Have you ever signed up for a service and opened your first bill to realize it’s nothing like what you expected?
I know I have, and it affected my entire perspective of the service and the company providing it.
With managed IT services, you’re paying a decent amount for a critical component of your business. You need to trust your managed service provider (MSP) and understand exactly what your invoice will include.
The KR Group believes transparency is essential to building relationships with our customers. We know you don’t want surprises when it comes to cost and billing.
More importantly, you don’t want hiccups or miscommunication with the billing process to hinder your view of an IT solution you know will empower your business.
To pull back the curtain on the billing process for The KR Group’s managed services, here’s what you should know:
- The managed IT services billing process
- Understanding different types of invoices
- Updating billing to reflect user changes
- Missed payments for managed IT services
We’ve put together all this information to prepare you for that first invoice you’ll receive after signing up for The KR Group’s managed IT services.
The managed IT services billing process
To start, let’s review how The KR Group sends out invoices and collects payment.
Each month, you’ll receive an invoice for your managed IT services contract. We’ll go over what it looks like in a future section. For now, you should remember that the amount on this bill correlates with your monthly rate and covers your users’ hardware, software, and support.
You’ll generally see this invoice between the 5th and 15th of every month.
We’ll collect payment for the amount listed on your bill via ACH payment on the first of the month.
If you have any questions about the bill, you’ll want to directly reach out to our accounting department.
Types of Invoices
Managed IT services solve one of the biggest nuisances of IT services: multiple invoices.
Most months, you’ll receive only one invoice that incorporates all the support, solutions, and services you utilize. Our goal is to help you streamline the financial aspect of managed IT services and create less confusion.
That being said, there are times when you may receive an additional invoice, but you’ll have plenty of advance notice about when to expect it and what it’s for.
Here are the different types of billing statements you can expect as a managed services customer:
1. Managed Services Invoice
This is the main invoice you’ll receive for your managed IT services and is for the full monthly amount you agreed to when you signed the contract.
This particular statement briefly describes what you signed up for in your contract. You can review the different solutions and services you use by looking at the line items.
This also includes the number of users you have, so you can quickly review if you need to make any changes to user counts.
2. Service Invoice
As a managed IT services customer, your contract covers most services, and you generally won’t receive a service invoice.
The most common exception is to add new users to your company. In this scenario, you’ll receive an invoice that shows what work was performed, the number of hours it took, the billable rate, and the total cost for the service performed.
As a reminder, your contract does not cover the setup of devices and accounts for new users.
Net new users will be added to your managed service invoice on the next bill. However, if you decrease your user count, you can update your invoice twice a year to reflect these changes.
3. Project Invoice
Your MSP can work with you on projects outside of the scope of your IT environment, but you’ll receive a separate invoice for them.
For example, if you decide midway through your contract term you’d like to migrate your phone system to the cloud, you’ll receive a project invoice for the time and material involved in migration.
Updating Billing to Reflect User Changes
You’ll have staff changes at some point, and your managed IT services contract will need to reflect that.
If you add or remove a user, you’ll need to update your managed IT services contract to reflect your user count accurately. It’s important to inform the service and billing departments of these changes.
It’s easy to remember to inform the service department about user changes because you’ll need assistance onboarding or offboarding the IT component of the user’s profile. Still, the most effective way to have billing changes accurately reflected on your invoices is to update accounting on changes to your user count.
If you do forget to let accounting know about the changes, the managed services team will update them, but it might take longer than if you were to pass along the information yourself.
Missed Payments for Managed IT Services
Since you’ll pay your bill via ACH withdrawal, you won’t have to remember to submit payment. However, if your banking information changes or your account balance is insufficient, you may miss a payment.
If this happens, we’ll let you know there was an issue and charge you again within seven days with an additional 15% processing fee.
But, if the payment still doesn’t go through on the second try, we’ll start the collections process. You’ll receive communication about us needing to collect payment and be placed on credit hold.
At that point, you cannot make any future purchases, but your services (anti-spam, antivirus, DNS filtration, etc.) aren’t impacted.
However, if you’re on credit hold for 30 days and still fail to submit payment, you’ll be placed on service hold. You can no longer make purchases or request IT support, and your applications (antivirus, anti-spam, DNS filtration, etc.) will be paused or ended.
You’ll need to pay any outstanding fees and work with the engineer and billing team to be taken off credit or service hold and resume routine services.
What to Remember about Managed IT Services Billing
You’ve researched what to expect from a managed IT service provider in terms of service, so when it comes to billing, you should expect just as much transparency.
As The KR Group’s managed IT services customer, you’ll receive a monthly invoice for services. Occasionally, you may receive additional invoices for user changes or ad hoc projects.
To submit payment for your invoices, you’ll sign up for ACH payment at the beginning of your contract, and we’ll withdraw your recurring fee on the first of each month.
Of course, billing is only one component you need to consider when signing a contract with an MSP. For information on everything you need to know before signing a managed services contract with The KR Group, check out our free guide to signing up for managed IT services.
