Why ProjectSmith works on top of Autotask Projects, not beside it

Every MSP that runs projects in Datto Autotask ends up having the same conversation. The projects are in Autotask. The contracts are in Autotask. The invoices come out of Autotask. But the project manager plans on a whiteboard or in another tool, capacity lives in a spreadsheet, timesheet sign-off happens over email, and fixed-price milestones get billed when somebody remembers.

We had that conversation in our own MSPs, more than once. When we built ProjectSmith, the most important decision we made was to build it on top of Autotask Projects, not beside it and not instead of it.

Two ways to fix the problem

There are two broad ways to give an Autotask shop better project tooling.

The first is to move project management somewhere else. Put the plans in a general-purpose project tool and sync time and status back to Autotask. You get a polished board quickly, and two systems of record. Which one has the right due date? Which one has the real estimate? When a tech logs time against a ticket in Autotask and a task in the other tool, who adds them up? In our experience it ends with someone whose job, in part, is reconciling the two.

The second is to keep Autotask as the system of record and build the missing layer on top. Projects, phases, tasks, predecessors, time entries, charges and milestones stay in Autotask. The new tool reads them, gives people better ways to work with them, and writes changes straight back.

We chose the second. Everything else in ProjectSmith follows from it.

What “on top of” means in practice

“Two-way sync” is easy to say. It is more useful to say exactly who owns what.

Autotask owns its fields. Title, status, dates, estimate, assignee and predecessors belong to Autotask. When ProjectSmith changes one, it writes to Autotask and reads the record back, so what you see is what Autotask stored. If someone changes the same task in Autotask, Autotask wins.

ProjectSmith owns what Autotask has no place for. Card order and colours, weekly allocations per person per project, budgets by phase, cost rates and approval history are ProjectSmith data. They point at Autotask records and never clutter them.

Board columns map to your statuses. An admin links each column to one or more Autotask task statuses. Dragging a card is a status change in Autotask, not a private state only ProjectSmith understands. A status nobody has mapped lands in a “Needs a column” lane instead of vanishing.

Approval is the gate. Techs submit time on a weekly timesheet. Only when a manager approves it is the entry created in Autotask, against the right project task with the right resource and role, and then it is locked. The same gate applies to estimate changes and extra costs, which become Autotask task updates and project charges.

Billing stays where invoices are raised. ProjectSmith tracks budget, burn and forecast. When a fixed-price milestone’s trigger fires, on a date or when a task completes, ProjectSmith marks the Autotask contract milestone ready to bill. Your normal Autotask billing run does the rest.

The trade-offs we accepted

Building on someone else’s platform has costs. We would rather name them.

ProjectSmith works only with Datto Autotask. If you run another PSA, it is not for you today.

We live within the Autotask API, including its rate limits. ProjectSmith budgets requests per customer and shows the usage on the connector page.

Changes made directly in Autotask take a sync cycle to appear, every 15 minutes. Approved time, charges and milestones from ProjectSmith are written to Autotask in batches every few minutes.

Deletes are limited to three small cases: removing a task dependency, taking an extra assignee off a task, and deleting a task with no time logged against it. Each goes through the same write-scope guard as every other write. ProjectSmith never deletes projects, time entries, tickets, companies or contacts. If an approved time entry turns out to be wrong, ProjectSmith raises an inbox item for a manager to correct it in Autotask. Quietly removing records from a customer’s PSA is not something an add-on should do.

Safe to try on real data

When you connect ProjectSmith, you can turn on the write-scope guard and choose exactly which companies, projects and queues it may write to, such as a test company and one test project. Reads are unrestricted. You get boards, capacity and utilisation on your real data from day one, and you switch the guard off when you are ready to go live.

Pricing that follows the same thinking

If Autotask is the system of record, every Autotask resource matters for planning, whether or not they ever open ProjectSmith. So every resource appears in capacity and utilisation, and you pay only for the people who sign in: US$20 a month for a Member and US$59 for a Planner, billed in USD, with a minimum of US$99/month (1 Planner + 2 Members). There is no onboarding fee and no annual contract.

The trial is 14 days on your own data, with no card needed to start. Nothing is charged during the trial. Add a card on the Billing page when you decide to keep going, and billing starts when the trial ends.

Try it

ProjectSmith is hosted in Australia, with United Kingdom and United States regions planned. If the conversation at the top of this post sounds familiar, see what ProjectSmith does as Autotask project management software, check the pricing, or tell us what you would need to make it work for your team.