Gradient MSP has launched an integration platform and associated partner program for Billable, the recurring revenue billing reconciliation solution it introduced last November.
Called Synthesize, the new offering is designed to benefit Gradient’s MSP end users by creating links between Billable and a wide array of as-a-service systems.
“In order to truly automate billing reconciliation, we need integrations with all the reseller tools,” says Dave Goldie, Gradient’s vice president of channel. “Gradient can’t do all of the reseller integrations. It would take forever.”
Synthesize aims to make integrating with Billable a simple, attractive option for as many vendors as possible. Use of the platform is free, and doesn’t require software makers to share revenue with Gradient.
“It costs nothing to integrate, and we won’t ever ask for the money that you make off of an integration,” says Andrea Ayala, Gradient’s director of technology alliances.
Becoming a Synthesize partner can help vendors reduce the cost of creating and maintaining integrations with products beyond Billable, Gradient says. In addition to downloading usage figures from consumption-priced services, Billable uploads reconciled data automatically to leading PSA solutions. Synthesize enables vendors to integrate not only with Billable itself but with those third-party PSA systems too.
At present, Billable is linked to eight PSAs, including products from ConnectWise, Datto, Kaseya, Pulseway, Syncro, and Tigerpaw. Two additional integrations are currently in development.
Forging ties to PSA solutions is both a competitive necessity for vendors and a major headache, especially for younger, smaller companies with limited resources. “I’ve got to spend all this R&D and all this money and all this time and energy on integrating with the PSAs,” Goldie observes. “Then I have to spend money on the maintenance of the integration.”
According to Ayala, Synthesize is engineered to make establishing integrations simple. “It’s a very quick, very painless process,” she says. “Our goal is to make it as easy as possible.”
Gradient collaborates with Synthesize partners on lead generation activities as well, Goldie adds. “You get access to our events, you get access to our marketing, you get access to our engagements and the experiences that we’re bringing to the market,” he says. “We’re trying to make this valuable for vendors who are serving this MSP community.”
Vendors either using or planning to use Synthesize already include Auvik, Breach Secure Now, ConnectMeVoice, Mailprotector, and ThreatLocker.
Billable’s ultimate mission is to help MSPs automate the normally time consuming, hands-on process of determining what to charge clients each month for usage-based solutions. At present, users must load consumption data into Billable via drag-and-drop .csv files. The system can import data from Synthesize partners, however, without that manual step.
“It happens automatically,” Goldie says.
Billable is currently free of charge for MSPs, and Gradient plans to offer a no-charge version of the product indefinitely. That edition has provided unlimited .csv imports since early this month. Other features include support for unlimited end user contracts and services, unlimited support for pre-populated, vendor-specific mappings from .csv fields to PSA fields, and identification of unbilled services.
A paid Pro edition of Billable, priced at $99 per user per month and planned for future release, will support unlimited users and unlimited vendor integrations through Synthesize.
Gradient was launched in 2020 by CEO Colin Knox, a one-time MSP and founder of password management and documentation vendor Passportal. N-able (then SolarWinds MSP) acquired Passportal in 2019. Gradient’s first product, a free “data hygiene” solution for improving the completeness and accuracy of PSA records, reached market last June.
Billing isn’t the only MSP workflow Gradient aspires to streamline. “We see some other use cases in business operations automation that may be more important,” says Goldie, who declined to cite examples.
The company’s longer-term ambition is to create a benchmarking service based on anonymous, aggregated data from its MSP users.
“How Gradient is going to monetize is through industry intelligence,” Goldie says. “We want MSPs one day to be able to say, ‘the average MSP in my geographic area with these products is seeing this average price, this average profitability, this average usage, [and] this average adoption,’ so that they can have a meaningful data-driven conversation with their customer about getting paid what they’re worth.”
As of two weeks ago, over 250 MSPs were using Billable and Gradient expected to nearly double that number before March.
