For team leads. Needs the Administrator, Manager or Builder role.
The Report template drives the whole process: every client Report is built from it. It holds the structure of your Reports, meaning their Parts, and your Assessment. We generally recommend using one template for all your clients. There are good reasons to add more later, but one template keeps everything in one place, and tags let you scale the Assessment to each client.
How your template and Reports fit together
In the Strategy module, the list on the left shows each client, the template they use, and their Reports underneath by date. Every new account has a sample client, Dunder Mifflin Urgent Care, and you add a Report for any client from the Strategy list with Add Report To Company. Open a Report and you'll see it's a set of Parts: the cover page, the executive summary, the Assessment and so on. Each Part is a section that comes from your template.
To open your template, go to Settings > Templates > Strategy and click its name.
Naming your template and your client lead
The template's name and the name of the person who leads each client are both on its Details tab:
Open your template.
On the Details tab, change the Name to what your team calls it.
Set Primary User label to what you call the person who leads each client, for example vCIO, TAM or Account Manager.
The label is set per template and shows as the column header on the Schedule.
Setting the Report name and what shows at the top
On the Report Settings tab:
Change Report Name to what you call your Reports. It shows at the top of every Report.
Leave Page Size, Page Orientation and the margins as they are for now.
Under Presentation/ Display Settings, choose what shows at the top of the Report: Logo, Title, Information (the company, who prepared it, the date and overall status) and Health Score (overall health, plus each group's health).
Setting up the cover page
The cover page is the first thing your client sees. On the template's Parts tab, click the gear on the Cover Page Part to edit it. Build the page with the Macros menu, which drops in your MSP's logo or the client's, along with text that fills in for each Report, such as the client's name, the date or the Report name. Or paste a finished image straight into the Part.
Setting up the executive summary
Click the gear on the Executive Summary Part and write the text each client's first Report starts from, such as the headings you always cover. Later Reports carry over the last Report's text. The executive summary has no macros.
Note: Changing the template's text later doesn't overwrite what's already written in existing Reports. In a Report, Reset Content From Template or Append Content From Template pulls the latest template text in.
Adding and arranging Parts
The Parts are yours to arrange: drag them into any order, add your own, and remove the ones you don't use. To add a Part of your own, such as an agenda right after the cover page:
On the Parts tab, click Add Part and choose Text Part. Name it Agenda.
Write your usual agenda as a few bullets.
Drag it by its handle so it sits right after the cover page.
Click apply part settings to all drafts, so your Open Reports get it too. Completed Reports don't change.
Each Part also has Build, Presentation and Display checkboxes, which decide the modes it shows in. To add or customize a Part for one client's Report only, open that Report's Settings, then Current Report Settings.
Seeing how it looks: the three modes
Every Report has three modes:
Build: where you prepare the Report.
Present: for walking the client through it in your meeting.
Display: the read-only view of the whole Report.
Open a Report and click Present to see how your Parts look in a meeting. Go back with Build Mode, adjust the template, and check again.
Starting with the Assessment that ships
Your template comes with the Strategy Overview Assessment, and every item is tagged:
1. Fundamentals: the core items worth covering with every client. Start here.
2. Comprehensive: everything else, for clients ready to go deeper.
Security, Efficiency, Vertical and Prospect: topic tags that cut across the Assessment's groups.
Tags filter the Assessment: 1. Fundamentals narrows it to the essential items, and adding 2. Comprehensive brings in the rest. You can also track a Health Score for a tag across Reports. Here's a simple way to use them:
Use tags, not extra templates, to decide how much of the Assessment each client gets.
When you first review a client's Assessment, filter it by Item Tags to 1. Fundamentals in their Report, so you tackle the basics first. The filter is saved for you on that Report.
Bring in 2. Comprehensive items as the client is ready.
To track one area over time, such as security, add a Last Report Health widget to your dashboard and pick that tag as its Health Tag.
Review which items carry which tags and change them to fit how your MSP works. Add your own tags sparingly, for something you'll really filter on, such as a service tier. They live on the Tags tab of the template's Assessment, under Add Tag.
Changing the Assessment
The Assessment is where your team does a full review of each client's technology stack and anything else you want to check the same way across every client. It's its own tab under Parts. Click any item to change its name, Description, Health Standard, Reference Instructions or tags. The Description says what the item assesses. The Health Standard is how your MSP defines healthy for it: the bar your team grades against, and the one AI uses if you use it to help fill out the Assessment. The more specific it is, the better the grades. For example: servers under five years old, under manufacturer warranty, and Lenovo.
For bigger changes, click export to excel, edit the sheet, then import from excel. AI tools are a good way to rework descriptions, health standards or tags across the whole sheet. A few rules for the import:
Groups match by name, and items match by their name within a group.
Keep the column headers exactly as they were exported.
An item renamed in the sheet comes in as a new item, so rename items on screen instead.
Customizing Your Assessment covers the Assessment in more detail.
Relating technology to Assessment items
Some items, such as backups or antivirus, are easier to grade when you can see the client's data. Open the item, and under Related Items, pick a Flexible Item Group, such as the group your backup or antivirus data comes into. When someone grades that item in a Report, the client's items from that group show right under it, with their health. The related data only shows in Reports that have the Technology Part.
When you're ready to go further
Once your team has used the template for a while, the lead can shape the rest: the Assessment's groups, grades and weights, and Markets on Assessment groups. Understanding Strategy Templates, Report Parts Overview and How Template Changes Affect Your Reports cover it.