Prepare your Autotask before onboarding: the setup checklist

Current's Autotask connection is deep — it reads thirty-odd entities and writes back to a dozen. That depth means the quality of your first sync is decided in Autotask, not in Current. This is the article to read before you paste a single credential: what to create, what to clean up, and what to turn on, so that the first pull and the first push both land.

Work through it in order. When you're done, use the "You're ready when…" checklist at the bottom as your sign-off. For the connection walkthrough itself, see "Connect Autotask and choose what syncs". For the field-level detail on what maps where, see "Autotask sync: the complete field-mapping reference".

Use a dedicated API user for Current, not a shared one and not a human login. The reason is attribution and control: Current's traffic shows up separately in Autotask's own API usage reporting, and the credential can be revoked on its own without touching a person's login. What a dedicated API user does NOT do is buy Current its own request quota — Autotask's hourly request threshold is shared across every integration hitting your Autotask database, so your RMM, your reporting tool, and Current all draw on the same budget no matter how many API users you create. Current reads ThresholdInformation before each 5-minute delta pull and defers the run once the account crosses 80% of the threshold, resuming automatically.

1. 1
   Create the API user in Autotask

   Admin → Resources (Users), New → New API User. Give it the API User (API-only) security level. Current's connection card says the same thing in its setup hint.
2. 2
   Generate the username, secret, and tracking identifier

   Autotask issues all three. The tracking identifier (also called the integration code) is required — Current sends it on every single API call, and Autotask rejects requests without it.
3. 3
   Name it recognisably

   Something like current-sync@yourmsp.com. It shows up in Autotask's own API usage reporting, and you'll want to be able to tell Current's traffic apart from your other integrations at a glance.
4. 4
   Do not fill in a zone URL

   Current discovers your Autotask zone automatically from the API username alone — Autotask's zone lookup is a public endpoint keyed by username, so no credentials are even needed to resolve it. Leave the API zone URL field blank unless someone at Autotask has explicitly told you to pin a specific zone.

Autotask permissions are per-object. Current needs read on everything it pulls, add/edit on everything it pushes, and — easily the most-missed item — read on entity metadata, because that's how Current resolves your picklists (status, priority, project type, task type, department, market segment) live instead of guessing at hardcoded ids.

Grant read access to all of the following. The right-hand column is what you actually lose if that permission is missing.

If you want Current to write back — and most of the platform's value depends on it — also grant add and edit on these:

Finally, the API user needs permission to read entity metadata (Autotask's entityInformation/fields) on the entities Current resolves picklists for. If metadata is blocked on Projects, project builds hard-fail because the project type can't be resolved. If it's blocked on Tasks, every required task field goes unfilled and Autotask rejects the creates one field at a time.

Metadata (picklist) read required on:
Projects   Tasks     TaskNotes   Tickets
TicketCharges         TimeEntries  Resources
Companies  CompanyNotes  CompanyToDos  Contacts
Contracts  Opportunities  ProjectCharges

Everything personal in Current — logging time, My Day, PTO-aware scheduling, cost and margin, an account executive's CRM book — hangs off one link: the Autotask Resource ↔ Current user match. Current makes that match automatically on a lowercase email comparison. That is the only automatic match; there is no name-based fallback.

Autotask enforces required fields at write time. Current auto-fills any required field that happens to be a *picklist*, using your zone's own default value (or the first active value). What it cannot invent is a required free-text, numeric, or reference field — and what happens then depends on the surface. On a CRM company push, an unfillable required field stops the push with "Autotask requires field(s) Current can't auto-fill," and it will not auto-retry until a human supplies the value. On a project/task build, Current attempts the creates anyway and then tells you afterwards which required task fields it couldn't fill ("set them in the task drawer, then build again"). On a won-quote ticket create, you'll simply see Autotask's own rejection. Either way, audit your zone's required fields on Companies, Projects, Tasks, and Tickets before you go live.

