Guided Setup
A blueprint interview that builds your service desk, catalogue and agreements from a handful of answers, a Getting Started checklist that completes itself from live data, and in-app tours that show you where to click.
The problem
A new PSA arrives empty. The owner spends the first three weekends creating queues, typing in ticket categories, guessing at SLA targets and rewriting the canned replies from the old tool. Six months in, the support mailbox is still not connected, the invoice settings were never chosen, and nobody can say what is finished and what is not. Ask an MSP owner how set up their PSA is and the answer is a feeling.
What Solidlio does about it
You pick the business model closest to yours from six blueprints and answer a short interview: team size, the hours you staff, how you bill, what you look after, your standard hourly rate and where you are. Solidlio shows you every item it is about to create, area by area, and creates nothing until you say so. Then it builds all of it: queues with routing rules, service levels whose clocks match the hours you actually staff, a three-level ticket taxonomy, canned replies, request templates, automations, a priced service catalogue and rate card, agreement templates, runbooks and project templates. Run it again next year and it adds what is missing without touching what you have tuned. The Getting Started checklist takes over from there. It watches your workspace and ticks each step when the real thing exists, shows the price of anything your plan does not include, and emails you the single next step if you stall.
Capabilities
| Capability | What it does |
|---|---|
| Six business blueprints | IT on the side, Managed services, Co-managed IT, Security-forward MSP, vCIO & consulting, and Start from scratch; each pre-fills the interview for that shape of business |
| Short interview | Six questions and two switches: team size, coverage, billing models, service areas, hourly rate, country and time zone, plus whether to copy agreements and whether new clients inherit the standard |
| Itemised preview | Lists every queue, policy, category group, template and price before anything is written; optional areas can be turned off, business hours and queues cannot |
| Coverage-honest service levels | Ships only the Bronze, Silver or Gold tiers your coverage answer can staff, and runs P1 clocks around the clock only where the tier promises it |
| Business hours and holidays | Sets the working week from your coverage answer and loads two years of Canadian or US statutory holidays, in your time zone |
| Priced catalogue and rate card | Activates the services your areas imply at benchmark prices converted to your currency, builds a four-level labour rate ladder from one number, and prices 10, 20 and 40-hour blocks at 10, 12 and 15% off |
| Agreements and runbooks | Copies the MSA, NDA, SOW, SLA, AUP and DPA starter pack into your account and publishes up to 18 runbooks and policies for staff only |
| Additive and repeatable | Creates only what is missing on every run; a queue, policy, template or article that already exists keeps its settings; an area that fails is reported on its own line and finished by the next run |
| New-client defaults | Applies your hours, boards, service level and ticket categories to every client you onboard, including bulk accounting imports, when you opt in |
| Getting Started checklist | 40 steps for an MSP and 34 for an organization, in six groups each, with why it matters, what you will need, a time estimate and a link to the page that does it |
| Self-completing steps | 59 detectors read live state on every load; a detected step cannot be hand-ticked, and skipping a step never lowers your score |
| Plan-aware steps | Shows a locked step with the tier that includes it and its monthly price, with an in-place upgrade where the account can self-serve |
| Provider-owned steps | Marks sender identity, payment method and billing settings “Handled by your provider” on a managed client, and makes the same steps actionable for the provider |
| Nudge emails | Sends one email naming the single next step, at most three times and at least three days apart, and stops on dismissal or opt-out |
| Guided tours | Spotlights the control to click, step by step, on the team, queue and email pages, with keyboard navigation and no third-party script |
| Activation funnel | Records a daily completion snapshot per workspace so platform operators can see the step where setup stalls |
Built for MSPs and their clients
The blueprint interview builds the MSP’s own practice. A managed client is a separate tenant and never receives the MSP’s commercial content. Each side works its own checklist, and the provider sees the client’s checklist with the client-onboarding work added on top.
