Which contracts eat your technicians' time?
A per-seat contract only works if the customer's real support load is close to what you priced. Technicians are meant to log time on tickets, and on a busy day they do not. Daytide counts time per customer from the remote sessions and admin portals the work actually happens in.
Where the time goes missing.
How it service providers usually bill: per-seat or per-device contract, plus hourly project work.
- Tickets closed with no time on them
- The fix took forty minutes. The ticket says ten, or nothing, because the next call was already ringing.
- Contracts priced once and never checked
- One customer with twenty seats needs an hour a month. Another with twenty seats needs a day a week. Without reliable time per customer, both renew at the same price.
- Project work that leaks into support
- A migration that was quoted as a project keeps generating small follow-up jobs, and they land under the support contract.
A day, as Daytide records it.
This is what one person sees for their own day. Pick an entry to see what the label was based on.
- 08:00 to 08:30Service deskTriage, no single customer30 min
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the session name
- Remote session, 35 min: “HDG-RECEPTION-02”
- Service desk ticket page, 15 min, titled with the same customer
- You confirmed that “HDG” machines belong to Harbour Dental Group
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the admin portal
- Microsoft 365 admin, 2 h 05: tenant “Mill Lane School”
- A terminal window, 20 min
The terminal has no customer name of its own. It is counted with the migration because the portal makes up most of the same stretch of work.
Why here
Not sorted. Daytide asks instead of guessing.
- Remote session, 20 min: “DESKTOP-7QK2”
- The machine name does not match any customer yet
- 12:05 to 12:50AwayScreen locked, not counted45 min
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the session name
- Four remote sessions, 1 h 25 in total, all named “KD-…”
- Firewall console, 15 min
- 14:30 to 15:10Harbour Dental GroupFollow-up from last month's migration40 min
- 15:10 to 16:30InternalDocumentation1 h 20
- Working time
- 7 h 45
- Sorted without asking
- 7 h 25
- Private
- 0 min
- Questions waiting
- 1
Tools the template already knows.
Anything not listed here is learned in calibration week. Daytide sees an unfamiliar tool, asks what it is for, and remembers.
- Service desk and PSA
- ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA
- Remote monitoring and access
- NinjaOne, remote desktop tools
- Admin portals
- Microsoft 365 admin, Google Workspace admin, firewall and backup consoles
Your PSA already has timers, and for ticket work it should stay the system of record. Daytide is the check on it. It shows the time per customer that the tickets did not capture. The customer is usually readable from the remote session name or the tenant shown in the admin portal's title.
What the first week shows.
Time per customer, from the sessions themselves
A team-level table for the week. Compare it with the hours on tickets and with what each contract pays.
Reactive against planned work
Support, project work and internal jobs as separate kinds of work.
The fix you do every week
The same password reset, mailbox change or onboarding checklist, done by hand each time. It appears in the Opportunities list with rough hours a month.
- Daytide: This morning 35 minutes went to a remote session on “HDG-RECEPTION-02”. Which customer is that?
- Harbour Dental Group
- Mill Lane School
- Something else
What it will not tell you.
Daytide records that a remote session to a named machine was open, and for how long. It does not see inside the session, and it is not a ticketing system. If your technicians already log accurate time on every ticket, you may not need it for billing at all, only for the picture.
Give it one normal week.
Install it, answer a handful of questions, and look at the picture on day seven. The trial runs for 30 days, so you see three more weeks after that before you decide anything.
No card needed to start. Want someone to set it up with you? Assisted onboarding is $250, credited to your first annual invoice.