Helpdesk Tool

[carlitocabana]

Hello ,

We are searching for a helpdesk tool i know there are a lot but not all meet our demand so i ask for help. Does anyone know a helpdesk tool with intergrated billing/sale posibility's (print out spent hours and costs)?

Most applications do time and cost reports (so you have to manually fill in the hours and cost you spent) but this is not what we want. We only want to fill in we spent 30min on an incident and let the programm/bill/report do the math/calculation of the amount of time spent times the money per hour.

(tech) fills in 30min spent on incident A1
(sale) make a report for a external company
(application) 30min x €20
(application) show report

[Rache]

Dont know the ins and outs of each tool and whether they will do what you want but there is a tool called Assyst (I can email you handouts about it if you email me) or Peregrine. Peregrine can be found on the internet it isnt too impressive and doesnt include problems but may do what you want I believe there is a suite of applications and I only use one of them.

[xitil]

I think the reason why most HelpDesk applications do not do what you are looking for is that... this is not a requirement for a HelpDesk application! These applications are there to support the HelpDesk and Incident Management process, not billing!

Most likely though, you will get the desired functionality by combining a report on the HelpDesk data and contract/billing information from a sales app or a custom app...
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Better have remorse than regrets

[itilimp]

Do you really need an integrated tool?
It sounds to me like what you want could be achieved by most of the decent help desk systems on the market.

Ensure that the incident table has a field to capture time spent on an incident by an analyst.

Add a field to the analyst table for their hourly rate (including on-costs so this is the actual cost to the company rather than the analyst's hourly pay).

Create a report (using your help desk tool reporting system, crystal reports, or excel, etc.) that extracts the data you need from the database, e.g. total of time per analyst (grouped by customer, incident, whatever you need) x hourly rate = total salary cost of incident

You could develop this further by including costs of materials used as well.

This report could be automatically generated weekly/monthly and e-mailed in whatever format suits your sales division.

Job done.

It doesn't need an expensive integrated tool. Or am I over-simplifying your requirements?

[PeterOz]

As an addition to the way previously described which can capture the costs of service, you may also wish to see if the tools you are looking at have an Application Programming Interface which can be easily used. The last bit is key. If you have agreements or contracts against certain customers, you should also have finance fileds which can be populated from external finance packages such as Oracle financials, SAP or MYOB using webservices.

Once this linkage is made you should be able to track all costs, estimates, penalties, bills etc to the customer agreement and use this information for more proactive customer support. Costs can also be updated to a knowledge bank or to the service catalogue for quick reference to get the most efficient services out there.