Streamline Your Ticket Closure Process in HaloPSA

By  
Jen Butler
April 7, 2025
20 min read
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Let’s be honest: ticket closure can be a huge mess in our MSPs.

You open a ticket and see open tasks, unlogged appointments, and missing resolution notes. But it’s marked “closed.” Now someone has to go figure out what really happened. Did those tasks get completed? Those HDMI cables delivered? Is the client still waiting for a response or an appointment?  

If you're closing tickets without making sure everything’s actually done, you’re probably dealing with

  • Billing issues. Tasks or appointments didn’t get logged, so you’re not billing for all the work.
  • Dispatch cleanup. Someone has to re-open the ticket or hunt down details later.
  • Incomplete data. Tickets don’t have the info you need for reporting or future troubleshooting.
  • Wasted time. You’re touching the same ticket multiple times just to wrap it up.

This stuff adds up. And the bigger your ticket volume, the more it costs you in time and money.

To add insult to injury, often that “someone” who ends up doing the legwork to close the gap is usually someone from dispatch or billing, and it's usually not a good use of their time especially when the technician responsible is already off-site half-completing another batch of tickets.

After 11 years in the MSP world, I’ve seen this pattern over and over again. It’s not that technicians are lazy or trying to avoid work. It’s that the system allows this to happen, and no one’s taken the time to fix it.

So let’s use HaloPSA to keep people accountable, ensure tickets are worked to completion, and eliminate the need to play catch up when it’s time to bill for the great solutions we’ve provided for this client over the last term!

One Possible Solution

I have a video working through this solution that you can watch here.  

Basically, we need to create a system that enforces good habits without relying on people to remember every little detail.

To achieve this goal, we’re going to use HaloPSA to:

  • Reduce the ability to close a ticket
    • Block ticket closure if there are open tasks, appointments, or to-dos
    • Remove “closed” or “completed” from quick status changes  
  • Update your Ticket Workflow to allow for ticket closure
    • Add “Resolve” action that checks the ticket first before allowing technician to advance
    • Create Custom Fields
      • One single selection field for the lookup trigger
      • Two rich text fields; one for displaying our message, and one for controlling the HTML.
    • Use simple SQL lookups and custom fields to flag missing pieces
    • Make the process clear, so techs know what to do before they close a ticket
      • Canned Text Values should clearly explain why they cannot close the ticket.  

In addition to the video, I also shared all the custom field setups, canned text, and SQL in this GitHub gist.

In Conclusion

This isn’t about making life harder for your techs. It’s about:

  • Making it easier to bill accurately
  • Giving dispatch less to clean up
  • Making sure the ticket tells the full story
  • Creating better data for the business

It’s one small process change that takes a lot of pressure off your team, especially the people downstream from the techs who are closing tickets.

If you’re running an MSP, or trying to tighten up operations inside your PSA, this is for sure worth 15 minutes of your time.

🎥 Watch the full video here: Streamline Your MSP Ticket Closure Process with HaloPSA

📄 Get the code and setup details here:  Ticket Review & Closure Process in HaloPSA – GitHub Gist

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Jen Butler

I’m an automations engineer who’s spent the past 12 years helping MSPs stop doing things the hard way. My specialty is solving real problems with real impact by connecting the dots between business needs and the technical tools that make everything run smoother (and way less painful).

I work mostly in Rewst, HaloPSA, and the wonderful world of APIs where I get to build automations that actually do something: save time, reduce errors, and make teams feel like they’re finally in control of their own systems.

Outside of work, I spend my time surrounded by epic tales and an even more epic household: six cats, two dogs, and one small child who believes she’s the main character. She’s probably right.

See some more of our most recent posts...
November 19, 2025
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Chapter-by-Chapter Discussion Questions for The Go-Giver by Bob Burg: Chapter Seven - Rachel

In this chapter guide to “Rachel” from The Go-Giver, we explore what great coffee, storytelling, and human needs have in common. From “survive, save, serve” to Maslow and “meat computers,” this piece invites MSP leaders and service pros to rethink how they scale excellence without burning people...or the beans!
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About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

Chapter Summary

In Chapter 7, "Rachel," we learn more about Rachel and about the characteristics that Pindar finds valuable.

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

  • How do you feel about the commentary about Pindar’s age? Do you know people who are younger than they seem? What characteristics contribute to that perception?
  • Can you relate to Rachel? Is her story believable? What do you think the authors seek to elucidate about her? What about Pindar’s view of her?
  • We’re yet again hearing Pindar described as a storyteller. What does that make you think the authors are trying to say about Pindar’s skill set?
  • Survive, save, and serve. Where do you find yourself landing? Where would you like to invest more?
  • What do you think is Rachel’s “secret” to good coffee? The author describes many aspects of her craft, surely it’s not just because she’s one-eighth Colombian!  

