About services and bundles

Recurring Service contracts work a little bit like car insurance. Your customers buy a service or service bundle that covers defined incidents, such as a virus attack. They pay you on a regular schedule, whether there is an "accident" or not. The monthly service charges are the contract revenue, and the cost of labor and materials to fix any issues are the contract cost.

Services and service bundles must be set up before they can be added to any Recurring Service contract. As the owner and administrator, the task of setting up and pricing your services is your responsibility.

If this is a new business model for you, Datto has a number of resources that can assist you with getting started:

Setting up service codes

Similar to products, services have billing codes that determine how they are taxed. If the tax rate is the same for all services you are going to set up, you will need one service code. You will need to set up more than one if your local organization does the following:

  • Offers types of services that are subject to different levels of taxation
  • Exports billing transactions to an external accounting program and would like to tag them with a different General Ledger Account or External Number

You set up service codes on this page: Left Navigation Menu > Admin > Admin Categories > Features & Settings > Finance, Accounting & Invoicing > Billing Codes.

Setting up services

Once your service code is in place, you can set up your services on this page: Left Navigation Menu > Admin > Admin Categories > Features & Settings > Products, Services, & Inventory > Services.

We recommend the following best practices:

  • Keep it simple. Don't use bundles when services would do just as well. Doing so will save administrative overhead and management. Also, services can be imported, while creating service bundles is a manual process, and bundles don't work well with external accounting software.

EXAMPLE  If your Desktop Monitoring Service includes software updates, anti-virus, and remote support, add that in the service description. Do not create three separate services and then create a bundle from them. Remember that a service bundle is one billing unit, and you cannot attribute revenue to the services it bundles anyway.

  • Wherever possible, make the period type Monthly. Your customers get billed the same amount every month, which prevents questions about billing.