Maximize ROI for Project Management with TopLeft's Solution

Project and ticket work leaks money in a few predictable places: projects that run over budget, tickets nobody closes, technicians waiting to be told what to do next, and managers copying data between tools. This post covers each of those, what changes when the work runs on a board built from your PSA, and the results MSPs reported. Every figure below names the MSP and the person who reported it.

Where the money goes

Projects over budget. A fixed-price project that runs 30% over hands that 30% back as unpaid hours. Usually nobody can say why it ran over until the project is done.

Work started and not finished. Engineers split across several projects at once feel busy, but nothing ships and nothing gets invoiced until it does.

Scheduling and rescheduling. A dispatcher or service manager who plans every technician’s day redoes the plan each time an emergency lands.

Double entry. MSPs that try Trello, Monday.com, Asana or Microsoft Planner for visibility end up copying tickets and updates between that tool and the PSA. Our founder’s own MSP tried those tools before TopLeft existed, and that copying is the problem TopLeft was built to remove.

What a PSA-integrated board changes

TopLeft reads and writes ConnectWise, Autotask or HaloPSA directly, so the board and the PSA hold the same data:

• Kanban boards and swimlanes show every ticket and project task, grouped by technician, project or team, with work-in-progress limits per column.
• Gantt charts show each project as a bar on a timeline, coloured by status such as on track, at risk or over budget.
• Time entries and notes from the card go straight to the PSA for billing, so nobody enters them twice.
• Conditional formatting and filters make overdue, ageing and high-priority work stand out.

The results MSPs reported

Projects came in under budget. Steve Psaradellis, CEO of TEBA, tracked project cost against estimate. TEBA’s projects averaged 130% of budget before the change and 71.6% six months later, a 58.4% turnaround by his count.

Net profit rose. Scott Taylor, CEO of Allixo Technologies: “We improved net profit from 9% to 22%.”

Scheduling stopped being a job. Morgan Birgé reduced its ticket queue from 180 to under 100 and no longer needed a full-time scheduling role, according to Te’neyl Simpson, its Director of Technical Operations. Some technicians’ utilization rose from 30% to 60%.

Project admin took a third of the time. Helixstorm cut the time to assign project tasks from 45 minutes to 13, according to Alex Anderson, its Project Manager.

SLAs and utilization improved together. Appalachian Network Services raised SLA adherence from 60% to 90% within six months, and employee utilization from 30% to 75%, according to Chase Effler, its Engineering Manager.

Stale tickets got closed. KaufmanIT closed 300 of 450 stale tickets in one week once the team could see them on a board, according to CEO Matthew Kaufman.

Why the PSA alone falls short

ConnectWise, Autotask and HaloPSA are built around tickets, time and billing, and they are the right system of record. Their screens show work as lists, which makes it hard to see where a project is stuck, who is overloaded, or how many tickets are half done. A board on top of the PSA adds that view without moving the data anywhere else.

Next step

See what MSPs say about TopLeft, the project management features, or book a demo to see projects on a board built from PSA data. For upcoming workshops and recordings, see events.