Frequently Asked Questions

To start, let's review how SOTA MSP sends out invoices and collects payment.

Each month, you'll receive an invoice for your managed IT services agreement. You should remember that the amount on this bill correlates with your monthly rate and covers everything on your MSA.

You'll generally see this invoice between the 10th and 20th of every month, and depending how your account is set up, will need to be paid via ACH within 10 days or we can collect payment for the amount listed on your bill with a credit/debit card on file on the first of the month via recurring payment.

If you have any questions about the bill, you'll want to directly reach out to our billing department.

Managed IT services solve one of the biggest nuisances of IT services: multiple invoices.

Most months, you’ll receive only one invoice that incorporates all the support, solutions, and services you utilize. Our goal is to help you streamline the financial aspect of managed IT services and create less confusion.

That being said, there are times when you may receive an additional invoice, but you’ll have plenty of advance notice about when to expect it and what it’s for.

Here are the different types of billing statements you can expect as a managed services customer:

1. Managed Services Invoice — This is the main invoice you’ll receive for managed IT services and is for the full monthly amount you agreed to when you signed the agreement. This particular statement briefly describes what you signed up for in your MSA. You can review the different solutions and services you subscribe to by looking at the line items. This also includes the number of users and/or endpoints you have, so you can quickly review if you need to make any changes to these counts.
2. Service Invoice — As a managed IT services client, your MSA covers most services, and you generally won’t receive a service invoice. The most common exception is to add new users and/or endpoints to your company. In this scenario, you’ll receive an invoice that shows what work was performed, the number of hours it took, the billable rate, and the total cost for the service performed. As a reminder, your MSA does not cover the setup of endpoints and accounts for new users. These will be added to your managed service invoice on the next bill. However, if you decrease your count, you can update your invoice every 90 days to reflect these changes.
3. Project Invoice — We can work with you on projects outside of the scope of your IT environment, but you’ll receive a separate invoice for them. For example, if you decide midway through your agreement term you’d like to migrate your backup system to the cloud, you’ll receive a project invoice for the time and material involved in migration.

You’ll have staff or endpoint changes at some point, and your MSA will need to reflect that.

If you add or remove a user or endpoint, we’ll need to update your MSA to reflect the count accurately. It’s important to inform the billing department of these changes.

It’s easy to remember to inform billing about any changes because you’ll need assistance in onboarding or offboarding the IT component of the user’s profile or endpoint. Still, the most effective way to have billing changes accurately reflected on your invoices is to update billing on changes to your user count.

If you do forget to let accounting know about the changes, the managed services team will update them, but it might take longer than if you were to pass along the information yourself.

Since many clients pay there bill via card on file and recurring, they don’t have to remember to submit payment. However, if your card gets declined or you pay by ACH and miss the net 10 deadline, you will miss a payment.

If this happens, we’ll let you know there was an issue and resubmit the invoice within three days with an additional 10% late fee.

But, if the payment is not recieved on the second try, we’ll start the collections process. You’ll receive communication about us needing to collect payment and be placed on credit hold.

At that point, you cannot make any future purchases, but your services (anti-spam, antivirus, DNS filtration, etc.) aren’t impacted.

However, if you’re on credit hold for 15 days and still fail to submit payment, you’ll be placed on service hold. You can no longer make purchases or request IT support, and your applications (antivirus, anti-spam, DNS filtration, etc.) will be paused or ended.

You’ll need to pay any outstanding fees and work with the billing department to be taken off credit or service hold in order to resume routine services.

You’ve researched what to expect from a managed IT service provider in terms of service, so when it comes to billing, you should expect just as much transparency.

As a SOTA MSP managed IT services customer, you’ll receive a monthly invoice for services. Occasionally, you may receive additional invoices for user changes or ad hoc projects.

Of course, billing is only one component you need to consider when signing an agreement with us.