Kaseya recently gave me a demo on their new quote manager. I made them run through it pretty fast because there were just a few things I really needed to see if it did before moving on. Sorry Tanner, I’m about to break your heart again. It’s out of love.
There were some dealbreakers.
No ConnectBooster integration. The only way for clients to pay during quote acceptance is with a Stripe integration. An integration from Stripe to Xero is availabe from Stripe but not QBO (as of 2023-11-291) You can use a third-party tool to sync Stripe payments to QBO, but it isn’t clear if sales tax information will transfer2.
If your client did pay with Stripe, and the payment is synced to QBO, the invoice still is not. So your client will see a credit on their account until you get the invoice sent over from Autotask.
Any other other way to pay — such as ACH — must be done through your normal invoicing system,.
The Autotask integration is a mess. This is the workflow provided by Kaseya:
We’re going to skip the top box and just hit the rest of the workflow.
- Create quote
- Quote Manager opens an opportunity in Autotask
- The quote is sent to the customer
- The customer accepts
- MSP goes to Autotask to win the opportunity.
- MSP closes ticket that Autotask created as a result.
- MSP approves and posts the charges in Autotask
- MSP creates invoice in Autotask and sends to QBO
- MSP sends out (unpaid) invoice to client
- If Stripe was used, MSP applies client’s payment against invoice
The Autotask Opportunities module is a mess. It requires no less than 11 steps to get an already created quote to an Autotask invoice. (11 steps in addition to the ten above!!!) If you use QBO add at least two more steps to this. And if you don’t win the quote you still need to go through and “Lose” the opportunity.3
Sales Tax settings are pulled from Taxjar, not Autotask or QBO. This means that it is possible Kaseya Quote Manager will calculate different sales tax then what ends up in your invoice and books. This is hell on earth. I’ve made sales tax mistakes before and it takes unnecessary back and forth with clients that don’t understand why you can’t get sales tax straight.
Kaseya Quote Manager will send the client a copy of the accepted quote as soon as they accept it, so if there is any discrepancy the client will see it. You don’t have time to fix it. To be clear: Quote Manager sends an accepted quote, but you still need to send an invoice, where it is possible the sales tax will not match up.
This is an incredibly complicated tool for a simple task. I’m much happier with Quoter. Which does integrate with ConnectBooser and QBO correctly. Kaseya Quote Manager has a nicer interface and quote aesthetic, but that won’t make up for a poor experience for both clients and MSPs.
Like my take on the Datto EDR, this looks like it will be a good tool, but is shockingly immature and ready for MSPs today.
- https://commerce.datto.com/help/Content/3-manage/payments.htm?Highlight=stripe ↩︎
- I really really hope this is wrong. Kaseya does not offer any documentation, so we’re left with the vendor’s docs: “Commerce Sync does not currently transfer item or tax information for Stripe, but support is on the way.” It isn’t clear if sales tax needs to transfer here, the Stirpe/QBO integration may only send over the lump sum payment amount. Without any clear docs who knows/
↩︎ - If Kaseya quote manager handles this it is not clear from the documentation. ↩︎
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