ConnectWise Report Automation: A Complete MSP Guide

ConnectWise Manage native reporting: what you actually get

ConnectWise Manage includes a Reports module accessible from the main navigation. Out of the box, you get access to several dozen pre-built report templates covering service tickets, time entries, billing, agreements, and contacts. These reports can be filtered by date range, company, board, technician, and other dimensions, then exported to PDF, Excel, or CSV.

For internal operations, this is genuinely useful. You can pull a time entry report to verify billing. You can run a ticket summary to see your team's volume for the month. You can generate a service level agreement compliance report by client. The data is there and it's accurate — ConnectWise Manage is a solid operational data store.

ConnectWise report automation at the native level also includes scheduled reports. From the Reports module, you can configure a report to run on a schedule and email results to specified recipients. This sounds like automation, and in a limited sense it is — but the output is a raw tabular export with ConnectWise branding, not a client-ready document. Sending a client a raw ConnectWise SLA report is the equivalent of sending your accountant's internal spreadsheet to a client instead of a formatted invoice.

ConnectWise has also expanded its reporting capabilities through ConnectWise Insight (formerly ConnectWise Automate's reporting features) and through deeper integration with ConnectWise PSA's custom reporting engine. But the fundamental constraint remains: these tools produce operational data exports, not narrative business reports designed to be read by non-technical stakeholders.

The real limitations of ConnectWise Manage reporting

Understanding where ConnectWise report automation falls short is essential for making the right decision about how to extend it. Here are the specific gaps that matter most for client-facing reporting:

No cross-tool data aggregation. ConnectWise Manage only knows about what's in ConnectWise Manage. Your RMM data — endpoint health, patch compliance, backup status, security alerts — lives in NinjaRMM, Datto, N-able, or another platform. Native ConnectWise reporting cannot pull that data. A complete client report requires both PSA and RMM data, and ConnectWise can only give you half the picture.

Limited white-labeling and branding. ConnectWise report outputs use ConnectWise's formatting and branding by default. Customizing these to look like professional client documents requires third-party tools or significant manual reformatting. Most MSPs don't want their clients to see "Powered by ConnectWise" on their monthly reports — it reveals your tech stack and looks unprofessional.

No narrative layer. A raw ConnectWise SLA report shows numbers in a table. What it doesn't show is context, trend analysis, or the exec-summary paragraph that translates "98.3% SLA compliance" into "Your team experienced minimal IT disruption this month." The narrative layer — the part that clients actually read — has to be written by a human or generated programmatically outside of ConnectWise.

Scheduled reports are basic. ConnectWise's scheduled report feature emails a static CSV or PDF on a schedule. There is no delivery tracking, no portal delivery option, no per-client customization, and no review/approval workflow. For MSPs managing 15+ clients, this becomes a fragile system that breaks silently — you often won't know a report failed to deliver until a client mentions they haven't received anything in three months.

ConnectWise report automation doesn't scale per-client. Building a customized, branded report for each of your 20 clients using native tools requires maintaining 20 separate report configurations, 20 scheduled jobs, and 20 formatting adjustments. Every new client means more configuration work. Every ConnectWise update potentially breaks something in your setup.

Extending ConnectWise with the API: how it works

ConnectWise Manage exposes a comprehensive REST API that gives programmatic access to virtually every object in the system — tickets, time entries, contacts, companies, agreements, SLAs, configurations, and more. For MSPs with development resources, the API approach enables genuinely powerful ConnectWise report automation.

The ConnectWise Manage API uses basic authentication with API keys. Here is how to set it up:

Step 1: Create a dedicated API member in ConnectWise Manage. Navigate to System > Members > API Members and click the "+" to create a new member. Give it a descriptive name like "ReportingAPI" or "ReadOnlyReporting". Set the member type to "API" and assign a role that limits access to only the modules your reporting integration needs. Do not use your own admin member for API integrations — this is both a security risk and an operational risk (if your admin password changes, the integration breaks).

Step 2: Define the role with minimum required permissions. Create a custom security role specifically for your reporting API member. For reporting purposes, you typically need read access to: Service > Service Tickets, Service > Time Entries, Service > SLA, Company > Companies, and Reports. Explicitly deny access to financial data, billing, and any modules not needed for reporting. ConnectWise Manage's granular permission system makes this straightforward.

Step 3: Generate the API key pair. In the API member's profile, navigate to the API Keys tab and generate a new key pair. You'll receive a public key and a private key. Store both immediately in your password manager — the private key is only shown once. The authentication header format for ConnectWise API requests is: Authorization: Basic [base64(company+publickey:privatekey)]

Step 4: Test with the ConnectWise API Explorer. ConnectWise provides an interactive API documentation page (usually at your ConnectWise URL + /v4_6_release/apis/3.0/swagger) where you can test API calls before building your integration. Start with a simple GET request to /v4_6_release/apis/3.0/service/tickets to verify your credentials work.

