M&A as growth strategy

M&A for growth is not a new strategy in the MSP world. Deal activity has picked up over the past few years and hasn’t shown any sign of slowing down. Most private equity firms focus on acquiring ownership during the deal-making process and underestimate the hidden cost of integration afterwards.

One of the most common problems: different MSPs run on different PSAs. The newly acquired company might be on ConnectWise Manage while the mothership lives in AutoTask (or vice versa). Realigning the tech stack often means months of manual data migration, duplicated work, and mismatched tickets. Any tools that can automate this transition will accelerate integration and smooth out the first 6–12 months post-close.

Migrate Company, Contact, Ticket Data

Here’s a straightforward workflow that moves data from ConnectWise Manage to AutoTask (or the other direction) with clean mapping and no duplicates:

1. Connect both PSAs using API credentials for Manage and AutoTask.

2. Map fields between systems (companies, contacts, statuses, priorities, boards/queues, UDFs).

3. Match or create the Company in the destination PSA based on name/domain.

4. Match or create Contacts by email and link them to the correct Company.

5. Match or create the Ticket with mapped fields, notes, and attachments.

6. Record cross-system IDs so future runs update instead of creating duplicates.

7. Repeat safely—the workflow is idempotent because it always reads before writing.

8. Run on a trigger—Automatically run the workflow when ticket has any update.

Idempotent by Design

The workflow is idempotent—meaning you can run it multiple times without causing duplicates or strange side effects. This helps you re-run a workflow that is partially complete to achieve desired outcomes.

Under the hood, it is done by reading before writing. The workflow checks if a Company/Contact/Ticket already has a stored external ID. If it exists, update instead of creating a new record. If not, create it once and save the mapping for future runs. That’s what lets you safely re-run the migration during testing, cutover, or clean-up.

Turn on Workflow Triggers

You don’t have to run this once and walk away. You can use an AutoTask webhook (or ConnectWise callback) on new or updated tickets to trigger the workflow and keep records in sync ad hoc. Alternatively, you can schedule the ticket synchronization to run on a regular cadence—every 5 minutes, hourly, nightly—whatever matches your integration plan.

This gives you a smooth path: bulk migrate the history, then keep both PSAs in sync during the transition period until you’re ready to shut one down.