1.0 - Introduction
Your clients spend a lot of money on technology - it is likely one of the highest overheads in their business. That's hardly surprising considering most businesses are dependant on their IT systems. Whether it's email, applications, telecoms, connectivity, computers, cyber security or your IT support services to keep it all running - it all adds up!
The problem is, clients don't see where all of this money goes - to them, it's just a big number on the P&L and they feel their hand is never out of their pocket.
With HighGround, you can give your clients some perspective on where all that money is going by:
breaking their down by category, e.g. Cyber, IT Support, Microsoft 365 etc.
showing where their spend with you actually covers
showing what they spend with you and what they spend with other providers
With this kind of visibility and understanding, you can have more productive conversations with your clients about where they can save money (including by switching services to you) and where they need to invest.
Most importantly, you can show your clients their security posture alongside their technology spend, helping them see the correlation between their overall technology spend, spend on cyber and their security posture.
2.0 - Managing Categories
HighGround has a default set of categories and subcategories that are universally understandable by your clients and prospects. These are areas that most organizations should be spending on.
You have a lot of control over these categories:
hide categories and subcategories
change the colour of categories and subcategories
add custom categories and subcategories
Note: you cannot hide categories/subcategories which have a spend > 0 in them, and you cannot delete or rename any of the default HighGround categories/subcategories.
To learn more about managing categories in HighGround, read our Managing your Categories article.
3.0 - Adding Spend
There are 2 different ways to add spend:
integrating your PSA or Finance tool
adding spend manually
To learn more about manually adding spend to HighGround, read our Adding Spend Manually article.
4.0 - Drilling into spend data
Dashboards are great, but their usefulness and credibility quickly fall apart when you can't drill into the numbers you are seeing.
That's why we've made it easy for you to get right down to the invoice and line-items behind the dashboard, ensuring you can go as deep as your client wants to!
To learn more about drilling into and working with data, read our Drilling into your Technology Spend data article.
5.0 - Filtering your data
You can filter for better visibility and control. Filters are available for the main dashboard view, as well as within categories and subcategories. Available filters include:
Date range
Amount
Category
Include/Exclude Taxes
To learn more about using filters in technology spend, read our Filtering your data in technology spend article.
6.0 - Using Views
There's nothing more frustrating than having a single view of your data. That's why we've built different views, which you can combine with the category management functionality, to create customized views of your data. These views are:
Category view - the default view, showing spend across categories and subcategories.
List view - a more detailed view that shows a complete list of all invoices, amounts and subscription payments.
Subscription view - shows a list of subscriptions, each of which you can drill into to see the subscription details and any associated subscription payments, helping you track ongoing commitments at a glance.
To learn more about working with different views, read our Using views in Technology Spend article.
7.0 - Distributing Spend (coming soon!)
For MSPs who charge larger seat prices which include multiple different service types (e.g. $250 / month /user that includes their Desktop, IT Support, Cybersecurity, Microsoft 365 and Onsite Callouts) - there is no way for you to split this product across multiple categories to give your clients a category view of their spend.
Likewise, if you charge a single 'Project Fee' for a project such as a server replacement, or you sell your client a new laptop which includes the device and the setup costs all as a single line item - there is no way to split this across the various different categories.
. . . until now!
With Distributed Spend, you can continue to quote and invoice your client the way you do it today and use HighGround to split these products across their various categories by %.
There you have it - the best of both worlds, coming Q2 2025!
8.0 - Editing your PSA data in HighGround
We get it - despite you're best attempts, your PSA gets messy. Even if you had the time to keep it clean, the sheer number of other systems it's connected to makes it difficult to change data without it having some knock-on effect on other systems you use.
We've got you covered. You can edit the data in HighGround without affecting your data in your PSA, and if you make a mess of it, you can simply reset it and let it sync back again!
So the next time you've got 30mins prep time for a QBR or are running into a meeting with seconds to spare, be confident that you can manipulate your data in HighGround without fear of fighting with your PSA or breaking some other system it's connected to!
To learn more, read our Connecting your PSA to HighGround article.