Step 5: Build your data extraction layer. Pull the specific data you need — ticket counts, resolution times, SLA compliance rates — using the appropriate API endpoints. Aggregate, calculate, and format the data in your application layer. This is where the real engineering work happens: translating raw API responses into the metrics your client reports need.

The API approach gives you maximum flexibility for ConnectWise report automation. The tradeoff is development and maintenance cost. A properly built ConnectWise reporting integration takes 40–80 hours of development time to build, plus ongoing maintenance as the API evolves and your reporting requirements change. For most MSPs, this is not a good use of engineering resources — unless reporting automation is a core part of your product offering.

ConnectWise report automation with BrightGauge

BrightGauge is the most popular third-party tool for extending ConnectWise Manage reporting. It connects to ConnectWise via the API, syncs your data on a schedule, and lets you build dashboards and report templates using a visual interface. For MSPs who want a DIY approach with more polish than native ConnectWise reports, BrightGauge is the default choice.

BrightGauge's key strengths in the context of ConnectWise report automation:

• Deep, well-maintained ConnectWise Manage integration with pre-built data sources for common metrics
• Client Report Builder that produces formatted, white-labeled PDF reports
• Pre-built report templates for common MSP use cases (service desk summary, SLA performance, etc.)
• Live dashboards you can display on a TV in your NOC or share with clients via a portal link
• Multi-tool support — BrightGauge also connects to many RMMs, so you can combine PSA and RMM data in one report

The significant caveat: BrightGauge is a platform, not a service. Your team builds the reports. Your team configures the templates. Your team manages the data mappings. Your team troubleshoots when something doesn't look right. BrightGauge is genuinely powerful for MSPs who have someone dedicated to building and maintaining it — typically a vCIO or operations manager who can invest the 10–20 hours of initial setup plus ongoing maintenance.

BrightGauge's pricing starts around $299/month for smaller MSPs and scales to $600+ per month for larger teams. At that price, it's a reasonable tool for ConnectWise report automation if your team has the bandwidth to use it effectively. If the person responsible for maintaining it leaves, or if reporting falls to the back of the priority queue during a busy month, the automation breaks and reports stop going out.

Security and read-only access best practices

Any ConnectWise report automation setup requires giving a third-party tool or integration access to your PSA data. This is a reasonable and common practice — but it needs to be done with proper security controls. Here are the non-negotiable practices:

Always use a dedicated API member, never admin credentials. This bears repeating because it's the most common security mistake. Admin credentials give full access to your ConnectWise environment — billing, client data, configurations, everything. A reporting integration needs read access to a fraction of that. Create a named API member with exactly the permissions needed and nothing more.

Apply the principle of least privilege. Your reporting API member should have read-only access to service tickets, time entries, and company data. It should not have access to financial records, billing information, employee records, or any write operations. ConnectWise Manage's security role system lets you be very granular here — use it.

Rotate API keys on a schedule. ConnectWise API keys do not expire by default. Establish a quarterly or semi-annual key rotation practice. When you rotate keys, update them in your reporting platform's credentials store immediately. Document the rotation in your IT runbook so it doesn't get missed during staff transitions.

Audit third-party access regularly. Review which integrations have API access to ConnectWise Manage at least annually. Disable any API members associated with tools you no longer use. This reduces your attack surface and prevents credential sprawl.

Verify the integration's data handling policy. Before granting any third-party tool access to ConnectWise, review their data processing agreement. Understand where the data is stored, how long it's retained, who has access to it, and how it's secured. This is basic vendor due diligence that many MSPs skip — and that their clients expect them to take seriously.

When a done-for-you approach to ConnectWise report automation makes sense

For MSPs who want ConnectWise report automation without the overhead of building and maintaining their own integration, a done-for-you service is often the better answer.

This is the model Roviret uses. We connect to your ConnectWise Manage environment using read-only API credentials — set up following exactly the security practices described above. We pull your service ticket data, time entries, SLA performance, and client information on a monthly schedule. We combine that with data from your RMM (NinjaRMM, Datto, N-able) to build complete, cross-platform reports that cover both your PSA and RMM data in a single document.

The practical difference from DIY tools: you never configure a data mapping, build a report template, or troubleshoot an API connection. You provide read-only credentials during a 48-hour onboarding process, approve a sample report, and the reports go out to your clients every month. When ConnectWise updates their API, we handle the maintenance. When you add a new client, we add them to the automation.

ConnectWise report automation via Roviret starts at $600/month (plus a $1,500 one-time setup fee) for up to 20 clients, with no per-report pricing and no usage limits. For MSPs who have tried to use BrightGauge and found that it took more of their team's time than expected, or for MSPs who want to start automating without any internal technical investment, the done-for-you model makes the most economic sense.

Frequently asked questions