Gradient MSP has introduced a billing reconciliation solution designed to make collecting up-to-date usage data from multiple vendors and exporting it to a PSA solution simpler for busy managed service providers.
The new product, which the recently launched company officially introduced during its online Leg Up partner conference today, represents a significant step in Gradient’s vision of automating core business processes by connecting the different tools MSPs typically use.
Called Billable, Gradient’s latest tool addresses what company founder and CEO Colin Knox calls “the second to last mile” of billing: figuring out exactly how many licenses, megabytes, minutes, or other commodity their clients should be billed for each month.
“The last mile is obviously creating the invoices and sending them out, but that second to last mile is the most treacherous mile,” Knox says.
Without a tool like Billable, he continues, the reconciliation process typically involves gathering consumption data from potentially dozens of vendor portals. “Has it gone up? Has it gone down? What’s the change so that I can be sure as an MSP that I’m getting paid for all the services I’m delivering, and also that I’m not billing my clients for services that they’re not actually receiving,” Knox says.
Billable also frees MSPs from the painfully manual task of updating the client contracts in their PSA application too, he adds, by exporting the data it collects automatically. At present, the system supports eight popular PSA solutions, including products from ConnectWise, Datto, Kaseya, Syncro, Pulseway, and Tigerpaw.
For now, users must download a .csv file from the vendors they bill against, drag it into Billable, and then map fields from the download to corresponding fields in their PSA system. Eventually, however, integrations between Gradient’s platform and a wide range of third-party products will enable MSPs to consolidate billing data from those systems and export it to their PSA automatically.
“We’ve seen an amazing level of interest and participation from channel vendors, who have over and over told us that this is a top three feature request of all their partners,” Knox says. “Almost 30 channel vendors have us on the roadmap or are in active development with us right now, building integrations.” Gradient expects the first crop of those integrations to arrive early in 2022.
A single user basic edition of Billable is available now at no charge. A more robust edition of the product costs a flat $49 per month for unlimited users. That version of the product will eventually support vendor billing integrations, and provide the first one free. Users will pay an as yet undetermined amount for each additional integration they employ.
Gradient isn’t the first vendor to recognize how much time MSPs end up spending on billing reconciliation each month. Datto’s Autotask PSA includes reconciliation functionality, and ConnectWise rolled out a reconciliation tool for cloud-based solutions in July. Liongard’s “unified visibility” solution is designed to help with reconciliation as well.
A former MSP, Knox is the founder of Passportal, the password management and documentation vendor he sold to N-able (then SolarWinds MSP) in 2019. He left N-able last September and created Gradient the following month. In June, the company shipped its first product, a “data hygiene” solution designed to help MSPs clean up the records in their PSA system. Like Billable, that tool is available at no cost.
Billable, however, better exemplifies Gradient’s long-term ambition to construct an integration fabric that automates data exchanges between the many solutions and services MSPs utilize. “That’s where our focus is going to be,” Knox says, “allowing any tool to attach to any PSA in a very fluid and seamless manner.”
The result, he continues, will be not only greater productivity and efficiency but more freedom for MSPs to use the products they prefer even if those systems can’t currently share data. “They can have seamless data replication and synchronization across all their tools regardless of if they’re all owned by the same ecosystem or PSA platform company or not,” Knox says. “We’re here to make everything work better together.”
That includes the channel itself, according to Dave Goldie, who joined Gradient as vice president of channel last month following earlier stints at Cytracom and IT Glue, and who now plans to help foster communication and collaboration among MSPs and vendors.
“It’s about getting the channel working better together,” he says. “How can we engage with each other in a better way, both in person and obviously in the new digital world that we live in?”
On the product side, Gradient has plans to provide business intelligence to MSPs based on the integration work it does. “How can we use the data that flows through our system towards collective intelligence to be able to inform and tell the MSPs what they’re missing, where they should be going next, what they can do to optimize and tune their business to actually be more successful?” Knox asks.
Gradient, which completed a $10.25 million Series A funding round last week, plans to invest the money in further product development and rolling out training materials, research studies, and other partner enablement resources. It also intends to hire 50 more employees by the end of next March.