| Organization | MSP | |
|---|---|---|
| Blueprint interview | Not offered | Runs it on first login and from Settings at any time; layers a second blueprint later |
| New-client defaults | Receives business hours, queues, service level and ticket categories when its provider opted in | Chooses once; its rate card, catalogue, block packages, pricing profile, agreements, runbooks and project templates are never copied over |
| Getting Started checklist | 34 steps, all self-serve except three | 40 steps for its own practice, plus every client’s checklist with four steps only the provider sees |
| Provider-owned steps | Read-only “Handled by your provider” | Actionable when viewing the client |
| Plan and locked steps | Upgrades its own plan at any time | Cannot lock a client out of upgrading |
| Nudge emails | Sent to the organization’s admin with the organization’s next step | Sent to the MSP’s admin with the MSP’s next step |
| Guided tours | Show me on invite team, create queue and connect email | Deep links only; the tours are written for organization pages |
Onboarding a client (agreements, signatures, portal invitations, the per-client tracker) is covered in the Client Onboarding datasheet.
How it works
- First login — a new MSP admin lands in a short wizard: company profile, plan, billing and tax, then Your Setup. The last two can be skipped.
- Pick a blueprint — six cards. Opening one lists who it is for and everything it creates from its own defaults, so you can compare before you commit.
- Answer the interview — every answer is pre-filled for the blueprint you chose. Change the ones that differ. Choosing a country moves the currency with it.
- Review the plan — the exact list of what will be created, grouped by area, with a count. Turn off any optional area. Notices call out anything your answers ruled out, such as a 24/7 tier you have not staffed, and any area whose management screen your plan does not include.
- Apply — each area is created and reported: created, already in place, or could not be set up. A failed area is finished by running setup again; nothing is created twice.
- Work the checklist — Getting Started ticks steps as the real thing appears, links each remaining step to the page that does it, and offers Show me on pages that have a tour.
- Stay on track — a stalled workspace gets a nudge naming its next step. When everything is done, dismiss the checklist and it leaves your navigation.
Editions
Guided setup is included in every tier: the blueprint interview, both checklists, tours, nudges and snapshots. A blueprint creates its full set on every tier. What varies is whether your plan includes the screens that manage three of the areas afterwards; the wizard says so before you apply, names the tier that does, and offers the upgrade in place.
| Capability | Free | Starter | Growth | Scale | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blueprint interview, preview, apply, re-run | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Getting Started checklists, nudges, tours | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Manage the service levels a blueprint created | — | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Manage the project templates a blueprint created | — | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Manage the business hours and holidays a blueprint created | — | — | ● | ● | ● |
Checklist steps your plan does not include appear locked, with the tier that does. On MSP tiers: service levels and projects from Starter; email-to-ticket, QuickBooks Online, change management and API keys from Growth; custom portal domain and roll-up reporting from Scale; brand colours, white-label and single sign-on on Enterprise. End-customer tiers gate the same steps at Professional, Business and Enterprise.
Integrations
- QuickBooks Online — a checklist step, and customers imported from it receive your new-client defaults like any wizard-created client
- Solidlio Ticketing, Service Catalogue, Documents, Knowledge Base and Projects — the blueprint writes ordinary configuration into each, so everything it creates is edited in the usual place afterwards
Compliance and audit
- What you approve is what is created. The preview and the apply resolve the same plan, so the review screen cannot promise something apply does not do.
- Existing rows are left as you tuned them. Every write is keyed on the row’s name or path, and a match is counted as already in place. The exceptions are deliberate: business hours are re-applied to your latest answers, an inactive queue is re-activated, and an automation missing its queue is repaired.
- Every apply is recorded with the blueprint, the time, the answers given, the count created per area, and a history of the last twenty applies.
- Completion is derived from live state. Checklist progress is recomputed on every load; a detected step cannot be hand-ticked; manual ticks and skips carry a timestamp.
- Internal content stays internal. Runbooks and policies are published for staff only and do not appear in a client portal.
- A client tenant receives configuration only. The rate card, catalogue, block packages, pricing profile, agreements, runbooks and project templates are excluded from client defaults by an explicit list.
- Cross-tenant reads are unprobeable. A client checklist you do not service answers not found rather than forbidden.
- Nudges are bounded. At most three per workspace, at least three days apart, never for a locked or provider-owned step, and a dry run computes the same result without sending or recording anything.