TL;DR: What’s New For Cognition360?
We just released enhancements to four reports for Cognition360, providing your MSP with improved analysis of your operations and financial situation. Four reports for our fourth and final release of 2024 for Cognition360, and just like the previous releases,request the updated reports.
Let’s take a quick look at each and see exactly what’s new and improved.
Which four reports have been enhanced?
Here’s the list
- Technology Business Review
- Project Summary Report
- Team Utilization Report
- Work Type Usage
Team Utilization is one of our most popular and important reports, and the other three are valuable core reports as well.
Also, there are no references to 90s pop music or films anywhere in this update. Think that was leaned into a little too hard last time around, so we’ll keep it on topic this time. No more 1992 references. At least, not many. Maybe just A Few Good Men references.
How does one access these updated reports?
The Cognition360 Support team kindly set up a request form (shout out to Marnel for setting this up in literally minutes!), as we’ve found it worked well the last couple updates we did. Please use this request form and request the reports you want to have updated to the latest version. 💥, next thing you know you’re in and using them.
What’s new-and-or-improved in each of these four reports?
Our running joke is that “these improvements will improve customer retention, enhance your quality of life, and empower you to make more informed and strategic business decisions.” But you know what? In every joke, there’s a grain of truth, and in this case, more than just a grain – the enhancements will help you make more informed decisions for your MSP. We’ll go through the four of these in detail below.
Did you take advantage of the last reports that we updated? If you missed out, request the October report updates. You’ll want those ones too.
Technology Business Review
We’ve added a new Configuration Type filter to the Computer Information page inside the Technology Business Review.
[Image pending import: Technology Business Review | Computer Information – new Configuration Type filter]
There may be problem (or opportunity) areas within specific Configuration Types, and this gives you a way to identify those. You likely already have a plan in place for your MSP to capitalize on opportunities with Windows 10 going EOL in October next year, but here’s a way to identify potential problematic hardware and encourage clients to budget for replacements.
Project Summary Report
Project Management Hours are now added to the Project Details Report under the Project Summary in Project Details as a separate column.
[Image pending import: Project Summary Report | Project Details – new Project Management Hours column]
It wasn’t straightforward to compare actual project spend vs the budget, schedule, and estimated hours, and project management overhead hours are a necessary evil that need to be tracked and accounted for.
Adding this additional column of data will allow users to understand how many hours a technician spends as a project manager. Ultimately, you need to account for these hours when planning and quoting future projects, so this will provide a useful actual measure on project management overhead for current and past projects. It can be easy to forget about or underestimate management hours when calculating margin at the outset, so we wanted to make this clearer right in the high-level Project Details.
Team Utilization Report
A drill-through to the Total Labor per Hour has now been added to the Hourly Labor page in the Team Utilization Report, showing labor per hour by technician.
[Image pending import: Team Utilization Report | Hourly Labor – new drill-through to Hourly Labor data]
This drill-down view lets you see your entire tech team, and how many hours they’re utilized. In the example above, we’ve set the Labor Hours to the time from 08:00 to 17:00, and Joseph, Shon, and Catherina are the highest utilized over the last week.
Work Type Usage
A yes/no filter for Child Tickets has been added to the Customer page of the Work Type Usage Report.
[Image pending import: Work Type Usage Report | Customer – new Child Ticket filter]
The addition of this filter allows you to toggle child tickets off or on when viewing / reviewing your technicians’ work by work type. Some service desk teams make extensive use of child tickets as part of their workflows, but feel these shouldn’t necessarily “count” as they weren’t created by client users. Other times (on projects, for example), including child tickets may be desirable. The addition of this filter gives your team another option on viewing information.
Winter is Coming
Winter has very much arrived here in Canada, and our American friends have celebrated Thanksgiving now, so as mentioned at the top, these are the last updated reports of the year. Use the request form to choose the report updates you want, and keep an eye out for more enhancements to Cognition360.
Discuss this update in the ScalePad Community if you’re already a partner. Love to get your feedback.
Not a Cognition360 partner yet? Book a Cognition360 demo. We’d love to help you unlock insights hidden in your ConnectWise PSA data so you can make better decisions and grow a more profitable MSP business in 2025.