Ok, sure.
So I will start by saying I don’t know anything about your business at all, but I am going to go off on a limb and make some broad assumptions, as well as offer some MSP advice from my past experience in the space if you are interested. My intent is to simply help you to potentially make more money as an MSP, and on our platform.
First, these types of requests often come from a place of not having a solidified cash flow. This is an unfortunate byproduct of being small (again, forgive the assumption). The smaller you are in most spaces, the more cash flow becomes a concern. That said, the vast majority of MSP revenue never has a fixed, crippling cost associated with it. Unless you are regularly becoming the bank for larger customers where you are floating them tens of thousands of dollars of hardware on terms, the most you are out of pocket is your time and some backup and MAV licenses, and that’s only true if your customer(s) are taking longer than 30 days to pay you on a regular basis (that’s a different problem entirely).
So my first piece of advice is to resolve the cash flow issue in any way possible, as soon as humanly possible, at all costs. Offering any discount, let alone a 10% discount, just so customers can pay you money they already owe you early instead of simply paying you on time, is leaving money, your money, in someone else’s pocket. This effectively means if everyone took you up on your early payment plan, for every 10 equally-sized customers you kill yourself to finally close (particularly if they are larger deals), one of those customers isn’t paying you a dime each month. Never put yourself into a position where you are devaluing your MSP, your MSP’s work, or the value your MSP provides to your customers. This does exactly that.
Second, your one true asset as an MSP is your time. You’ll come to realize this more and more the larger you get, but not fully grasping that early on is one of the reasons why some MSPs wind up growing so much faster than others. Anything, anything you do that takes time away from closing new customers is losing you money, and stunting your potential for growth. So when you consider moving your invoicing out of your PSA for virtually any reason, including this one, it will never pay off. It can’t payoff, because any additional work it takes you to do that further puts you behind. It’s siphoning off time you should be turning into money. What’s worse, moving toward an unintegrated stack versus a fully-integrated one means you’ll be consistently siphoning off upside potential indefinitely, or at least until you move back to a fully-integrated RMM and PSA.
I truly enjoy discussing new and unique ideas our MSPs come up with regularly, but in this case I’d definitely reconsider how you are approaching some of this because altering this trajectory now, even if just slightly, is going to pay off massive dividends down the road for you.
