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Payments for IT service providers and managed service providers
A managed services book is a recurring revenue business wearing a project business as a coat, and the two halves fail in completely different ways.
Recurring, project and pass-through, kept apart
Three revenue shapes in one company. The account is built so none of them contaminates the others.
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Per-seat contracts change every month
Seat counts move as clients hire and leave, so the recurring charge is derived from the current count at run time rather than from a figure typed in at signing.
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A reissued card must not cancel a contract
Recurring contracts run on stored credentials enrolled in automatic updates, and a genuine failure raises a task with an owner instead of a service interruption.
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Hardware is pass-through, not margin
Equipment resold at cost inflates processed volume without touching income, which is a fact the underwriter is given at boarding rather than left to discover.
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Project work bills against milestones
Migrations and rollouts are invoiced against completed stages, each referencing the work that triggered it, so a long project does not become one disputable invoice at the end.
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Break-fix and contract work are separate lines
Work outside the agreement is billed as its own authorized charge, because an unexplained increase on a familiar recurring line is what a client disputes.
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Auto-renewal is a notice, not a surprise
Renewal is announced before it bills, with the notice recorded, which is both good practice and the evidence that answers a dispute about it.
What to ask before moving MSP billing
Written for an owner who already knows what a failed recurring run costs in support time.
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Ask where the seat count comes from at run time
If it comes from a field somebody edits by hand, expect to be under-billing a third of the book within a year.
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Ask what happens on a genuine card failure
The right answer is a task with an owner and a grace window, not a silent stop and not an immediate service cut.
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Tell the underwriter about hardware pass-through
Volume many times larger than revenue is normal for a reseller and alarming to a model that was not told in advance.
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Ask how a project stage becomes an invoice
The stage, the date and the sign-off should travel with the charge. That is the dispute evidence as much as it is the billing.
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Ask what a renewal notice looks like and where it is stored
A notice you cannot produce is a notice you did not send, as far as a dispute is concerned.
Questions IT providers ask
Short answers for people who read documentation.
Can recurring charges follow a changing seat count?
Yes. The charge is derived from the current count at run time rather than from a number captured at signing.
What happens to a managed-services retainer when a card expires?
The credential refreshes ahead of the monthly run and the retainer bills unattended. Where that fails, the ticket opens against your account manager rather than the client, so nobody loses cover over an expiry date.
Will hardware pass-through cause an underwriting problem?
Not when it is declared at boarding. Undeclared, it looks like volume that does not match the business.
Can project milestones and recurring contracts bill from one place?
Yes, into the same ledger and the same export, with each project charge referencing the stage that triggered it.
Do we have to replace our PSA or RMM tooling?
No. We integrate with what you run. If it works, it stays.
Talk to somebody who has billed a managed book
Tell us about the practice and how to reach you.
Thank you. We will book a short call and bring the recurring failure modes into it.
We will implement whatever is right for you — including keeping what you have.
Two free tools, before you talk to anybody
Both are open to anyone, and both were built to be read by somebody who already understands a billing system.
- Answer the boarding questions Describe a book with monthly contracts, resold hardware and project milestones on it, and it returns a starting configuration that keeps those three billable in different rhythms.
- Get a free statement audit Send a month with a hardware resale in it. Pass-through and margin land differently on a statement, and we will point at where.
Last updated: 2026-08-17