How to automate PSA software for MSPs

Discover how to automate your PSA software to streamline ticketing, security, billing, and operations. Learn how to scale faster with RPA-driven automation.

Professional services automation (PSA) software is a crucial tool for managing service operations, streamlining workflows, and improving customer satisfaction. However, many managed service providers still handle time-consuming manual processes within their PSA, leading to inefficiencies and increased labor costs. Integrating automation into your PSA can eliminate repetitive tasks, improve accuracy, and free up valuable technician time.

This guide explores key areas automation can optimize across your PSA platform and provides real-world examples of how it enhances business processes, resource utilization, and service efficiency.

What is PSA automation?

PSA automation is the process of using automation to streamline repetitive, manual tasks within a PSA system. While a PSA platform helps managed service providers (MSPs) centralize and optimize key business operations like ticketing systems, billing, resource utilization, and project management, automation takes care of the manual lifting.

Think of your PSA tool like an air traffic control system. It organizes all your flights (tickets, billing, security, and reporting) in one place, ensuring operations run smoothly. But without automation, your technicians are like overwhelmed air traffic controllers manually directing every single plane, matching flight schedules by hand, and juggling last-minute changes. It’s exhausting and just plain inefficient.

Think of automation as your autopilot that turns your PSA platform into a true command center so you can scale operations, improve service delivery, and maximize billable hours.

How to choose and implement the right RPA for your PSA needs

When implementing RPA across your PSA tools, choosing the right platform is crucial for efficiency and long-term scalability. Some MSPs rely solely on their PSAs, build custom PowerShell scripts, or rely on single-task automation tools, but these approaches often create maintenance headaches and fail to scale with business growth.

A full-process RPA solution purpose-built for MSPs ensures seamless PSA automation, reduces manual intervention, and offers prebuilt automations alongside customization options. The key is to find a platform that integrates with your various tools, offers API connectivity, and long-term scalability.

Key PSA processes you can automate 

Once you’ve chosen the right RPA platform for your MSP, the next step is identifying the most impactful areas to automate. Instead of starting from scratch, we’ve outlined five critical PSA workflows that benefit the most from automation. Automating these key areas helps reduce technician workload, and create a more scalable, profitable business. 

1. Help desk and ticketing triage 

Help desk technicians often spend countless hours manually categorizing, prioritizing, and routing tickets in their PSA. This leads to slow response times, inconsistent classifications, and high administrative overhead. Duplicate tickets create extra work, forcing technicians to manually merge similar issues instead of resolving them.

Automating ticket categorization and escalation reduces technician frustration, improves efficiency, and offers customers a better experience. For example, the technicians at Air IT were overwhelmed sorting and routing tickets in their PSA by hand.

The result?

Inconsistent service and delays to customers. Automating their PSA ticketing processes with prebuilt automations leveraging OpenAI allowed their team to focus on solving critical issues rather than spending hours on manual ticket triage.

Here’s how you can automate help desk processes like they did:

2. Security and compliance 

While ticket triage is a prime candidate for automation**,** security, and compliance are just as critical**.** From users locked out of accounts to failed backups and a flood of PSA tickets**,** manually handling these issues overwhelms technicians and increases security risks.Relying on human intervention alone leads to delays, fatigue, and potential compliance gaps. 

Automating PSA solutions for securityensuresusers regain access quickly, technicians detect every backup failure and resolve it instantly, and compliance remains intact**—**all without overloading your team. 

This video is a good example of how you can automate security enforcement within your PSA. Matt from Rewst’s Marketplace team showcases the Liongard MFARemediation automation**,** which instantly detects and enforces MFA compliance across multiple accounts. Instead of technicians manually auditing authentication settings and responding to tickets, Liongard triggers a PSA ticket when users lack strong authentication.   

The Rewst automation then picks up that alert and automatically applies a Conditional Access policy**,** ensuring compliance without manual intervention. 

Here are more ways you can automate your PSA’s security processes: 

While this prebuilt automation is currently specific to Rewst users with Acronis, anyone can customize this workflow to their unique needs.

