The 15 Numbers Every MSP Owner Should Know

The 15 Numbers Every MSP Owner Should Know

Here's a quick test. If someone stopped you right now and asked how your MSP is doing, could you answer with numbers - or only with a feeling? Most owners can rattle off revenue and headcount and then start to hesitate. That's not a failing of attention; it's that the numbers that really describe the health of an MSP are scattered across a PSA where nobody can see them at once.

These are the fifteen worth knowing. Think of them as the vital signs of the business, grouped into the four areas that actually determine whether it's healthy: the service desk, your customers, your team, and your money.

The service desk (are we keeping up?)

1. First response time. How long tickets wait before anyone acknowledges them - the biggest single driver of how your service feels to clients.

2. Same-day resolution rate. The share of tickets opened and closed the same day; your quick-win throughput and an early warning when work starts to pile up.

3. Reopen rate. How many "closed" tickets come back - the quality check that stops speed metrics from lying to you.

4. Aged ticket count. How many tickets have been open longer than about five days. This is where satisfaction quietly dies, so it's arguably the most important operational number on the list.

5. Ticket volume per endpoint. Not raw volume - volume normalised to what you manage. This is what tells you whether a rising ticket count means growth or trouble.

Your customers (are they happy - and staying?)

6. CSAT. Your overall satisfaction score, ideally captured on every closed ticket rather than an occasional survey.

7. At-risk accounts. The clients whose satisfaction, ticket experience or contract is trending the wrong way - your churn early-warning list.

8. Survey response rate. How much of your CSAT data you're actually capturing, because a great score from 5% of clients isn't a great score.

Your team (are they coping - and performing?)

9. Team capacity versus load. Whether the desk as a whole is over or under capacity right now - the number that tells you whether to hire, and when.

10. Utilisation. The share of your technicians' time that's productive and billable, connecting the team's effort to the P&L.

11. Aged tickets per technician. Overload made visible per person - your earliest warning of burnout, weeks before a resignation.

12. Per-technician performance. A fair, blended score of each person's speed, quality and customer outcomes - not raw ticket count.

Your money (are we actually profitable?)

13. Monthly recurring revenue. The foundation number, and its direction of travel, split from one-off revenue.

14. Profit per customer. Revenue against the cost to serve, per client - the number that reveals the accounts quietly losing you money despite a healthy invoice.

15. Pipeline value and renewals due. What's coming in from new deals and what's up for renewal in the next quarter - your forward view of revenue.

The real problem isn't the list - it's seeing it

None of these fifteen is exotic. Any owner reading them nods along; of course those matter. The reason almost nobody can answer all fifteen on demand isn't that they don't care - it's that the numbers live in different corners of Autotask, several of them are calculations rather than fields, and assembling the full set by hand is an afternoon's work nobody has time to repeat. So owners run on the five they can remember and stay in the dark on the other ten.

That's the entire reason a management layer exists. Canopy reads these fifteen numbers straight out of your Autotask data and puts them on one screen - desk health, customer satisfaction and risk, team capacity and performance, and the money - refreshed automatically so they're current whenever you look. Autotask records every one of them; Canopy is what lets you actually know them, at a glance, instead of guessing. The test at the top of this article should take you ten seconds to pass. For most owners it takes an afternoon. It doesn't have to.