February 2023 Product Update from Syncro’s new CTO

Announcements
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To All Partners:

Kristen Costagliola here, Syncro’s new Chief Product & Technology Officer. I started with Syncro at the end of 2022 and wanted to introduce myself, give an update on some of the feature work that was in flight when I started, my observations so far, and provide some insight into what our product priorities are for the quarter.

I join Syncro with years of experience in the MSP space having run multiple engineering teams at Datto. I care deeply about the quality and reliability of my products because I know how critical your PSA and RMM are to your business. I value listening to partners and acting on your feedback. Since joining Syncro, I’ve spoken to many partners from around the world of all sizes and I heard loud and clear from everyone that we can improve by delivering more value, more smoothly. I am committed to continue listening to what you need to run and grow your business and demonstrating continuous improvement in shipping the features you need on a reliable platform.

When I started at Syncro, we were in the midst of working on two features: rich text communication in tickets and Stripe ACH. I want to acknowledge that these projects did not go as planned and provide a clear update.

Rich Text Update

I personally apologize for all the stumbles throughout the rollout of Rich Text. Ticket communications are a core part of your workflow and this was a large project that required us to update many areas of the platform, making the roll out more risky. We tried to account for all of this, but the roll out was not as smooth as planned, so we paused the automated rollout and the feature is currently optional. Over the last month, the team has worked hard to fix the known issues and polish this feature however I have decided to keep the feature optional for the time being. Partners can enable or disable rich text with minimal disruption to your existing workflow or tickets. We will be adding a self-serve setting, in the meantime if you want to enable or disable rich text please create a support ticket. Please watch for updates in the community and in-app for the specific location of this feature toggle.

Stripe ACH Update

You may have heard that we were working on a project to bring Stripe ACH to our platform. We know that providing choice in payment providers is very important to you however I have made the hard decision that we will be pausing work on Stripe ACH for the time being. I am pausing this work after evaluating our approach to the solution and concluding that it isn’t fit for production. Let me reassure you that we will be investing to provide more choice in payment providers. We are currently in discovery with new payment provider options and will have something to share with the community in the latter half of the year.

Future State (or: How I Roll)

For the next quarter or two, our Product & Engineering teams will be focused on enhancing our ticketing experience, improving scripting and billing system reliability, as well as UI / UX improvements which are currently underway. Due to the previous missteps, we will be releasing smaller chunks of work to improve your workflows overtime to confirm that we can deliver the reliable experience you deserve.

We’ve returned to releasing frequent Quality of Life improvements and want to make sure we are prioritizing the most valuable work. Syncro’s foundation for success is built on listening to our partners and helping them grow and I am committed to continuing that. Since I’ve started, I have spoken to multiple partners, read countless of your community posts, and followed up with feedback given in-app or via email.

I have just finished restructuring the engineering team and re-prioritized their work to deliver more things you need. We want to do things faster, but we also want to do them reliably. We take your feedback seriously, so please keep it coming in your format of choice; whether that is the Syncro community, Facebook, ceo@syncromsp.com, Ask Us Anything, at an event, etc.

I will be joining the March 2nd Ask Us Anything to take your questions and feedback directly, and would be happy to see you there.

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I don’t necessarily agree with this. There are still some big bugs that affect the workflow, and customer facing emails that look unprofessional, such as customers receiving double emails on ticket creation when an image is involved. Emails not going out when using the Public Comment option in Ticket Automations. Logo missing from the autoresponder email when a ticket is created. Lots of formatting issues still. Some emails don’t make it to tickets properly. Those are just to name a few. It’s one thing to release a feature with unknown bugs, it’s another to know about the bugs and release it anyway. This was one of the deciding factors for us to leave CW behind.

Can you fix the Authorize.net integration and make it fully working, which would provide a nice alternative to WP? In order to fix, Syncro needs to ask for billing information at time of storing or running a CC. That includes things like Name and Address. This would fix 100% of our issues with storing cards and having customers self-service. This would also fix other integrations, since they also receive an error if a company is missing a First and Last name (Companies don’t have first/last names). The display name also changes to Company - First Last Name and looks horrible. ACH is super easy and in fact, we can use ACH with a workaround. This would take barely any programming time to integrate. Authorize.net is one of the biggest names in the industry, so it doesn’t make sense to me that it is a “legacy” integration.

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Integrate with Connectbooster, they already do CC and ACH and are MSP friendly. We are partners with them for several of our clients and I know the team.

This will allow your users to select what type of invoice to auto pay and how to do it. Super easy.

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Another year with WorldPay. Maybe in the meantime someone can get WorldPay to honor the agreement for Syncro subscribers. Getting surprised charges on our bills and having to spend months trying to resolve is horrible. Time is money. Is this something someone can tackle while you figure out other options.

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I don’t even have authorize as an option when I look at the app center. But if you did let me bring my Authorize.net I would be more than satisified. key word… bring… Not get padded fees from Syncro

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You have to contact support for them to enable it since it’s “legacy”. The integration doesn’t require switching any billings to Syncro, you just link up via API.

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Thankyou @kristen.costagliola for your update.
It can be good to shake things up a bit with a fresh set of eyes, and I appreciate the insight you have provided.
I’m surprised at how poorly the implementation phase of the Rich text or Stripe ACH updates have tracked. Have a listen to “The 6 Types of Working Genius” and then roll out the assessments. Moving people to suit their natural talents might avoid future implementation problems.

