Your most overwhelmed clients could be handling their own Tier 1 tickets inside your PSA, under your rules, without your technicians touching them. Most MSPs running Autotask Premium or Ultimate have never turned this on. It's disabled by default, which means it's invisible to anyone who didn't go looking for it.
Co-managed Help Desk isn't a workaround or a hack. It's a fully supported feature that lets qualified client-side users create, manage, and work tickets inside your Autotask instance with controlled permissions. If 30% of your ticket volume is Tier 1 work your clients could handle themselves, this is a headcount conversation disguised as a configuration task.
Here's how it actually works, where MSPs go wrong setting it up, and how to calculate whether it's worth the investment.
Co-managed Help Desk gives client-side contacts a limited but functional view into your Autotask instance. These "co-managing users" can be assigned to tickets as primary or secondary resources, have notes and time entries shared with them selectively, and trigger their own workflow rule actions.
When you enable it, a significant portion of the platform opens up:
The reason most MSPs have never seen any of this: the feature is off by default and lives behind a checkbox in Admin > Activations. There's no pop-up, no onboarding wizard, no nudge. If you didn't go looking, you didn't find it.
One important caveat from the official configuration documentation: some UI changes introduced by enabling co-management are not reversible. And if you later disable it, the organization-to-co-managing-user associations get deleted permanently. Plan before you enable, and don't treat this as a feature you can casually toggle on and off to test.
The single most common setup error: MSPs conflate Co-managed Help Desk with the Client Portal and configure them as if they're the same thing. They're not.
Client Portal is a self-service tool for end users to submit tickets and check status. It's a read-mostly, simplified interface built for general client contacts. Configuration lives under Admin > Extensions & Integrations > Client Portal & Taskfire, and the Client Portal configuration page covers its own security levels (Basic, Advanced, Manager) that are completely separate from Co-managed security levels.
Co-managed Help Desk is for IT professionals on the client side, typically an internal IT coordinator or help desk lead, who needs to actively work tickets alongside your team. They get a co-managed security level, not a Client Portal security level. These are different license types in Autotask.
Mixing up the admin settings creates one of two outcomes:
The correct path: create dedicated co-managed security levels in Admin > Features & Settings > Co-managed Security Levels, scope them specifically to what client-side IT coordinators need, and associate those levels with co-managing user accounts. Every co-managing user must be linked to a contact record in Autotask. If you had co-management enabled before the 2022.2 release, some of those user accounts may be unmapped and will need contact associations added before they'll work correctly.
Giving every client the same co-managed access is the same mistake as giving every client the same SLA. Your enterprise accounts with dedicated internal IT coordinators have different needs than your 25-person SMB clients.
Organization categories in Autotask let you scope this properly. The practical structure most MSPs land on looks something like this:
| Client Tier | Co-managed Access Level | Typical Use |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise / White-glove | Full co-managed permissions | Internal IT coordinator works Tier 1-2 alongside your team |
| Mid-market | Moderate permissions | Client IT lead creates and updates tickets, limited note visibility |
| SMB standard | Minimal or none | Stick with Client Portal for ticket submission only |
Co-management is enabled at the organization level (via Tools > Enable/Disable Co-management on the Organization page), not as a global toggle for all clients. This gives you per-client control. You can also use contact matching rules to ensure that co-managing user accounts map correctly to the right contacts, especially if you're syncing with Active Directory.
The key configuration discipline: build your co-managed security levels before you start associating clients. Retrofitting permissions after you've already enabled co-management for a dozen organizations is messier than it sounds, and getting it wrong mid-rollout erodes client trust fast.
Here's the calculation that makes this worth taking seriously.
Start with your actual ticket volume. Pull the last 90 days from Autotask and categorize by tier. For most MSPs, the distribution looks roughly like this:
If your team handles 500 tickets per month and 30% are Tier 1, that's 150 tickets. At an average handle time of 20 minutes per Tier 1 ticket, that's 50 technician hours per month your team is spending on work a qualified client-side IT coordinator could handle.
At a fully-loaded technician cost of $35-50/hour, that's $1,750-$2,500 per month in labor on work you could offload, per medium-sized client.
The configuration investment to stand up Co-managed Help Desk properly (creating security levels, setting up co-managing user accounts, enabling it per organization, testing workflow rules) runs roughly 8-16 hours depending on complexity. That's a one-time cost that pays back in the first month for any client with meaningful Tier 1 volume.
What this doesn't account for: the time your team spends context-switching. Every Tier 1 ticket interrupting a Tier 3 project isn't just 20 minutes. It's the 10 minutes of recovery time to get back into deep focus work. Co-managing users handling their own Tier 1 workload reduces interruptions, not just ticket counts.
The configuration documentation outlines three required setup tasks, and the order matters:
After those three steps, revisit your workflow rules. Co-managing users can now trigger workflow events, and several condition types (Assigned to Co-managing User, Co-managed Visibility) are new options you'll want to incorporate into your existing automation. If you skip this step, you'll have co-managing users working tickets that fall outside your normal SLA tracking and escalation logic.
Also audit your ticket notes. The Visible to Co-managing Users checkbox on time entries and notes is off by default. Anything you want co-managing users to see needs to be explicitly marked as visible, or they'll be working blind. Build this into your note templates so technicians don't have to remember it manually.
Co-managed Help Desk isn't the right fit for every client, but for MSPs with enterprise accounts that have internal IT staff, it's a meaningful capacity lever that most haven't touched.
The practical takeaways:
The feature has been sitting in your Autotask instance, disabled by default, waiting for someone to notice it. Whether that's worth acting on depends entirely on your Tier 1 volume and whether your enterprise clients have the internal IT staff to handle it. For many MSPs, the answer is yes, and the configuration investment is modest compared to the labor it recovers.