TL;DR: What’s New For Cognition360? 🎃

Cognition360 has released enhancements to five reports that provide your MSP with improved analysis of your operations and financial measures, including four of our core reports. Just like the set of several reports we updated in March, and the four more we updated in July, however, you have to ask for them to get them.

Let’s take a quick look at each of the new-and-improved reports and see exactly what’s new and improved. 

Which five reports exactly?

Here’s the list:

1. Fixed Fee Tickets Report (add-on)
2. Ticket Daily Stats Report (core)
3. Customer Profitability Report (core)
4. Time Entry Benchmark (core)
5. Project Summary Report (core)

You might not be using all of these reports now, but they’re all well worth a second look.

How do I gain access to these reports?

The Cognition360 Support team has just what you need. If you know exactly what you want, you can fill in this form and request to have the reports you want updated to the latest version. Next step, you’re in and using them.

What’s new-and-or-improved in each of these five reports?

Once again, the official word from our Product team is that “these improvements will improve customer retention, enhance your quality of life, and empower you to make more informed and strategic business decisions.” 

Did you take advantage of the last reports that we updated (by the way, here’s the form if you missed out last time, and a link to read what you missed)? Did they enhance your life’s quality? These ones just might. Read on to learn more… and FYI, the best is saved for last. 

“Save The Best For Last” was also a huge hit song in 1992 for actress, pop star, and former Miss America winner Vanessa Williams.  

Fixed Fee Tickets Report

Speaking of 1992, do you remember the 1992 Disney film Aladdin, when the titular character sang about “a new fantastic point of view” in the film’s Oscar and Grammy-winning signature song “A Whole New World”? Well, now in 2024, we’ve added a whole new Billable Technicians page that will give you a new fantastic point of view – the technicians who worked on those tickets, including the billable hours and the billable amount.

All the ticket details are linked here, along with bar charts for the number of billable tickets per technician, the billable hours per technician for these tickets, and the associated billable amounts. 

You can also see in the table on the top right how many techs worked on bigger tickets, and this can help you find oddities… like our example, where 6 techs worked on a fixed-fee workstation update for 68.68 billable hours and billed nearly $10,000. Hopefully you don’t find alarming examples in your own business… feels like the client relationship could be in “A Whole New World” of pain. 😬

Tickets Daily Stats Report

This is just a quick clean-up to the Entered | Resolved page:

The Entered | Resolved page will now show tickets entered vs tickets resolved on the same date range selected for an easier visual comparison. Strongly recommend getting this fix as it makes the page much more useful.

Customer Profitability Report

The Customer Profitability Report has been updated with a new filter for Technical Account Manager added:

Technical Account Manager has been added as a filter just below Account Manager on the Summary page of the Customer Profitability Report. If your organization has both AMs and TAMs, with different customer responsibilities or lines of reporting, this will allow you to see how profitable each TAM’s portfolio of accounts is by month.

Time Entry Benchmark

An incorrect URL on the Report Information page had been used (which you’d find if you drill down), and refreshing the report with this updated one will correct the error. This one is just a fix so nothing is broken. No screenshot, but we’ll update it for you.

Project Summary Report

Saving the best for last, but unrelated to Vanessa Williams, three enhancements have been made to Project Summary Report’s main Project Details page that improve oversight for projects:

1. Billable Budget Hours Remaining and Billable Budget Hours % Remaining
2. Added Engineer Hours and Project Management Hours
3. Added a With Opportunity filter

Billable Budget Hours Remaining and Billable Budget Hours % Remaining have been added to the Project Details page of the Project Summary report. These two measures will indicate the Billable Hours compared to the budgeted hours for the project. This shows at a glance whether billable hours are over or under budget, how many billable hours are still left in the budget, and the percentage of remaining hours of budget. 

This enhancement is useful for MSP project managers to communicate with stakeholders, allowing them to quickly highlight projects in the portfolio that are going well and get ahead of issues that have arisen on others (perhaps scope issues with the client, or resource challenges with internal team members).

We’ve also added Project Management Hours and Engineer Hours to the Details page of the report. Again, this is great for portfolio-level project oversight – understanding overhead requirements / overruns and getting an at-a-glance look at the technical resources individual projects have consumed versus estimates / budgets for each. Take action on any projects that are moving in the wrong direction before they’re on fire .

A new With Opportunity filter has been created, which will allow you to view only projects with associated Opportunities that have been created in your PSA, or see those that don’t have any Opportunities at all. This will let you see projects that just got missed on updating Opportunities on the sales process side (or just aren’t linked correctly), or if you’ve moved ahead with a client-sourced project that wasn’t “sold” and never had an Opportunity at all (like a surprise office move). 

And That’s The End of That Chapter

Summer is over here in the northern hemisphere, so these are the last updated reports of the season. Please use the form to request any of these that interest you, and keep an eye out for more enhancements to Cognition360. 

Not a Cognition360 partner yet? Join us for a personalized demo, or check out this quick overview here. We’d love to help you unlock your ConnectWise PSA data to make better decisions and grow a more profitable MSP business.