Autotask and ConnectWise users don’t share every gripe, but they do share this one: Why is my PSA slow? Let’s tackle the most common reasons that people find Autotask to be slow, and how to tackle that. (Sorry, no help for ConnectWise Manager users in this article.)
Working with tickets is slow
This is by far the most common complaint. A user goes to a ticket, starts editing it, there are timeouts, they find using the Edit slow, etc.
The first thing to do is to stop editing tickets.
Tickets should be setup by triage, and, from there, rarely edited. Certainly, there are times a tech or service manager wants to tweak the values of a ticket to better reflect reality, e.g., the ticket title was too vague, but otherwise edits shouldn’t directly happen. And, in fact, most of Autotask’s development reflects that they don’t expect you to constantly edit tickets because their updates are generally around ticket notes, time entries, etc.
Let’s take an example of when an Autotask user edits a ticket when they should NOT be: updating ticket status. If you are manually updating the status of a ticket via the Edit button, you are most definitely doing it wrong.
In Autotask, build a workflow of how your techs operate.
Instead of editing the ticket status, do this: Create Autotask Forms (aka speedcodes) that create a standard way for techs to enter notes and time entries, and those Forms should update the ticket status (e.g., have a “Waiting Customer” time entry Form that ensures the tech enters their notes, the note is sent to the customer in your preferred style (notification template), and the Form sets the ticket status to Waiting Customer.
Notice that this reduces 3 transactions (record time, update customer, set ticket status) into a single transaction (use time entry Form). No ticket Edit needed.
Finding tickets, config items, and accounts is slow
This is more of “I have to click a lot of things” than “Autotask is just slow,” but I think it goes here because it impacts overall usage of the product.
Autotask wants you to build dashboards. It’s really driven by them. If you are using Ticket Search, Project Search, Account Search, etc., often, then you are routing around the primary interface Autotask provides: dashboards.
Identify how you want to display data to your service manager, techs, account managers, etc., and group those into specific dashboards.
Pro Tip: One of the coolest dashboards you can create is a “HelpDesk Account Dashboard” that let’s a tech enter the customer into a single field, and the dashboard resets to show highlights of everything about that account. This is not the same as the Account Dashboards that come with CRM, but something specific to your helpdesk team. It’s great to put key data about an Account in this dashboard so a tech gets a 40,000 ft view of what is going on with the customer when tackling a big problem or taking on a project. Data can include:
- 30-day history of Alerts tickets
- 30-day history of HelpDesk tickets
- All Open Projects
- Past year of projects
- Upcoming Opportunities
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