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

  • Making coffee well is an interesting metaphor! There is so much care, precision, and repetition in making coffee, it’s as much a science as it can be considered an art.
    • Consider Starbucks beans: to produce a consistent product at a scale, they roast their beans very hard, eliminating the unique characteristics of a specific variety of coffee bean in lieu of a product that will hold up to their regularly heavy-flavored and sugared drinks. (See: Why Starbucks Coffee Has That Burnt Taste) Is it possible to truly scale excellence with care? Is there a limit?
  • Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs suggests humans must have their basic needs met before they have the space to pursue “more advanced” needs.
    • If that’s too academic, El gave a talk at MSPGeekCon about how we’re all basically meat computers with Hardware, Software, and Networking built into us. Does that perspective change how you can handle other humans and even take care of yourself? (Watch part 1 of “The Care and Feeding of Meat Computers” here: https://youtu.be/yRcs5XYI8LQ?si=J3Q_VGenSHaKutOR)

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Fall/Winter 2025, we’re walking through The Go-Giver, chapter by chapter.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

October 13, 2025
8 min read

Chapter-by-Chapter Discussion Questions for The Go-Giver by Bob Burg: Chapter One - The Go-Getter

At Rising Tide, we use book clubs not to read—but to listen, question, and practice curiosity. Join us as we unpack Chapter One of The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann, using open-ended prompts to reflect on ambition, connection, and growth. Perfect for service-minded teams who want to slow down and think differently.
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About this Series

If you’ve already read Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity, you know that at Rising Tide, we don’t host book clubs for the sake of reading. We use them as an excuse to talk, to listen, and to practice curiosity together.

The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann is the first book that we've chosen to explore together in this way. Each week, we’re reading one short chapter together and using a few open-ended questions to spark real conversation: no lectures, no wrong answers, just reflection.

Below are our discussion prompts for Chapter One: “The Go-Getter.”

They’re written for teams like ours: busy, service-minded, sometimes too practical for their own good...who want to slow down long enough to notice what these stories have to teach.

How this guide is different from others you'll find online: We keep it chapter-focused. Every set of questions focuses only on the current chapter so there is no foreshadowing, no jumping ahead, no “we’ll get to that in Chapter 7.” The goal is to slow down and savor the smaller ideas that get lost when you rush to the big themes, and we're going to make sure that team members that are "behind" have enough data points to connect the dots and contribute even if they're not caught up to the current reading.

Use them however you like. Whether you’re reading along with us or just looking for a fresh team conversation starter, we hope these questions help you stretch a little, think differently, and see something new in yourself or your work.

Some Tips on how to use this Guide

  1. Keep it simple. No slides. No structured lessons. Read a question aloud, give a solid 10-second pause, sometimes you have to let the awkwardness of silence drive the conversation.
  2. Honor the one-chapter rule. No spoilers, no summaries! Stay inside the chapter or assigned reading. If someone raises a later theme, park it in a “Next Chapters” list and keep today focused. Similarly, don’t try to solve the book. Ask what this chapter made people notice or feel—nothing more.
  3. Actively include people who didn’t read and make space for quieter voices. Use prompts like, “From this idea alone, what stands out?” Curiosity doesn’t require homework. Explicitly ask: “Anyone who hasn’t shared want to weigh in?” Intentionally invite two voices before anyone speaks twice
  4. Time-box it. 15–30 minutes. One good discussion beats five rushed questions.
  5. Close with a single takeaway. Each person names one sentence, idea, or action they’re taking into the week. Log it. Revisit next time.

If you tweak or add questions, tell us at partners@risingtidegroup.net. We’ll keep improving this tool for other MSP teams.

Chapter One Discussion Questions and Observations

Chapter One Summary

In this chapter, we meet Joe, a go-getter who doesn't seem to be getting what he's going for. We are also introduced to his coworkers: Melanie and Gus, who help connect him with Pindar, or the Chairman, who agrees to tell Joe the huge trade secret that will surely be his key to success.

Chapter One Questions

  • How would you describe or define a go-getter?
  • Is it a good or bad thing? Why?
  • Do you consider yourself a go-getter?
  • Do you know people like Joe, Gus, or Melanie? What do you think of them as people or colleagues?
  • Why do you think the authors chose the name Pindar for the Chairman?
  • What do you think Pindar's conditions are going to be?