3. New user onboarding and offboarding 

Tech Rage IT was all too familiar with the time-consuming and labor-intensive processes associated with manual PSA upkeep. Their user onboarding process required technicians to manually create accounts, assign permissions and configure access to the necessary tools. Offboarding was just as tedious—requiring access removal, account archiving, and PSA record updates. The tedious nature of these processes often led to setup and decommissioning delays as the team juggled multiple priorities. 

Recognizing the need for a more efficient solution, Tech Rage IT, like many other MSPs, turned to automation. Leveraging Rewst’s prebuilt New User Onboarding automation transformed he MSP’s user lifecycle management. They reduced manual effort by 85%, saving $60,000 annually on onboarding alone. 

Instead of technicians handling each step, theirPSA-integrated automations now do the heavy lifting for them. Here’s how you can follow suit and automate lifecycle management, too:  

“Automation was a game-changer for us. We turned a $60,000 problem into a cost-effective, streamlined process.”  - Matt Rose, CEO of Tech Rage IT. 

4. Billing reconciliation and data accuracy

Let’s say you’ve mastered automating your help desk, security, and user lifecycle management, but what about billing? Manually reconciling user counts across platforms like Microsoft 365, RMM tools, and antivirus subscriptions with your PSA contracts is asking for errors. Missing a single piece of data can lead to discrepancies, lost revenue, and frustrated clients.

Automation streamlines billing reconciliation by integrating real-time vendor data with PSA contract line items, ensuring accurate and up-to-date billing. Marcus Networking, for example, saved $120,000 annually by automating this process. Instead of spending 40+ hours a month manually reconciling vendor bills, their automated workflow updates PSA agreements in real time, preventing lost revenue and improving financial accuracy.

Want to save time and maximize revenue? Here’s how automation can help your PSA billing process:

While this prebuilt automation is currently specific to Rewst users with ConnectWise PSA, you can customize it to your unique PSA needs.

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5. Operational improvements & project management 

Automation enhances many aspects of your PSA, but one area that’s often overlooked is operations and project management. Whether you’re merging two MSPs or managing multiple platforms—like PSAs, CRMs, and documentation tools—manual upkeep can be a logistical nightmare**.**  

Without automation, data migration requires specific data entry, verification, and deduplication, leading to operational disruptions and concerns over data integrity. Meanwhile, labor-intensive contract management, on-call scheduling, client syncing, and API upkeep increase administrative burdens and run the risk of human error. 

Automating these processesimproves accuracy, reduces mundane workloads, and ensures cross-functional consistency**.** For example, Fusion IT leveraged automation tosync client and deal data between HubSpot and ConnectWise PSA, eliminating 267 hours of manual work per month and ensuring standardized contract management**.** 

Here’s how you can achieve similar results:

The benefits of automating your PSA

Hopefully the benefits of automating your PSA are already apparent. If you’re still wondering why automating your PSA tool is essential, here’s what you gain:

• Increased efficiency – Reduce time spent on manual data entry and streamline business processes, allowing technicians to focus on high-value work.

• Improved accuracy – Minimize errors by automating data transfer, ticketing updates, and contract updates.

• Enhanced visibility – Gain real-time insights into managing projects, resource utilization, and financial performance.

• Better client satisfaction – Deliver services on time and within budget through cloud-based automated workflows.

• More substantial compliance – Automate security audits, backup monitoring, and compliance tracking to maintain regulatory adherence.

  Start automating your PSA today. 

  Automating your PSA platform allows services organizations to scale operations while reducing inefficiencies. Whether you’re using ConnectWise PSA, Halo PSA, Autotask, or other PSA solutions, automation enables your team to streamline workflows, improve accuracy, and reduce labor-intensive tasks. 

  With prebuilt automations, deep integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) tools, remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms, and cloud-based services, automation future-proofs your business operations and resource managers gain more control over efficiency and profitability. 

  Looking to see how automation can transform your PSA? Schedule a demo with Rewst today.

Ben Climer
Lead Automation Specialist

Joelle Cullimore
Content Marketing Manager