Gradient MSP announced StackTracker this week, a tool designed to provide near real-time visibility into an MSP’s tech stack consumption and utilization. The tool offers insight into vendor spend, resale revenue, product category coverage, and profitability of both clients and products.
Many MSPs today rely on their accounting systems or PSAs to gather this information. However, Colin Knox, co-founder and CEO of Gradient MSP, says those systems provide an incomplete view of what’s happening in the business. “What you get when you report out of the PSA or the accounting solution is a good representation of what the MSP is billing and thinks they should be billing, but not necessarily what clients are actually using and how that’s performing for them,” he tells MSP Success.
View How Your Stack Is Performing
StackTracker, he says, will allow an MSP to “be in tune with what is driving or pulling back from your profitability” by providing AI-driven data analysis on revenue, cost, and profit along with automated product usage tracking.
In one consolidated view, StackTrack is “able to report and show an MSP how their entire stack is performing for them,” Knox explains. It solves a critical problem, he adds. “Service Leadership for years has been reporting [that] half of the industry isn’t profiting … 25% [of MSPs] are losing money and the next 25% are barely breaking even. I think a lot of that is due to not digging below the business and individual clients into what is quickly becoming the lion’s share of their revenue—the resale of solutions that they don’t own.”
Without the ability to view “product performance and trends in profitability, their volume, and their spend, it’s tough to tune the business to profitability,” he says.
StackTracker connects “to the delivery systems and channel vendor products. This lets us pull out which clients are actually using the solutions and how much of those solutions they are using,” Knox explains. “This lets us enrich those other reporting and billing systems, but also report gaps where the MSP might not be billing for something. In other cases, they can see where they’re under deployed on certain systems or certain tools for their clients.”
Identifying these “stack gaps” creates opportunities for the MSP to upsell or cross sell those clients, he adds.
Recipe For Success
For MSPs, Knox says the value proposition is fine-tuning profitability. “Our industry has generally offered one-size-fits-all solutions for MSPs to grow. That’s very seldom the best-case scenario for an MSP, because it’s ignorant to the MSP’s size or stage, geography, vertical focus, stack, and specializations. But we’re able to tune the system based on their own data, giving them intelligent recommendations and reporting on exactly what they should do as the best recipe for their success.”
Asked how StackTracker is different from other solutions trying to solve tool sprawl and boost profitability, Knox says it does not focus on general business or financial performance or service delivery and tech efficiency. Rather, Gradient MSP’s solution “is completely focused on the reseller side of that business—what are the various solutions you’re reselling, what are your opportunities that exist within that.”
He continues, “We’re an integration and data aggregator. We’re not a quote to cache-type system. We’re not looking at fueling automation and doing all of that. We’re looking at collecting this information, connecting the systems, and giving actionable growth advice. That’s where we sit.”
StackTracker currently integrates with ConnectWise and Autotask, with more PSA integrations planned.
Gradient MSP is enrolling its first cohort of 100 MSPs now. Knox expects StackTracker to be generally available by the end of the year.
