Why your MSP shouldn’t be reselling without “multi-vendor reconciliation”

Reselling cloud resources, SaaS licenses and other online services is nothing new.

In fact, on average every MSP does it across approximately 10-20 different vendors, every month.

You’d think it should be easy then, right?

The problem

It’s purely a margin game. Take Microsoft for instance; everyone under the sun resells it, and unless you offer a unique value add (aka the MSP pipe dream), you can’t charge above RRP. Every single cent matters.

But it can also be a major pain to administer and fraught with human error. So when the invoices and usage reports for those 10-20 different vendors roll in every single month, what do you do?

MSPs typically fall into four camps here:

1)   There’s the line-by-line MSP. No invoice, whether it’s a one line internet bill or a 600 row Microsoft NCE invoice, won’t be signed off until it’s been reconciled against every relevant client charge. This might take a whole resource several days every month. Fun!

2)   There’s the close-enough-is-good-enough MSP. So long as the income line is higher than the COGs line on your GL, then rock and roll!

3)   There’s the spreadsheet wizard MSP. Macros, scripts, BI dashboards, you name it… Highly customised ways of monitoring reconciliation. Amazing! That is.. until the vendor changes the bill format and all reporting throws up errors. Damn.

But lately, there’s a new kid on the block:

4)   The automation MSP. This savvy operator uses a built-for-MSP’s multi-vendor reconciliation platform to check every invoice from every vendor against every client bill. Instantly. Bravo!

How does it work?

Multi-vendor reconciliation platforms (such as CloudOlive) integrate with your PSA, like Autotask or ConnectWise Manage.

They ingest any format of vendor or distributor file (from basic reports to the invoice itself), and compares line by line against client contracts & billing plans in your PSA.

The ones worth their salt can even remember the bespoke billing rules you might have for a certain client.

The results you’d expect:

These Automation MSP’s report that they see:

• 86% of line items automatically reconciled. The other 14% are flagged for review due to dropped margin, fallen off a contract, or other reasons ensuring they don’t pass through undetected.
• Faster month-end billing by 8x.
• 100% reselling accuracy, meaning less billing disputes
• Thousands upon thousands of dollars in extra revenue.

You can check out a case study here with IT Partners, a New Zealand based MSP who were one of the first to adopt CloudOlive’s multi-vendor reconciliation platform. 

Download the factsheet. 

Want a quick demo? Book one here.

About the author

Adam Ross is a co-founder of CloudOlive, a company that was established in 2020 with the goal of solving a universal MSP challenge: SaaS billing management.

Visit CloudOlive’s website to know more.