By
Jen Butler
April 7, 2025
•
20 min read
Tutorials

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
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!
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:
In addition to the video, I also shared all the custom field setups, canned text, and SQL in this GitHub gist.
This isn’t about making life harder for your techs. It’s about:
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

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:
In Chapter 7, "Rachel," we learn more about Rachel and about the characteristics that Pindar finds valuable.
Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!
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.

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

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.
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.
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!)
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?
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.