Datagate CEO, Mark Loveys recently sat down with Joel Zaidspiner of the ChannelPro Network to discuss telecom billing for MSPs on the Voice Of The Vendor Podcast.
Check out some of the highlights below!
Listen to the full episode here
Telecom Billing Interview With Datagate Highlights
Why MSPs should bill under their own brand
There are some vendors that are doing the billing for the MSP.
Some of them do it under their own brand (under the vendors brand) and some do it under the MSPs brand. Now, we are very clear on our message, we say to MSPs that it’s very important to bill under your own brand, to really own that piece of the relationship.
Supplying voice to a customer, if you’re an MSP, it’s a very important piece of the pie, as we say.
What we offer at Datagate is the ability for the MSP to have their own billing environment which enables them to use their own branding it enables them to pick and choose which suppliers they use, enables them to make up their own pricing plans, enables them to work with a tax partner and ensure that all the compliance is taken care of as well.
So really, we’re in the job of making it easy to sell and bill telecom.
The challenge of tax and compliance
We’re a company that’s very strong on partnering.
In the United States we have some excellent partners that work with us as part of our offering.
They take care of all the filing of tax returns, the registrations, they just take care of all that side of things and that really frees up the MSP to focus on what they do best, servicing their customers.
It means you’ve got people in the background that are trusted experts to do that. And they work with our solution, Datagate Telecom Billing, and our solution plugs into some of the best tax engines in the United States, including CCH SureTax, Avalara, Compliance Solutions, so we have expert systems in the background that make sure that it’s done correctly MSPs don’t have to worry about the accuracy of the tax returns that they’re filling.
Integrates with top MSP software
We like to say that our product is built from the ground up for MSPs and what that actually means is we designed it to work hand-in-hand with products like:
- ConnectWise Manage, [Datto] Autotask, Kaseya BMS, HaloPSA,
- QuickBooks, Xero
So we’re integrating with software that MSPs use and that is for the purpose of preventing them from having to rekey things from one system to another.
When you’ve got a recurring billing scenario like telecom you want it to be automatic and you want it to be part of the other systems you’re using so you do not have to have separate systems for telecom and separate systems for IT.
You want it to be all working together as one big system. And that’s our vision, that’s what we’re here to do. Just make it easy and make the telecom billing part of the regular billing systems that the MSP’s using.
Don’t leave voice on the table
Our key messages to any MSPs that are not doing voice right now is: Don’t leave voice on the table.
I’ve just come back from a conference in Australia, it was a ConnectWise IT Nation conference and the resounding message there from MSPs was, “wow we’re getting attacked through the voice side of things, if we don’t do voice ourselves, other people are coming in offering our customers voice and taking over the whole the whole staple of MSP services”.
So if any MSPs want to get into selling voice and they aren’t doing it now, we’d be very happy to share our knowledge and our contacts to make it easy for them to get started with the right people.
What differentiates Datagate as a billing software for MSPs from other brands?
It’s our laser sharp focus on MSPs.
What that really means is we’re not going across the broad spectrum of every telecom provider.
We really picked the MSP and said we will have the perfect system for an MSP, we will integrate with the software they use so that’s what you’ll find if you’re comparing us with our competitors, you’ll see with us we have a laser sharp focus on doing the right thing for MSPs.
