Managing Project Profitability with the Moovila and Halo Integration
- Amanda Kubista
- Jun 24
- 7 min read
Here is a recap of our recent webinar, a deep dive into how the robust integration between HaloPSA and Moovila Perfect Project can help you manage projects more efficiently to increase profits.
In this webinar, Louis Bagdonas, Senior Program Manager for MSPs at Moovila and Morgan Aspinall, Product Manager at HaloPSA, teamed up to demonstrate the robust tools the integration between these two environments brings to your toolset.
What is Moovila?
“Moovila Perfect Project is our robust, automated project and resource management platform,” explains Bagdonas. “It offers portfolio management, reporting dashboards, resource management, and automated budget and finance. At its core is our Critical Path Engine.”
As you build projects and work plans, the Critical Path engine forecasts when tasks and tickets will land on your schedule and offers automations, resource management, and the ability to predict revenue, profitability, and cash flow.
“We focus on managing projects,” he says. “But a big piece of this is our tight, native, bi-directional integrations with partners like HaloPSA.”
The team at Moovila works closely with the HaloPSA team so that Moovila Perfect Project is up to date with new features and changes as they happen.
“It's a great partnership,” says Bagdonas.
What is HaloPSA?
“HaloPSA is a complete service management platform,” says Aspinall. “The breadth and scale of what you can do with it is unmatched. This is because we are laser focused on supporting, building, and delivering the best PSA on the market.”
The team does not get distracted by building add-on tools and extra functionality outside of that scope. “We are single minded in that focus.” To deliver extra features, such as project management, HaloPSA creates strong partnerships with developers who build best-in-breed solutions.
“Halo has about 250 integrations that include everything an MSP or CSP would expect,” says Aspinall. Still, it is possible that there is a platform you use that Halo doesn't integrate with. “In that case,” he says, “we can build that out for you with the drag-and-drop, codeless editor inside of HaloPSA.”
How the integration works – with a sneak peek
The close partnership between HaloPSA and Moovila has led to a robust, two-way integration between the two products that allows you to work in whatever environment suits the person or task without worrying about duplicating or manually syncing data. If you are working in HaloPSA and want to expand a ticket into a project, you can do that with a few clicks. All details will travel with the project and any changes you make to the work in Moovila Perfect Project will be synced back to HaloPSA.
Bagdonas shared his screen to show webinar viewers what this looks like.
“This is a sneak peek at a new UI that will be coming out to production soon,” he says. “The first thing that jumps out at you is our RPAX score.”
“It is a big differentiator for us,” he says. “Moovila Perfect Project monitors your projects, 24/7, 365 days a year. It is constantly checking: Have you built a good plan? Are you on track? It offers a live score as you work.”
In this screen, 980 is a great score. That is a well-built project. The 273 score in red is a project that needs attention. As you fix errors and correct misaligned dates, your score goes up. Your plan is in good shape when that score turns green.
“When projects go live,” says Bagdonas. “If tasks are late, that score will drop. When you have a large portfolio of projects, this feature lets you quickly see which are going off the rails and need attention.”
Fast project plans from templates
Bagdonas then created a new project using an already built template.
After updating the dates and assigning it to a team – in a few clicks – the new project is nearly ready to go.
“When we spin up a new project from a template, we pull in the dependencies, durations, work estimates, and resource types and it is quickly ready to go. You can set your default work types and those map to your charge rates in HaloPSA.”
Simply by choosing prebuilt project plans for all the types of work you do from a menu of templates and stitching them together, you can create a full work plan for a client in just a few clicks.
“From my list of project templates, I'm tapping ‘Select” to grab all the pieces of the execution phase that I need for this new client,” says Bagdonas. These templates are work plans you have already built, run, and corrected. They are built for your workflows and your team.
“You can duplicate as many templates as you want and as many phases from any template,” he says. “Grab whatever project plan pieces you need to build what we call a Frankenstein project.”
This is the work plan for a new client’s Cloud Migration and Risk Assessment, assembled in seconds:
As you add tasks, resource types, and financial information, Moovila Perfect Project starts to calculate a total cost for the work plan and estimates the revenue for the project. These calculations are based on real data, not estimates.
Template Analytics
Because tracking the profitability of projects can be a time-consuming challenge for MSPs and this data is essential to profitability, Moovila Perfect Project now has template analytics that offers fast, detailed insight into costs – on a granular level.
Every project task that's created from a template or from a ticket in HaloPSA is tracked, and detailed data about estimated versus actual time and costs is pulled into these analytics.
