Project-heavy delivery with a maintenance tail that deserves the same system.
Early accessCubeMSP for AV & systems integration firms
For audio-visual, access control and smart building integrators: installed estates, planned maintenance, reactive callouts and multi-site clients.
- AV & integration
- UK hosted, implemented on site
- 01234 672 617
Integration businesses live in two modes at once. The install is a project with a date, a specification and a margin that erodes if it slips. What follows is years of maintenance, callouts and warranty work against equipment nobody has documented centrally. The firms that struggle are the ones where those two modes live in different systems, so the engineer attending a fault has no reliable record of what was installed, and the account manager has no reliable record of what maintenance was promised. CubeMSP holds the installed estate as services against the client and site, and the projects that created them on the same record.
- Per site
Estate, contacts and history
- Recurring
Planned maintenance raised when due
- Lifetime
Margin including the warranty tail
What goes wrong
The recurring problems in AV & integration
Not every business has all five. Almost every business we speak to has three.
Nobody knows what is installed
The as-built information is in the project folder, the engineer’s memory and occasionally a photograph. The callout two years later starts with a survey that should not be necessary.
Maintenance promised but not scheduled
Annual servicing sold with the install and then dependent on somebody remembering. The first anniversary is usually honoured; the third often is not.
Multi-site clients as separate records
A client with fourteen sites becomes fourteen customers over time, so nobody can answer a question about the whole account without knowing all fourteen names.
Project margin lost in the tail
The install made its margin. Two years of warranty callouts, unrecorded because they were not chargeable, quietly consumed a good deal of it.
Callouts without context
An engineer sent to a fault with an address and a description, but no history of the site, the equipment or the last three visits.
What we do about it
How CubeMSP is set up for AV & integration
Configuration, not a separate edition. Everything here is in the same product - it is switched on and shaped during implementation.
Sites as first-class records
One client, any number of sites, each with its own address, contacts, installed services and incident history. Multi-site clients stop fragmenting.
The installed estate as data
What is installed, where, when and under what warranty - held as services against the site rather than as an as-built document in a project folder.
Planned maintenance that recurs
Servicing intervals held per installed service, raising the work when it is due rather than depending on an anniversary somebody remembers.
Installs as templated projects
Board templates with dependencies, supplier lead times and dates, shared with the client so a slipping delivery is visible rather than explained afterwards.
Warranty work that is counted
Non-chargeable callouts still booked against the site and the project, so the true lifetime margin on an install is visible before the next one is quoted.
History the engineer can read
Previous visits, faults and resolutions on the site record, so the person attending arrives knowing what happened last time.
In practice
Two situations from this sector
Anonymised, but not invented. These are the situations businesses describe before they change anything.
A callout that began with a survey
The situation
An engineer attended a fault at a site installed four years earlier. No central record existed of what had been fitted, so the first ninety minutes were spent working it out - unchargeable, and repeated across dozens of visits a year.
What changed
The installed estate is held per site with the original project attached. Engineers arrive knowing the equipment and the history, and the survey time disappeared.
An install that made money and then did not
The situation
A large install came in on margin. Over the following two years, warranty callouts were attended and not recorded because they were not chargeable. Nobody knew the true position until an unrelated review estimated it.
What changed
Non-chargeable time is booked against the site and project. The lifetime figure for that install informed the pricing of the next three.
How it happens
What implementation involves
The same five stages whatever you make. Discovery, training and go-live are done on your site, because most of what the system needs to know is learned in the building.
Discovery
A structured session mapping how you run now - the PSA you have outgrown, the spreadsheet of renewals, the shared mailbox that is really your ticket queue, and the review deck somebody rebuilds by hand every six months. We come back with what the platform covers as standard and what needs building.
Configuration
Your service catalogue, ticket taxonomy, boards, roles, approval limits and review templates set up to match how you actually work - not a demo tenant with your logo dropped on it. Your categories, not ours.
Data migration
Clients, contacts, sites, services, renewal dates and enough ticket history to make the knowledgebase and similar-incident retrieval useful on day one. An empty AI is a useless AI, so the history matters more here than in most migrations.
Training & rollout
Role-based training - the service desk learns logging and resolution, account managers learn reviews and renewals, directors learn the reporting. We usually pilot with one technician and one client before opening it up.
Ongoing support
UK support from the people who built the platform and use it themselves, with a named contact, agreed response times, and a roadmap you can influence. Being a small vendor is an advantage here and we intend to keep it.
Questions
What this sector asks first
Partly. It holds sites, installed equipment, planned maintenance, callouts and time. It does not currently do engineer scheduling with route optimisation or a dedicated mobile app for job sign-off, and if those are central to your operation we will say so during discovery.
As services against the client and site, with install date, warranty period and maintenance interval. Incidents attach to the specific installed item, so recurring faults on one unit are visible.
Yes. A servicing interval on an installed service raises the work when it is due, so the third-year service happens as reliably as the first.
Yes - one client with any number of sites, with contacts and services attached to the site they belong to. Reporting rolls up across the account or breaks down by site without duplicating the client.
Yes, on shared boards, with internal-only tasks and comments filtered on the server. For install projects with a client project manager, this is usually the feature that sells it.
Where to start
The parts that usually matter most here
IT Project Management Software
Shared kanban boards for migrations, rollouts and onboardings - with the client invited in, and internal-only tasks filtered on the server.
Read moreMSP CRM Software
Prospects, clients, contacts and sites in the same system as the services you supply and the incidents you handle - so winning an account and running it are one record.
Read moreService Desk Software
A real queue instead of a shared mailbox - incidents logged against the client, site and service they affect, with priority, ownership and time.
Read moreSubscription Management Software
Every licence, circuit, backup and contract you resell - with quantity, cost, sell price, term and renewal date, and the margin visible on all of it.
Read more
Related
Sectors with similar problems
- Telecoms & Unified Comms ProvidersFor resellers of lines, circuits, SIP and hosted telephony: hundreds of small recurring lines per client, each with its own term and renewal date.
- Managed Service ProvidersThe core case: recurring support contracts, a shared service desk, project work alongside the day job, and a review meeting every quarter.
- IT Support CompaniesFor firms whose revenue is still largely break-fix and blocks of hours, and who want to move towards recurring contracts without losing the work they already do.
If your process really is unusual
Some requirements are specific to one business rather than one sector. Those get built against the same documented API everybody else uses - not bolted on to the side of a database nobody is allowed to look at.
AV & integration
Show us a real job from your AV & integration operation
Bring one order that went wrong and the paperwork that went with it. That tells us more about whether this fits than any list of features.