Chapter One Observations from the Rising Tide Team

  • Being a Go-Getter isn’t a bad thing!
  • It’s important to remember that the authors of this book are likely flattening the depth of characters into caricatures to more cleanly get the point of their story across. This is important to remember because rarely in life will the humans you interact with be the fulfillment of the assumptions you make about them.
  • Pindar is the name of a Greek poet who wrote odes of Victory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pindar. Does this mean we can expect victory for Joe?
Creatures of a day! What is anyone?
What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days. (Pindar, Pythian 8)

Join the Conversation

Want to hang out in these conversations with the Rising Tide team? We meet Fridays at 9:30 AM ET to talk through important business, technological, and communal developments, and for the next 14ish weeks, The Go-Giver! If you’re an MSP owner, consultant, or service professional who wants to grow your team’s emotional intelligence alongside your technical skill, you’re welcome here.

Reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Rising Tide Fridays Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity: no prep required.

October 13, 2025
8 min read

Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity

Curiosity isn’t taught; it’s practiced. At Rising Tide, we build a culture where curiosity fuels both technical and personal growth. Through team discussions, shared learning, and a book club centered on The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann, we explore how better questions lead to better people, better work, and better service.
Read post

Like many MSPs, Rising Tide invests in our people through access to books, trainings, conferences, and certifications. At its core, this is not education for education’s sake: rather, we believe the best technical work starts with curiosity, and we consistently seek ways to foster curiosity as a skill. You see, we think the best solutions come not just from curiosity about technology, but curiosity about each other, about our clients, and about our community. We want to be known as people who ask better questions, understand others' perspectives with clarity, and are always hungry for more. We believe that personal growth will always drive technical and professional success for our team, and as a result, our clients.

Curiosity is not something you learn from an SOP, a certification, or a conference.

So how does a business foster curiosity? Curiosity is not something you learn from an SOP, a certification, or a conference. It’s something you develop by creating the time and space for yourself and your people to feel safe to speak up, to ideate, to build, and to iterate.

We are doing our best to build a culture of curiosity and progress in as many ways as possible, not just through structured education, but in choosing tools, conversations, and activities where we can intentionally seek to learn from and about each other and the world around us. The last part is very important at a core level: we believe every person brings a different background, toolkit, and perspective that strengthens and deepens our own, even — or especially! — when we disagree.

every person brings a different background, toolkit, and perspective that strengthens and deepens our own, even — or especially! — when we disagree.

As a fully remote team of 6, this can be pretty difficult to do since we can’t go out for lunch or have regular physical touchpoints other brick-and-mortar businesses may enjoy. So, one of the standard ways we cultivate this is through scheduled daily and weekly team conversations where we review customer issues, books or videos, conferences attended, or other interesting things we’ve seen that we want to share.

Most recently, we chose to essentially start a book club where we would read The Go-Giver by Bob Burg, together, and to invite clients and friends to review it with us on a weekly call. It was important to us that as a team expectation, we should make sure no one felt the demand too great on top of weekly work expectations. Thus, we decided on reading one chapter (7-10 pages) a week, to make sure that it felt accessible to everyone. (Reading ahead is absolutely allowed and encouraged, but we will only discuss one chapter a week!)

how do you allow for people to join in the conversation even if they didn’t get a chance to read?

The next question for a book club is: how do you facilitate conversation in a way that allows for people to share what was meaningful to them, or to join in the conversation even if they didn’t get a chance to read? In preparing for our book meetings, I sought out online resources with simple chapter-by-chapter discussion questions. However, as a very easy read, it seemed that most questions online covered concepts that spanned multiple chapters, which encouraged reading ahead and missing perhaps some smaller ideas worth savoring in each chapter.

Honestly, we figure we’re not alone in this desire to have simple questions and to walk carefully through conversations, so we've decided to share our own discussion questions, chapter-by-chapter! These questions are written without consideration for future chapters of the book and are meant to help bring in conversation about the topics and themes specifically covered in the given chapter. These questions are open-ended and if you’re facilitating, we encourage you to take the stance of no-wrong-answers, just as an impartial listener. You never know what perspectives or fresh ideas may come out of conversation.

Check out The Go-Getter Chapter One Discussion Questions here.

We’ll continue to add discussion questions and commentary on the book club as we move forward. Next things I’d like to try is to offer facilitation to a team member who has read ahead, to help them stretch their muscles of asking questions and building conversations. What other ideas should we tie in?

Join the Conversation

Want to hang out in these conversations with the Rising Tide team? We meet Fridays at 9:30 AM ET to talk through important business, technological, and communal developments, and for the next 14ish weeks, The Go-Giver! If you’re an MSP owner, consultant, or service professional who wants to grow your team’s emotional intelligence alongside your technical skill, you’re welcome here.

Reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Rising Tide Fridays Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity: no prep required.