If you want to see what's inside your data, we'd love to show you.
MSPCFO is a ConnectWise Certified integration that organizes your PSA data into the agreement profitability and efficiency views MSP leaders actually need.
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The term 'ConnectWise' is a trademark of ConnectWise, LLC. This application uses the ConnectWise API but is not a ConnectWise product or service and is licensed separately from ConnectWise products and services.
