Why Most MSPs Only Use 30% of Their PSA

I say this on almost every discovery call, and the MSP owner on the other end usually gets a little quiet: your PSA can run your entire business, and you're using about 30% of it.

It's not an exact number. Some shops are at 20%. A few are at 50%. But the pattern is remarkably consistent — the typical MSP is paying full price for a platform that handles ticketing, agreements, billing, project management, procurement, time tracking, reporting, client portals, integrations, and workflow automation, and they're using it as a ticket tracker with some agreements bolted on.

The natural question is why. These are smart people running real businesses. They didn't buy the PSA with the intention of ignoring most of it. So what happens?

The implementation trap

It starts at implementation. Most PSAs get set up in a rush — the MSP is either brand new and trying to get operational, or they're migrating from another platform and trying to minimize downtime. Either way, the implementation focuses on the essentials: get tickets flowing, get agreements created, get billing running, set up the basic integrations. Ship it.

The problem is that "get the basics running" becomes the permanent state. The features that were deferred to "phase two" of the implementation — advanced workflow rules, reporting dashboards, client portal customization, procurement tracking, project management setup — never happen because phase two never arrives. There's always a more pressing client issue, a more urgent fire to put out.

I've worked with MSPs that have been running ConnectWise for five or six years and never touched workflow rules. Five years. That's five years of manual ticket routing, manual escalations, manual status transitions — all things the platform handles automatically when it's configured.

The knowledge gap

Here's an uncomfortable truth: ConnectWise and HaloPSA are both complex platforms, and the average MSP doesn't have anyone on staff whose job includes understanding the full capability set.

The person who "knows ConnectWise" at most MSPs is usually whoever was around during the initial setup, and their knowledge is limited to the specific configurations they were involved with. They know how to create tickets, how agreements work (mostly), and how to run the two or three reports they use regularly. They don't know what they don't know, which means they can't identify the features that would help because they've never explored them.

This isn't a criticism of that person. ConnectWise PSA has hundreds of configuration options across dozens of modules. Nobody should be expected to discover all of that through casual exploration while simultaneously doing their actual job. It requires dedicated time, training, or outside expertise to fully understand what the platform can do.

The vendor training doesn't fill this gap either. ConnectWise University is fine for learning how features work mechanically, but it doesn't teach you how to apply those features to your specific business processes. There's a big difference between "here's how to create a workflow rule" and "here's the specific set of workflow rules your MSP needs based on your team structure, client tiers, and service delivery model."

Configuration drift

Even MSPs that had a decent initial setup experience configuration drift over time. People leave and take institutional knowledge with them. Business processes change but the PSA configuration doesn't get updated to match. Someone creates a workaround for a one-time situation and the workaround becomes permanent. New tools get added to the stack but never integrated with the PSA.

Over time, the PSA configuration slowly diverges from how the business actually operates. The gap widens until the PSA feels more like an obstacle than a tool, and the team starts building shadow systems — spreadsheets, email threads, Slack channels, personal notes — to track the things the PSA should be tracking.

This is the drift from 50% utilization to 30% to 20%. Each workaround replaces a PSA function, and each replaced function is one less reason anyone has to learn or maintain that part of the platform.

The features most MSPs are leaving on the table

Based on what I see consistently across different MSPs and both platforms, here are the capabilities that are most commonly configured poorly or not at all:

Workflow automation. Auto-routing tickets based on type, client, and priority. Auto-escalating based on SLA timers. Auto-closing stale tickets after client follow-up. Auto-notifying managers on high-priority ticket creation. This is where the biggest time savings live, and it's the most neglected area in almost every PSA I audit.

Agreement profitability tracking. Your PSA can tell you, in real time, whether each agreement is profitable or underwater. But only if labor costs are configured against time entries, agreement coverage rules are set correctly, and the reporting is built. Most MSPs can't pull this data without a spreadsheet exercise.

Client portal. Both ConnectWise and HaloPSA offer client-facing portals where your clients can submit tickets, check status, view invoices, and access documentation. Most are either not enabled or so poorly configured that clients don't use them, which means your team is fielding phone calls and emails for information the client could self-serve.

Procurement tracking. If your team buys hardware and licenses on behalf of clients, the PSA can track purchase orders, vendor orders, receiving, and billing markup — all within the ticket or project. Instead, most MSPs track this in spreadsheets or email threads.

Project management. ConnectWise's project module and HaloPSA's project management features can handle phases, tasks, resource allocation, and budget tracking. Most MSPs use them as glorified ticket queues with a "project" label, missing the scheduling, dependency tracking, and budget visibility features entirely.

Custom reporting beyond canned reports. The canned reports are starting points, not answers. Custom reports and dashboards showing tech utilization, client profitability, SLA compliance trends, and billing accuracy — these are the numbers you need to actually manage the business.

The cost of 30% utilization

This isn't just about wasted license fees, although that's part of it. The real cost is operational.

Every feature you're not using is a process being handled manually somewhere in your business. That manual process takes time, introduces errors, depends on specific people, and doesn't scale. When your manual ticketing routing person goes on vacation, tickets don't get routed. When your billing spreadsheet person makes a mistake, revenue gets missed. When your service manager leaves and they were the only one who understood how the PSA was configured, institutional knowledge walks out the door.

A properly configured PSA is insurance against all of that. It codifies your processes into the system so they happen automatically, consistently, and regardless of who's working that day.

The MSPs I've seen make the jump from 30% to 70% utilization don't just save time — they operate differently. Decisions are faster because the data is visible. Onboarding is faster because the system guides new hires through standardized processes. Billing is more accurate because automation catches what humans miss. And the owner sleeps better because they can see what's happening in their business without asking five people.

Getting from 30% to 70%

You don't get there in a weekend. But you don't need to overhaul everything at once either.

Pick the three areas with the highest impact: usually billing accuracy, workflow automation, and reporting. Focus on those for 4–6 weeks. Get them configured properly, documented, and your team trained on the new processes. Let the team adjust.

Then pick the next three: client portal, project management, procurement tracking. Same approach. 4–6 weeks. Configure, document, train.

In three to four months, you'll be using most of what you're paying for, your team will be more efficient, your billing will be tighter, and your data will actually tell you useful things.

Or you can keep paying full price for a ticket tracker. That's a choice too.

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Want to find out where your PSA utilization actually stands? Book a discovery call and I'll give you an honest assessment.