“What you see in this example,” says Bagdonas, “is that for Office 365 migrations our work estimates were good. We were under budget on most of our tasks. But on cutovers, we start to go over our estimates.”
To find out what’s really happening, you can drill into the child tasks for these projects and see who owns those tasks and how they are performing.
“Here I notice that John was over budget on several tasks while Amy was on or under budget in everything she worked on,” says Bagdonas.
“With this knowledge, I'm going to go assign all of that work to Amy until I have a chance to talk to John and find out why he is going over budget on office 365 migrations.”
We can also look at the cost for Amy specifically. This allows us to calculate a detailed cost for this work based on a specific agent, rather than merely the resource type. This enables real cost predictions that are based on actual work data.
The Critical Path view
One feature that is central to Moovila Perfect Project is the Critical Path View. This view allows you to see projects on a path toward completion. It shows you the dates when each piece of work will happen, the durations for each task, and the completion date for each step, phase, and the entire project.
When something is at risk, this view flags it, and allows you to drill into the work and find out what’s going wrong.
Here is the entire work plan, zoomed out, with every piece in order complete with start dates and completion dates as well as a start and finish for the entire project.
“If I start this project on 5/5 with a scope review,” says Bagdonas, “the Critical Path Engine forecasts that the work will wrap up on 6/15 with a Project Review.”
Back in HaloPSA, Bagdonas saves the project in a few clicks, assigning it to a team. This creates a ticket in HaloPSA, complete with all the project tasks. Phases in Moovila Perfect Project are milestones in HaloPSA.
The project is already complete with project tasks, risk assessment, dates, budgets, statuses, and priorities. You can drill into those to see all the details.
Your engineers can work in either environment. The data will sync as they do. Any changes you make in HaloPSA will be reflected in Moovila Perfect Project. Any changes you make in Moovila Perfect Project will also be made in HaloPSA.
A HaloPSA sandwich
When it comes to planning projects, HaloPSA and Moovila Perfect Project work like a relay team.
“HaloPSA is responsible for everything that happens prior to the project being created,” says Aspinall. “Then it sends the project to Moovila Perfect Project, which has all that neat functionality – scheduling, Critical Path Engine, template analytics, and project management – and HaloPSA comes back into the conversation when you are ready to send a bill.”
The project is sandwiched between the two environments.
“Let’s take a look at what happens in HaloPSA before the project is created,” says Aspinall. “This is our home screen where you will find our core modules. One of these is the CRM – or sales area.”
This is where you keep leads and opportunities, where the sales team works, closing deals. The configuration gives lots of options for organizing leads and creating lead lists.
The sales order
The process of creating a project starts with an initial quote or a proposal. Once you have all your signatures and a green light, you create a sales order. The sales order is effectively the central hub for this project.
“Sales orders might include a managed service agreement, hardware, projects, perhaps some licenses as well,” explains Aspinall. “Those all spawn from the sales order.”
Important data travels with the project
One nice feature, when creating a project, is that you can copy data from the opportunity into the project. For example, you might attach the statement of work so that everyone is on the same page.
“You want to make sure the statement of work the customer agreed to is the same SOW that's given to the projects team, so there's no scope creep,” says Aspinall. So, it is common to copy the SOW into the project. But any information in the opportunity can be attached to the project.
This is the point when the project moves to Moovila Perfect Project to be executed and tracked.
And when the project is completed, it comes back to HaloPSA for billing.
Billing a project from HaloPSA
There are a number of billing mechanisms inside of the platform. They are found in the Invoices module under the Ready for Invoicing section.
“This brings you to an interactive, dynamic screen that shows everything in HaloPSA that can have an invoice generated for it but does not yet have one,” says Aspinall. From there, you can jump to your projects that are ready to be invoiced.
Here you will see any hardware that's been added to projects as well as the billable labor. If the project is billed on time and materials, you will see the time that has been spent on each task.
“We have fixed-fee project billing, T&M project billing, with or without milestones, and we have milestone fixed-fee billing,” says Aspinall. “We also have the ability to leverage deferred revenue. We can bill up front for a project and, as the work is completed, chip away against that deferred revenue.”
Billing is very straightforward. Select the records you want to invoice for. Select your criteria, click create invoice, and that will create the invoice, or set of invoices, you want.
You can also define how the invoice looks once it's created. And, if you have an accounting platform, your invoices will be synced to that platform, with no need for manual syncing.
“It is an incredibly diverse platform,” says Aspinall, in closing “If you have a desire to do something and a little bit of creativity, chances are that you are absolutely going to be able to do it in HaloPSA.”
For more details and quite a few dad jokes, click here to watch the entire webinar.
