Labor Margin Audit

Every MSP knows the project hours run over. Almost nobody knows by how much.

The managed services side of your business is measured to death. The project side is quoted from experience, delivered, and then absorbed — and the difference between the two numbers is nobody's report.

Your PSA is already holding both halves of it: what you quoted on the project, and every hour your team booked against it. Nothing in ConnectWise or Halo puts those side by side across your whole project history and tells you which kinds of work are consistently under-quoted. That is the entire job of this audit.

It is a retrospective on work you have already delivered and been paid for. Nothing changes in how you operate, nobody adopts a new tool, and no one on your team has to assemble a spreadsheet.

We need three MSPs to make the benchmark real.

The analysis compares your variance against a pooled baseline from other MSPs. That baseline is only meaningful — and only safely anonymous — once at least three firms have contributed to it. You are being asked to be one of the three, and the honest trade is below.

What the report actually says

The core of it is one table: every recurring kind of work you deliver, what you estimated across all instances of it, what it actually took, and the spread — ranked so the worst offender is the first thing you read.

Alongside the analysis you get four things:

• Your headline number. Total variance across the window, converted to dollars at your blended labor rate.
• Variance by vendor. Where the brand on the box changes how long the work takes — usually the finding that surprises people most.
• The three repeat offenders, with sample sizes, so you can tell a real pattern from one bad job.
• What we couldn't classify, and why. We publish our match rate. If we could only classify 60% of your labor lines, the report says 60% on the first page.

What we plug into, and what we read

DarkBird connects to ConnectWise Manage or HaloPSA using an API key you issue and can revoke at any moment. Nobody on your team assembles an export.

From you we need three things, all settled on the intake call: the window you want analysed, your blended labor rate so we can turn hours into dollars, and 30 minutes with whoever can issue the API key.

If your PSA history is thin — you moved platforms recently, or projects lived in spreadsheets before last year — send what you have as a file instead. We map the columns on our side; they don't need renaming.

The one thing that stops this cold: if your PSA holds actual hours but no estimated hours anywhere — not on the project, not on the phases, not on the quote that created it — there is nothing to compare against. We find that out on the intake call by looking, and we will tell you then rather than produce a report built on a guess.

Three weeks, two calls, one API key

What we do with it, in plain terms

• Read-only, always. The connection cannot write to your PSA. Revoke the API key whenever you like — during the audit, or the day after it ends.
• Your credentials are stored encrypted and are only ever decrypted server-side. They are never held in a browser and never leave our infrastructure.
• Your company name, your clients' names, and your project names are never published without your written approval — and that approval is asked for after you have read the report, not before.
• The benchmark pools ratios, not hours. Your contribution is the shape of your variance, stripped of names, dollars and volumes, and it is only ever released once three or more firms are in the pool — so no single firm's figures can be read back out of it.
• Withdraw whenever you like. Say the word and your data is deleted from the pool and from our systems, including after the engagement ends.

Who this works for