Co-managed IT costs MSPs more than they think

Each week we hear a new story. But it’s always the same story.

A customer runs ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or another enterprise-grade ITSM. They’ve invested heavily. Their internal team is structured around it. And when they bring on a managed service provider (MSP), they expect the MSP to plug into their world. Not the other way around.

The MSP? Often a specialist, brought in for cloud, security, networking, or desktop support. But to deliver value, their engineers have to work across systems. Enterprise tickets are forwarded via email, pasted into the MSP’s PSA, and triaged manually. Hours disappear in duplicate entry and status updates.

This is the new normal for co-managed IT. And it’s quietly eroding the margins of mid-to-large MSPs.

Engineers are copying and pasting instead of solving

Technicians spend minutes per ticket just rekeying data, often across hundreds of tickets a month. In one common setup, enterprise incidents arrive by email and must be manually logged into ConnectWise, Autotask, or Halo. Even with templates, the formatting breaks. Auto-replies loop. Assignment fails silently.

For a team processing 300 or more inbound tickets, this is 25 hours or more each month in low-value work. At $50 per hour, that’s $1,250 per client, per month, just moving data from one tool to another.

Now multiply that by a dozen enterprise clients.

Account managers are pleading for resolution data

Meanwhile, account reps, who are often former engineers, are preparing monthly performance reviews and Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). But without direct access to the customer’s ITSM, they’re forced to reconcile from their side only. They chase down status updates. They try to reverse-engineer outcomes. They end up in meetings hoping the customer has better data than they do.

One QBR might take 5 to 8 hours to prepare. That’s not strategy. That’s survival mode.

Billing is a best guess

Even billing isn’t immune. Without shared workflows, time entries and ticket closures go unconfirmed. SLAs are disputed. Scope boundaries get fuzzy. Finance teams spend days reconciling invoices, comparing resolved work against contract terms, and adjusting for exceptions.

And when engineers aren’t entering their timesheets - because they’re frustrated, rushed, or just unsure which system to trust - the numbers become little more than a guess.

When the audit trail lives across disconnected tools, every invoice becomes a negotiation.

Co-managed shouldn’t mean double-handled

Enterprises are right to expect their MSPs to meet them in their tool of choice. But too often, that means the MSP pays the price. In engineer time. In account effort. In strained relationships.

Co-managed IT shouldn’t mean double-handled tickets, stitched-together reports, or reconciliations by spreadsheet.

That’s why Support Fusion exists

We help MSPs work inside their clients’ ecosystems without manual effort. Our platform keeps tickets in sync across PSA and ITSM. So your team can spend time solving, not duplicating.

QBRs generate automatically, pulling from both systems. Billing workflows stay aligned. And everyone, from helpdesk to executive, gets the data they need to grow the account, not just maintain it.

Final thought

The rise of co-managed IT is a permanent shift. Enterprise clients won’t bend to new tools. And MSPs shouldn’t have to bend over backwards.

Support Fusion helps MSPs sync with their customers, solve problems faster, and succeed at scale.

Because every ticket you don’t rekey is time back for what matters.