AlgaPSA 1.6: The Parts of Your Business Your Clients Actually See

Three weeks ago we wrote about a year of AlgaPSA. Today we're releasing v1.6.

We called this one Brand Identity, and the name came from a question an MSP owner asked us in August. A client of theirs had forwarded a ticket notification back and asked why their IT company's emails were suddenly purple.

The MSP had done the work, answered the ticket, and kept the client informed. The email that carried all of that looked like it belonged to us, not to them. Their logo, their colors, and their name were nowhere on it.

The Email Should Look Like It Came From You

An MSP's relationship with a client is built on a few thousand small moments: a status update, an invoice, a portal login, a callback. Most of them are routine. All of them are chances for the client to recognize the company they hired.

We are proud of AlgaPSA, and plenty of MSPs are happy to tell their clients what they run. That is not the issue. The issue is proportion. When the software's identity is louder than the MSP's on every message, the client starts to see a tool where they should see their provider. Your brand belongs in front, with ours somewhere behind it, and the choice of how far behind should be yours.

So in 1.6, every system email AlgaPSA sends on your behalf can carry your colors, from the ticket update to the invoice to the password reset. Pick one or two brand colors, or take the ones AlgaPSA suggests from the theme and portal branding you already set up. A live preview repaints each template before anything changes, and templates you have hand-edited are left alone unless you say otherwise. Enterprise customers can add their logo to the header and decide for themselves whether the "Powered by AlgaPSA" line stays.

The same thinking reached the browser tab and the side menu. White-labeling gains a wide wordmark and a favicon, so a technician's screen and a client's portal tab both read as your company first. And staff sign-in can now go through your own Keycloak realm on every plan, including the free self-hosted tier, so a new hire logs in with the identity you already manage rather than another password you have to reset.

None of this changes what the PSA does. It changes whose name the client sees first, which is the point.

The Phone Call Is Where the Work Happens

Ask a service desk what they did today and most of the answer is calls. Ask the PSA and it has no idea.

That gap costs money in a way that is hard to see. A ten-minute troubleshooting call with an office manager is billable work, context the next technician needs, and evidence when a client asks what they are paying for. When it lives only in someone's memory, it is none of those things.

In 1.5 we captured Microsoft Teams Phone calls as interactions. In 1.6, 3CX joins it, and 3CX is the phone system a large share of MSPs actually run. Setup is one downloaded CRM template and one key. After that, callers are identified against your contacts, finished calls land as interactions on the contact and the client, and a recognized caller can open a ticket automatically. Nobody has to remember to log anything.

On 3CX editions with API access, it goes further. A ringing extension pops a card in AlgaPSA with the caller, their client, their open tickets, and recent interactions, so the technician knows who is calling and why before picking up. Any phone number in the app dials through the PBX from the technician's own extension, and a call placed from a ticket is journaled against that ticket. Transcripts and summaries from the PBX attach to the call, which means the next person on the ticket can read what was said instead of asking.

The same release lets any interaction with a start time land on a calendar as you log it, yours or a colleague's. A promised callback stops being a sticky note.

Money Should Flow Both Ways, Honestly

Every PSA promises to talk to your accounting system. The honest version of that promise is shorter than the marketing version.

QuickBooks Online has had a real two-way sync in AlgaPSA for a while. Xero users had a CSV export and our assurance that live sync was coming. In 1.6, Xero is a two-way sync: finalized invoices push to Xero, and payments and credit notes your bookkeeper records in Xero flow back onto the AlgaPSA invoices, applied exactly once. If a Xero total or invoice number drifts from what was exported, the invoice is flagged for a human rather than silently rewritten.

Here is the honest part. Payments, credits, and voids you record inside AlgaPSA are not pushed to Xero. They are recorded as unsupported, visibly, so nothing pretends to have synced when it has not. We would rather tell you where the line is than have you find it during month-end close.

The rest of the billing work in this release comes from the same instinct: fewer places where money quietly goes wrong.

A support ticket can now be invoiced directly from the ticket, with the approved time and products preselected and each item claimed once, so a busy billing day cannot charge the same hour twice. A catalog price change now shows you every contract line it will touch, with the delta and the effective date, before you commit, and lines with a negotiated rate stay where the client agreed they would. Tax sources, regions, and rates live on one page, and a nightly sweep keeps service periods extended so due charges stop disappearing from Ready to Bill because a contract ran out of runway.

Why This Is the Release After the Anniversary

The first year of AlgaPSA was about proving it could be a PSA. The second year, we said, would be about building the one MSPs can trust every day.

Trust is not a feature. It shows up in whether the client recognizes your company on every email, whether the call you took at 4:50 PM exists anywhere, and whether the number in your books matches the number on the invoice. Those are the three things 1.6 is about. There are a great many smaller changes as well, and the release notes list every one of them, but they are all in service of the same idea.

Thank you, as always, to the MSPs who asked the questions that turned into this release. Including the one about the purple emails.