# IT Support Companies > For 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. **URL:** https://cubemsp.co.uk/industries/it-support-companies The system that makes the move from break-fix to managed service visible rather than aspirational. Plenty of good IT support businesses have never made the transition to a fully managed model, and not because they do not want to. The transition is hard to see: you cannot tell whether a fixed-fee contract would be profitable until you know what reactive support actually costs, and you cannot know that without recording it. CubeMSP makes the reactive work measurable first - incidents against clients, time against incidents - so the recurring proposition can be built on figures rather than on hope, and so blocks of hours, ad-hoc work and contracts can coexist while the mix shifts. ## Figures - **Billable** Flagged at the desk, not reconstructed - **Per client** Real consumption, before you price a contract - **Both models** Ad-hoc and recurring, side by side ## Common problems in this sector - **Chargeable work that never gets charged:** Ad-hoc work agreed on the phone, done, and remembered at invoicing time - or not. The write-off line is significant and nobody can explain where it came from. - **Blocks of hours tracked by hand:** Prepaid blocks drawn down in a spreadsheet, reconciled monthly, and occasionally exhausted without anybody noticing until the client queries an invoice. - **No basis for a fixed fee:** Moving a client to a monthly contract requires knowing what they consume. Without recorded time against recorded incidents, the first fixed fee is a guess, and guesses in this direction are usually low. - **Reactive scheduling:** The day is set by whoever rings first. Planned work is displaced by urgent work indefinitely, and the improvement projects that would reduce the urgent work never start. - **Client history in an inbox:** What was done for a client last year exists as email. Answering "have we seen this before?" depends on the memory of whoever happens to be in the room. ## What CubeMSP does about it - **Time captured at the desk:** Booked against the incident while the detail is fresh, flagged billable or not. The gap between hours worked and hours billed becomes visible, and then becomes small. - **Blocks, contracts and ad-hoc together:** Prepaid hours, recurring agreements and chargeable one-off work held on the same client without forcing every client onto the same commercial model. - **Real cost before the fixed fee:** What a client actually consumes, measured over a quarter. The managed-service proposal is then built from the figure rather than from an optimistic estimate. - **History that answers questions:** Every incident a client has ever raised, filterable by site, service and category. "Have we seen this before?" becomes a search rather than a memory test. - **Planned work that survives:** Project boards keep improvement work visible alongside the queue, so the thing that would reduce next quarter’s reactive load is not permanently displaced by this quarter’s. - **Billing data without reconstruction:** Billable time and out-of-contract work exported to your finance system at month end, from what was recorded rather than from what can be remembered. ## Use cases ### A firm that could not price a contract **Scenario:** Three clients had asked about a fixed monthly fee. The business wanted the recurring revenue but had no reliable way to say what any of them consumed, so the proposals kept being deferred. **Outcome:** One quarter of recorded time against incidents produced real consumption figures. Two clients moved to contracts priced on evidence; the third turned out to be far heavier than expected and was priced accordingly rather than accidentally. ### Blocks of hours that ran out unnoticed **Scenario:** Prepaid blocks were drawn down in a shared workbook updated when somebody remembered. Two clients went significantly over without being told, and the resulting invoices were both awkward and partly written off. **Outcome:** Consumption is tracked as time is booked, with alerts as a block approaches exhaustion. The top-up conversation now happens before the overrun rather than after the invoice. ## Implementation 1. **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. 2. **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. 3. **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. 4. **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. 5. **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. ## Frequently asked questions **We are not a full MSP yet. Is this too much?** Not usually. Most of what makes the transition possible - incidents, time, clients, history - is exactly what a break-fix business needs anyway. The recurring service and renewal modules simply sit unused until you need them. **Can we run contracts and ad-hoc clients together?** Yes, and most providers in this position do for a couple of years. Commercial model is a property of the client rather than of the system, so there is no need to convert everybody at once. **Does it handle prepaid blocks of hours?** Yes. Blocks are held per client and drawn down as billable time is booked, with alerts as the balance runs low. **Will engineers actually record their time?** They will if it takes seconds and happens where the work does. Time entries live on the incident rather than in a separate timesheet application, which is the single biggest determinant of whether time recording survives its first month. **What if we never move to fully managed?** Then you have a service desk that produces reliable information about a business that previously produced none, which is worth having on its own terms. Nothing in the platform requires a recurring model. ## Relevant solution pages - **Service 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. https://cubemsp.co.uk/software/service-desk-software - **MSP Ticketing System** - Multi-client ticketing built for a provider - client, site and service on every ticket, and a clean line between one customer’s data and another’s. https://cubemsp.co.uk/software/msp-ticketing-system - **MSP Software** - One system for clients, services, renewals, incidents, projects and reviews - built in the UK by a managed service provider. https://cubemsp.co.uk/software/msp-software - **Subscription 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. https://cubemsp.co.uk/software/subscription-management-software ## Related industries - **Managed Service Providers** - The core case: recurring support contracts, a shared service desk, project work alongside the day job, and a review meeting every quarter. https://cubemsp.co.uk/industries/managed-service-providers - **Telecoms & Unified Comms Providers** - For resellers of lines, circuits, SIP and hosted telephony: hundreds of small recurring lines per client, each with its own term and renewal date. https://cubemsp.co.uk/industries/telecoms-providers - **Cloud & Hosting Providers** - For providers reselling cloud, licences and hosted infrastructure: consumption that moves monthly, licence counts that drift, and margin that needs watching. https://cubemsp.co.uk/industries/cloud-and-hosting-providers ## Contact - **Product:** CubeMSP - **Trading name of:** Cube Systems Limited (company number 17220899, ICO registration number ZC216972) - **Email:** hello@cubemsp.co.uk - **Sales:** sales@cubemsp.co.uk - **Support:** support@cubemsp.co.uk - **Telephone:** 01234 672 617 (+441234672617) - **Address:** Unit 11, Olney Business Park, Osier Way, Olney, Buckinghamshire, MK46 5FP - **Opening hours:** Monday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm - **Part of:** Crushed Ice Group (https://crushedicegroup.co.uk)