Reading your Future State section I see lots of things to look forward to.
Unfortunately, based on what is not in your Future State section I conclude that none of the Security related or API feature requests will be implemented into production until well into 2024 or beyond.

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I appreciate the transparency.

My concern goes beyond your tenure here, though. As I’ve grown to understand the role of a PSA/RMM over the last 2.5 years in the MSP space (17 years total in IT as a hands-on director/sr. systems engineer), I feel like there are some slam dunks that Syncro isn’t paying attention to, or just isn’t delivering on. And maybe no PSA/RMM providers are, and that’s why other options exist.

Those items I’m talking about are pretty, professionally templated emails (the option to play with the html wrapper is fine, but it’s essentially required as the product sits now). A professional-looking client portal. Some attention to CX for our clients is in order. I’d rather muck about the UI internally and focus on my client’s experience first. The cop out has been something on the order of “the competition has prettier menus, but barely any functionality”.

The other items are a solid ability to get paid. I was one of the holdouts for something better than WorldPay. I got lucky as my onboarding rep at WP was terrible, so I went with my gut and just abandoned using it from the start. And scripting, which I know you mentioned. Scripting needs to work. I promise you, if scripting is working, people can live with shortcomings in other parts of the RMM. The scripting engine is, imo, worth the monthly price by itself, if it’s working. Scheduled scripts and remediation both.

As it stands now, I manually email my clients. I don’t give them portal access. I generate invoices, but don’t collect payments w/in Syncro. I run any important scripts manually. I feel like Syncro is so close to being great, but in 2.5 years, we’ve gotten transparency from a few different sources, and some new faces, and some apologies, but I’m more interested, at this point, to see some action. It seemed like maybe there was some momentum, but we’re learning that isn’t quite the case, yet. I think that Syncro, by in large, has gotten lucky with a number of things. One is consolidation of the space. One is light competition. I don’t think you’re gaining traction because your product is superior. I think it’s because of a lack of options in the space. But I don’t think Syncro can rest on it’s niche place in this space forever, and I really hope you’re coming to the end of cleaning up your house internally and moving onto your paying customers soon. And if you simply don’t have the resources to make everything a reality, please just be up front about it right away, and don’t string people along thinking a feature is on the way, or even that you’ll put it on the list. Just say no, we aren’t doing that. A lot of the ‘big new features’ Syncro has been chasing invove getting more revenue instead of fixing existing issues that would make the product more polished. That’s fine. Then just keep doing integrations with 3rd parties that provide features and take your cut, and make it clear if you want this feature or that, to engage with an integrated 3rd party.

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Sadly CB is now a Kaseya company so you can expect it to go downhill shortly.

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Eh, I know the team there and the only changes happening are deeper integrations with their platforms, they are absolutely open to integrating with others as it’s a payment processor.

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Kristen! First of all, congrats!! (former Datto employee here, u were a true rockstar there!).

Thanks for the transparency. This is just another reason I’m glad we decided to go with Syncro. Can’t wait to see all the improvements!

  • Marc
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Wish you guys would get lendarr up and running already. Would love to use them as a processor but keep it as smooth as Worldpay or better.

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This is a wise choice. I look forward to seeing you execute on the small stuff and make our jobs just a bit easier and smoother. I look forward to the next Zoom call.

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Stripe makes this very easy to integrate. Unless there is an unseen technical debt with just adding another option within the Stripe API and whatever Syncro side of things, I find this response to be rather confusing and disappointing. In theory Stripe makes it easy enough that you could even allow Apple Pay as a payment option (not that I want that at all), but adding ACH shouldn’t be that big of an overhaul that you choose to pursue other payment gateways for ACH. I’m hoping that I’m just missing what you mean by this.

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A big +1 on this. If there’s enough tech debt for this to be a lift, that’s more than a bit worriesome.

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I saw this news item (and the joke in the tag line :rofl:) tonight in the CodeProject Daily News email.
image
The article is here.
Stop saying “technical debt” - Stack Overflow Blog
It is a good read.

Bottom line is. There will always be tech debt because all code is never finished…as long as there are users requesting updates and finding bugs.

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I am really disappointed that syncro is not bringing in Stripe ACH for who knows how long. My MSP is ready to switch to ACH for payments for hopefully a number of our clients but we have been holding off as we have been waiting for Strip ACH. There is no way we are going to even think about Worldpay and you may as well forget authorize.net as their ACH rates are WAY higher than Stripe ACH and it will only hurt IT groups in the pocket book by offering it.

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Indeed! Stripe is easy to integrate with. In a previous job, I wrote a payment capture process that billed for backup usage. It is incredibly simple to use their API as even a mediocre developer.

@kristen.costagliola It would be acceptable, to me, if Syncro allowed the automated billing process that charges credit cards on invoice creation to allow any payment sources that are already assigned to the customer in Stripe. I’ll take care of getting customers’ ACH sources input via Stripe directly, but if all the sources were options in the “Payment profile to use” dropdown, that would be leaps and bounds better than “nope, we just can’t do it.”

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Not sure it’s syncros fault here. I tried adding stripe ACH to my xero invoices. It’s very easy to add it as an option to an invoice but it just pops up a message that is very confusing for the customer. (and me) And the information needs to be entered for every invoice. Recurring invoices need a unique ACH number given to the bank every payment. Not customer friendly at all.