MSPs who resell voice and UCaaS services can automate their entire telecom billing workflow, from usage data ingestion to invoice generation to payment collection, by connecting Datagate, HaloPSA, and Alternative Payments. In May 2026, the three companies hosted a joint webinar to walk through exactly how that works. This post covers the key topics from that session.
Why the billing stack matters more than any single tool
The biggest operational headache for MSPs reselling telecom isn’t any one part of the billing process. It’s the gap between parts.
Usage data lives in the carrier feed. Customer and contract data lives in the PSA. Invoices go out through the billing platform. Payments land in the accounting tool. Eventually. Every handoff between those systems is a place where data gets re-keyed, errors creep in, and hours disappear.
Mark Loveys, CEO of Datagate, put it directly: MSPs who are doing this manually are often spending days each month on a process that should take 30 minutes. The work isn’t hard. It’s just repetitive, error-prone, and doesn’t scale.
The answer isn’t a single platform that does everything. It’s three purpose-built platforms, each excellent at its own layer, connected so data moves through automatically. That’s the stack: Datagate rates and invoices, HaloPSA manages the PSA layer and profitability reporting, Alternative Payments handles collections and cash flow.
How the three platforms connect
The integration works in both directions at every handoff.
Customer and contract data syncs from HaloPSA into Datagate automatically. When a quote converts to an agreement in HaloPSA, the customer record, site details, and contracted services move into Datagate without re-keying. When the billing cycle runs, Datagate ingests usage data directly from carrier feeds (call records, seat counts, data volumes), rates it against each customer’s plan, applies the correct telecom taxes by jurisdiction, and generates the invoice.
That invoice pushes back into HaloPSA as a line item, sitting alongside IT service charges in the same system. Any accounting platform already connected to HaloPSA (QuickBooks, Xero, Sage) picks it up automatically.
From HaloPSA, Alternative Payments collects payment. The integration triggers automated payment reminders, handles ACH and credit card processing, and pushes reconciliation data back so the books close without a person chasing each invoice.
The result is a billing cycle that used to require multiple people and multiple days running largely without manual intervention.
Telecom tax compliance: what makes it harder than regular billing
Most MSPs who have thought about reselling telecom and walked away cite tax compliance as the reason. Mark Loveys spent part of the webinar explaining exactly why, and why the right tools remove it as a blocker.
Telecom taxes in the US don’t behave like regular sales tax. There are jurisdictions at the federal, state, county, and city level: thousands of them, and the applicable rules are determined by where the customer is located, not where the MSP operates. When a customer moves offices, the tax calculation changes. When jurisdictions update their rates or rules, every invoice has to reflect that accurately or the MSP is either overcharging or undercharging.
Staying current with all of that manually isn’t realistic. Datagate integrates with four dedicated telecom tax engines whose teams of researchers do nothing but monitor and program those changes. When a rate changes, it’s in the engine before it takes effect. The MSP’s billing runs the correct calculation without anyone tracking it.
The FCC safe harbor rate: most MSPs are overpaying FUSF
One of the more concrete topics in the webinar was the Federal Universal Service Fund (FUSF), the largest single tax in telecom billing.
MSPs who aren’t submitting real traffic data to the FCC default to what’s called the “safe harbor” rate. That rate assumes around 60% of VoIP calls are interstate, which is often not true. The consequence is that MSPs are applying a higher tax rate than their actual traffic warrants, and passing that overcharge to their customers.
Submitting real call data (the actual split between interstate and intrastate traffic) can lower the applicable rate. That means lower tax bills for customers, which makes the MSP more competitive on pricing without reducing margin.
Working with a tax partner (separate from the tax engine) is what enables this. The tax engine calculates the liability. The tax partner handles the FCC submission and ensures the traffic data is filed correctly. Both are part of the stack Mark described.
The cost recovery fee most MSPs don’t know about
There’s a line item MSPs are legally allowed to put on telecom invoices in the US that most MSPs who are new to telecom have never heard of: the cost recovery fee.
It sits alongside tax charges on the invoice, typically at 1 to 3% of the invoice total, and is designed to cover the cost of compliance infrastructure: the tax engine, billing software, and regulatory overhead involved in billing telecom correctly. It’s standard practice in the carrier industry. Most MSPs entering telecom don’t realise it exists or that they can use it.
Mark was clear: get professional advice before structuring this to cover specific costs. But the mechanism itself is well-established, and for MSPs building out a telecom practice, it’s worth understanding.
Profitability reporting: why your accounting tool can’t tell you the full story
Alex Golden from HaloPSA covered a topic that lands differently when you’ve been running a telecom practice for a while: the gap between what your accounting tool shows and what your contracts are actually returning.
QuickBooks or Xero can tell you revenue in and costs out. What they can’t tell you is which specific clients or contracts are profitable after labor is factored in. They don’t know what your technicians cost per hour, which contracts those technicians worked on, or whether the margin you think you’re making on a customer reflects what you’re actually putting in.
HaloPSA does. Every technician has a fully-loaded cost per hour in the system. Hours logged against a contract roll up into a profitability view that accounts for revenue, license costs via Microsoft CSP or Pax8, hardware, and labor, all tied to the contract level.
When a contract looks profitable on revenue but isn’t after labor, you can see exactly why. That visibility changes how MSPs price renewals, where they choose to grow, and which customers are worth keeping.
Payment automation and the cash flow gap
Steve Taylor from Alternative Payments opened his section with a framing that’s stuck with a lot of MSPs who’ve heard it: “You are the bank.”
There’s the invoice you send. There’s the payment you receive. And there’s the gap in between: 30, 60, sometimes 90 days, during which you’ve already delivered the service and are waiting to be paid while your own vendor costs keep running.
That gap is a float you’re extending your customers for free. It’s also capital that could be reinvesting in the business.
Alternative Payments automates the collection side: payment reminders go out on schedule, ACH and credit card processing is handled through the platform, and autopay options let customers set it and forget it. MSPs who move customers onto ACH autopay typically see days sales outstanding (DSO) drop significantly, from the industry average of around 30 days to closer to 7.
The webinar also covered how to structure payment fees so customers are naturally drawn to the option that costs the MSP the least. ACH through Alternative Payments is included at no charge. Credit card processing fees can be passed through to customers, waived for autopay customers, or configured differently for specific accounts where the deal has already been done. The setup takes a few minutes in the platform’s preferences screen.
Watch the full webinar
The session runs approximately 50 minutes and covers each of these topics in depth, with live walkthroughs of the platforms and Q&A from attendees.
Watch the recording on YouTube →
If you’re an MSP currently billing telecom manually, or using a disconnected stack, the most useful parts are probably the tax compliance section (starting around the 10-minute mark) and the payment automation walkthrough toward the end.
If you’d like to see how Datagate fits your specific setup, get in touch with the team.
Speakers: Mark Loveys (CEO, Datagate), Alex Golden (HaloPSA), Steve Taylor (Alternative Payments). Webinar hosted May 6, 2026.
