9 articles
Cost of service
What it costs to deliver an agreement: licensing, the tool stack and technician time.
Annual tool contracts and prepaid expenses
When you pay for a tool a year upfront, recording it as a prepaid expense and tracking its renewal date keeps monthly cost of service smooth and prevents surprise renewals.
Building a cost-to-serve per endpoint
Knowing what it costs to support each user or endpoint under an agreement lets you price new deals with confidence and find clients that quietly lose money.
Match tool seats to billed seats
Every RMM agent, EDR license and backup seat costs money, and a monthly match against what you bill keeps unbilled seats from eating your margin.
Measuring utilization without gaming it
Utilization shows whether your team has room for more clients or is running out of capacity, but only if you define it carefully and measure it from clean time entries.
Pass-through licensing distorts margin
Reselling Microsoft 365 and similar subscriptions adds revenue but little profit, so how you present it and report it decides whether your margin numbers mean anything.
Pricing and tracking security stack margin
Bundling EDR or MDR, email security, backup and awareness training into agreements works when you know each component's unit cost, account for minimums, and measure the bundle's margin separately.
Reconciling distributor invoices
A monthly match of distributor and marketplace charges against what you bill clients catches unbilled subscriptions, duplicates and missing credits before they turn into lost margin.
The effective hourly rate test
Dividing flat-fee agreement revenue by hours delivered shows which clients pay your real rate and which ones quietly cost you time.
What a technician hour really costs
A technician's hourly wage is only the starting point. Here is how to build a fully loaded cost per productive hour that you can use for pricing and margin.