Glossary
A client, a junior tech or a board member asks what an acronym means, and you need a plain answer. Every term here is defined in a sentence or two, for MSPs.
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All terms, A to Z
A
AISP (All-In Seat Price)The average monthly recurring revenue an MSP earns per supported user seat, across every managed services client. It folds all recurring services into one per-user figure.AR (Accounts Receivable)Money clients owe you for work or services already invoiced and not yet paid. It sits on the balance sheet as an asset until it is collected.AYCE (All You Can Eat)An all-you-can-eat agreement bundles unlimited support for a fixed monthly fee, with no per-ticket or per-hour billing for work inside its scope.
B
BAA (Business Associate Agreement)A business associate agreement is the contract a healthcare client must have with you before you touch anything containing patient information, setting out what you may do with it and what you owe them if it leaks.Billable UtilizationThe percentage of a technician's available working hours that are logged against client work. Available hours exclude holidays and approved leave.BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)BYOD is an arrangement where staff use personal phones, tablets or laptops to do company work, rather than being issued equipment the business owns.
C
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)The total sales and marketing spend in a period divided by the number of new clients won in it. It is what one new client actually cost you to win.CMMCCMMC is the American defense department's framework for proving that a contractor handling sensitive but unclassified government information has the security controls it claims, verified at intervals rather than asserted.Co-managed ITCo-managed IT is an arrangement where an MSP works alongside a client's internal IT staff rather than replacing them, with responsibilities split by agreement rather than by default.CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)The share of post-ticket survey responses that rate the support experience positively. It measures how clients felt about individual interactions with the service desk.
D
DSO (Days Sales Outstanding)The average number of days between sending an invoice and receiving payment. It measures how quickly billed revenue turns into cash.Dwell TimeHow long an attacker is inside an environment before being detected. It runs from the first compromise to the moment someone notices it.
E
EBITDAEarnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. It approximates the operating profit a business produces, independent of how it is financed or taxed.EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response)EDR is software on endpoints that watches process and system behavior, records it, and allows an operator to investigate and respond (isolating a machine or killing a process) rather than only blocking known-bad files.eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score)The NPS question asked of your own staff: how likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work. Promoters minus detractors, from minus 100 to plus 100.
F
G
Gross MarginRevenue minus the direct cost of delivering it, such as technician labor, tools and resold product, expressed as a percentage of revenue.GRR (Gross Revenue Retention)The share of last year's recurring revenue from existing clients that you kept, counting cancellations and downgrades but ignoring any expansion. It can never exceed 100 percent.
H
I
ITILITIL is a published framework of IT service management practices (incident, problem, change and service request handling among them), used as a common vocabulary and a starting structure.ITSM (IT Service Management)IT service management is the practice of running IT as a set of defined services with owners, processes and agreed levels, rather than as a queue of requests handled however whoever picks them up prefers.
L
Logo ChurnThe number of clients who ended their agreement in a period, as a percentage of the clients you had at the start of it. It counts clients, not dollars.LTV (Lifetime Value)The total gross margin a typical client produces over the whole time they stay with you. It is usually estimated as monthly gross margin per client times average client lifetime in months.
M
MDR (Managed Detection and Response)MDR is detection and response delivered as a service, where an external team monitors the tooling, triages what it produces, and responds, rather than the software being handed over for someone in-house to watch.MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication)A sign-in that needs two or more kinds of proof, such as a password plus a code from an app or a hardware key. A stolen password alone is then not enough to get in.MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)Monthly recurring revenue is the predictable, contracted revenue an MSP bills every month, counted separately from project work, hardware resale and hourly labor.
N
NPS (Net Promoter Score)A loyalty score from one question: how likely are you to recommend us, on a scale of 0 to 10. It is the percentage of promoters (9 or 10) minus the percentage of detractors (0 to 6).NRR (Net Revenue Retention)The recurring revenue your existing clients pay today as a percentage of what the same clients paid a year ago, counting expansion, price increases, downgrades and cancellations.
P
Q
R
RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management)RMM is the software an MSP uses to monitor client endpoints and servers, apply patches, run scripts and access machines remotely, usually through an agent installed on each device.RPO (Recovery Point Objective)The most data, measured in time, the business can afford to lose in a failure. An RPO of four hours means backups must run at least every four hours.RTO (Recovery Time Objective)The longest a system can be down after a failure before the outage becomes unacceptable to the business. It sets how fast a restore has to be.
S
SLA (Service Level Agreement)A service level agreement is the part of a contract that states what response and resolution a client is entitled to, usually by severity, and what happens when you miss it.SOC 2SOC 2 is an audit report in which an independent firm examines how you handle security, availability and confidentiality, and states whether your controls did what you said they did.
T
TTFR (Time to First Response)Time to first response is how long a client waits between raising a ticket and hearing from a human who has read it.TTR (Time to Resolution)Time to resolution is how long a ticket takes from being raised to the underlying issue being fixed, measured end to end rather than by how long anyone worked on it.
V
X
Z
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