Source
r/msp•
cjmod

Reconcile CSP Bills for Microsoft

Vendor

New Product Manager for ConnectWise CloudConsole here (recently transitioned from the LabTech/Automate side). I've seen some posts lately about CloudConsole costing too much and I agree with you. From what I can tell, it's main value is in helping you reconcile billing for MS CSP accounts, so I'm working to align our pricing model with that value.

Two Questions + One Proactive Response:

  • How long does is typically take you to manually reconcile your monthly file from MS for a single tenant?
  • How long would it take you to automate that process yourself? (we're considering a monthly MAXIMUM)
  • Yes, I'm familiar w/Pax8. IIRC, they procure thru Arrow, charge a 4% fee & have free integration w/CW Manage.

I'm in learning mode right now. So if you've even considered looking at CloudConsole, I want your input. No sale pitch. No PMs (so you don't give away your un). No gimmicks. Just email me: CWright at ConnectWise.

I'll also be at MS Ignite next week if you want to talk in person. Educate me on your billing process. I'll buy you drinks.

Bonus: I'll personally mail swag to the first person who can get me Kaseya's latest pricing for Unigma (I hear they switched from per resource to per company).

Posted Sep 19, 2017, 4:51 AM UTC

48
Coriron•

!lf Vendor,vendor

2
orty•

I agree with you: CloudConsole is great at reconciling for billing. The extra stuff that's in there for reporting and monitoring and such just gets in the way. The automated alerting/ticketing doesn't always work. It will end up alerting on stuff it doesn't need to alert on (client's who have online archiving getting quota alerts) and not alerting when it should (I rarely get the emails/tickets that the admin user/pass for syncing isn't working properly).

The service/reporting-side of things just needs to go away as I feel like I'm paying for stuff I'm never going to use. I just want a tool to save me the trouble of manually updating billing quantities -- that's it. This does it, but it's totally overkill and expensive for that feature (and I feel like it should be like UserCentric -- included with the product).

2
AlaskaFishingGuide•

The margins are already slim and we pay a lot for CW. How about including it?

1
cjmodOPVendor - ConnectWise•

Resale margins are slim, yes. But if you've reselling Microsoft licenses, especially under CSP, shouldn't it be bundled in your per seat costs for end user support?

Free isn't a sustainable business model for this product, because it needs to continually evolve as your cloud business evolves + it can be purchased by companies that don't have Manage.

1
hellcat81•

If you could make the billing reconciliation portion free with the product (ie any number of seats) then demonstrate the other pieces have value on their own and allow us to enable or disable by client the additional features it might help uptake of Cloudconsole.

As it's priced it kills what little margin there is especially on $4 exch plan 1 SKUs that we aren't "managing".

The policies, central management from CW and reporting have potential value as add-ons if we can choose which clients to use these with but only in cases where the client is MSP or paying for us to manage those pieces would we turn it on. In cases of reselling 100 seats of O365 or 25 Azure resources the math simply makes it hard to justify CC especially if the client's IT people are the one managing user accounts and all we get for it is the ability to sync subscription counts which don't change often and we can update manually in seconds.

No problem with paying the base $50 or so for the few minutes saved on Azure billing but I've heard the same from other partners that they're just doing the billing manually because of Cloudconsole cost.

1
Craptcha•

We already manage office 365 as part of managed service agreements, there isn't "more" money in it than before when we managed users connected to an exchange server.

Now, not only are the margins single digit but we also need to handle complex billing which incurs more costs. Solution? Don't resell Office 365 and let your customer pay Microsoft direct with their credit card.

It's not that CloudConsole is expensive per se, but its not adding value for our customers. Kinda reminds me of LabTech MDM. No on wanted to pay extra for that either.

Why not make a deal with Ingram to have them subsidize cloudconsole for msps who use them as CSP. They get market share, you get volume.

1
Bovie323•

Does this do the same thing?

https://www.plugins4labtech.com/products/office-365-for-labtech

1
cjmodOPVendor - ConnectWise•

That helps manage O365, but doesn't reconcile billing or address Azure.

1
aretokas•

I'll be honest, I'm already part way through writing integration between Rhipe and CW. This will replace CloudConsole for us, and considering we're unable to use CC for Azure billing, it makes it even better.

It's honestly not taken a lot of time to get where it is, and the design is such that we will just be plugging in new suppliers with APIs as we get them for other things (VoIP and Internet are the 2 big ones for us at the moment).

1