Getting Started - Asset Lifecycle - A Quick Tour
Asset Lifecycle Management
Data Origin
Propel Your MSP retrieves Assets and Agreements data by importing them from your ConnectWise Manage instance. It also queries some of the major manufacturer`s APIs to fetch Warranty Expiration date and Purchase Date. See this article for more information about Warranty Lookups.
As an opt-in functionality, Propel Your MSP can also write back the Asset's Purchase Date and Warranty Expiration date back to ConnectWise Manage.
As such, the quality of the data in your ConnectWise Manage instance is important. The better the quality of the data in ConnectWise's Configuration Tab, the more powerful Propel Your MSP becomes!
Not all your customers are the same, nor should they be, so Propel Your MSP is designed to be highly customizable to suit the specifics of each customer. You can configure each individual company.
Asset Category: Account Templates vs Company Copies
An Asset Category regroups all policies (see next section) to be applied to a subset of assets imported from ConnectWise. There are two "levels" of Assets Categories:
- Global Account-Wide Templates
- Company-specific Asset Categories
Propel Your MSP provides a default list of account-wide templates. These can be modified at any time in Settings / Account Categories (you must be an Account Administrator to do so). They are your default values to make things faster when accessing a new company for the first time.
When accessing a company for the first time, you are asked to confirm the mapping between ConnectWise Manage Configuration Types and Propel Your MSP Asset Categories. You may want to import more or less assets for that company for whatever reason. Once confirmed, mapped Asset Categories are copied over to the company. From then on, any changes made to the account-wide templates will not affect the company values.
Creating New Assets Categories
You can create new Asset Categories for a specific company either by accessing the list of Company-specific Asset Category at "Page Actions / Manage Asset Categories" or while moving an Asset and choosing to create a new category. If you want, you can base the new category on any the Account-Wide Templates that you have.
Asset Category Policies
Asset Category Policies determine the default values for assets belonging to that specific category. Most values can be overridden on the asset individual property, but regrouping similar assets into a category make management easier.
End Of Life
The End Of Life policy determines the Asset's default lifespan and replacement price. The End of Life is calculated from the Asset's Purchase Date.
When replacing the asset, you can budget the replacement a few month early to allow for the time required to order and setup the replacement. So for example, in the following situation:
- Asset end of life: July 1st
- Budget replacement early: 2 months
- End of Life action: Replace
Then the replacement action will be budgeted on May 1st.
Special Case: Project
When a Project is set to replace some assets, then the End of Life of those assets will be automatically set to expected start date of the project and the replacement price will be set to $0 (as it should be included in the Project's Material costs).
Note: Only Project with an expected start date will change their linked Assets' End of Life.
Warranty Renewal
The Warranty Policy determines how long the asset should be covered by a warranty, whether it be until the asset's End of Life or only for a few years. Since most warranties are purchased on a yearly basis, you configure the approximate annual price and the maximum number of years for which a warranty can be renewed at a time. This will be used to determine the warranty renewal actions in the budget.
Example
If you have, for example, a warranty price of 150$ / year and new you can only renew for 3 year at once, that means that Propel Your MSP can budget purchases of 1 year = 150$, 2 years = 300$ and 3 years = 450$. If you have an asset that has a 10-year lifespan with a current warranty expiring in 2 years, warranty renewals will be budgeted as following:
- In 2 years, purchase a 3-year renewal for 450$
- In 5 years (i.e. 2y + 3y), purchase a 3-year renewal for 450$
- In 8 years (i.e. 2y + 3y + 3y), purchase a 2-year renewal for 300$.
To avoid renewing warranties for Assets about to be retired or replaced, you can provide a "buffer" in months. If the asset's End of Life is within that buffer at the time the warranty expires, then the warranty will not be renewed.
As with the End of Life, you can decide to budget the warranty renewal action early. This does not impact the actual warranty expiration, just the date at which the renewal action is budgeted.
OS End Of Life
When the OS reaches its end of support date, you may wish to upgrade it, and you can configure that price. Though, you may wish to only upgrade the OS if there is still a fair amount of time before the Asset is retired or replaced. To do that, you can specify a number of months required before the Asset's End of Life. If the Asset does not meet this requirement, the OS Upgrade will not be budgeted. Optionally, you could say in that case that you wish to Force the End of Life. Checking this option will modify the Asset End Of Life to the earliest date between its calculated lifespan date and the OS date.
As with the End of Life, you can decide to budget the OS upgrade action early. This does not impact the actual OS End of Life date, just the date at which the upgrade action is budgeted.
Other Options
Since the Asset Name may be somewhat cryptic for the typical customer, there is an option to set the description field to the last login be by default. This is useful for Workstation or Laptop namely.
Special case: Virtual Assets
Virtual Assets can (and should be) treated differently. The Warranty Renewal Policy does not make sense for virtual assets as its the underlying infrastructure that is subject to a warranty, so it is removed.
Since the lifespan of the virtual asset is a flexible concept, there is an option to sync the Asset's End of Life to the OS End of Life. That way, the End of Life date is set to the OS End of Life date and the OS End of Life action is ignored as far as budgeting is concerned.
Override Individual Assets Policy
The policies described above may help create 95% of your IT Budget, but there are always some exceptions. For these cases, you can override the policies' values on the individual assets. Once overridden, the asset will deviate from the policy and used whatever value you picked.
You can distinguish an overridden value from a policy-inherited value by the presence of a little "i" icon next to the overridden value.
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