This is the step most MSPs skip and most regret. Current pulls Autotask Companies with no filter at all — there is no active/inactive flag on the Autotask Companies pull, and Current has nowhere to store one. Every dead, archived, or long-dormant company in your Autotask lands in Current as an ordinary company, indistinguishable from a live one, and shows up in the CRM, in search, and in the prospect pool.

• ＋Merge duplicate companies in Autotask FIRST. Current matches companies on the Autotask id and nothing else — no name matching, no domain matching. An Autotask duplicate becomes a permanent Current duplicate.
• ＋Fix blank company names. A company with no companyName imports with the literal placeholder name "Autotask company 12345".
• ＋Audit the companyType, classification, and marketSegmentID picklists for DEACTIVATED values still sitting on live companies. Current drops inactive picklist values when it builds its label map, so those companies import with a blank type, classification, or segment — the id is there, but there's nothing to show for it.
• ＋Set ownerResourceID (the account owner) on every company you care about, and make sure that owner's resource is linked to a Current user. Unlinked, the company shows no account manager — and a later company update push fails loudly.
• ＋Pre-create every Market Segment value you'll need. Autotask's REST API can't create market segments, so Current never will either — an unmapped industry is skipped with a warning, not guessed at. Then fill in the mapping; see "Mapping CRM industries to Autotask Market Segments".
• ＋Check whether your zone exposes a Lead Source picklist on Companies. The field's API name varies by zone, so Current scans your live field list for a picklist with "lead" in its name or label. If there isn't one, lead source stays a Current-only field and never reaches Autotask.
• ＋Confirm your zone exposes primaryContact on Contacts. If it doesn't, every contact imports with the primary-contact flag off, and Current logs one warning per sync run to tell you.
• ＋De-duplicate contact email addresses in Autotask, so Current can enforce one contact per email cleanly.

These three drive MRR, seat counts, customer status, and the working calendar the scheduler books against. Each has a specific shape Autotask has to be in.

See "Holidays and employee costs: where the numbers come from" for how these land in the app, and "Logging time and how it reaches your PSA's billing" for the full time-entry lifecycle once your resources are linked.

Two switches inside Current are deliberately closed by default. Neither is an Autotask setting, but both will stop a write dead if you don't know about them, and both belong in a go-live plan.

1. 1
   CRM write mode starts at OFF

   Every CRM write to Autotask — companies, contacts, notes, deals, to-dos — is blocked until an admin opts in. Off means no Autotask writes at all.
2. 2
   Create a test company in Autotask before you QA

   Test mode is the middle rung: it allows CRM writes only against companies whose live Autotask name starts with "ZZ-Current Test" (companies named with the older "ZZ-Cascade Test" prefix still count). Create one in Autotask now, so your team can exercise the whole flow without touching a real account.
3. 3
   Flip to live deliberately

   Live mode is an explicit admin action, not a default. Move to it only after test-mode writes have landed correctly in Autotask.
4. 4
   Map your pipeline stages

   Pushing a deal to an Autotask Opportunity requires a mapping from each Current pipeline stage to an Autotask Opportunity stage. Set it up under Integrations before your first deal push, or you'll get "This deal's stage isn't mapped to an Autotask Opportunity stage yet."

• ＋A dedicated Autotask API user exists with the API User (API-only) security level, and its username resolves in Autotask's zone lookup.
• ＋That API user has READ on every entity in the table above, ADD/EDIT on every entity you intend to push, and metadata (picklist) read on Projects, Tasks, Tickets, TimeEntries, Resources, Companies, Contacts, Contracts, Opportunities and the note/charge/to-do entities.
• ＋The API user has View permission on internal cost data — otherwise every internal cost silently reads as 0.
• ＋Every person who will use Current has an ACTIVE Autotask resource whose email matches their Current sign-in email, exactly (case aside).
• ＋Each of those resources holds an ACTIVE role through an ACTIVE Resource Role/Department association.
• ＋At least one active general allocation (labor) billing code exists.
• ＋At least one active, non-Template project type exists.
• ＋At least one value exists in the Tasks Department picklist.
• ＋For won-quote conversion: at least one ticket queue exists, plus usable ticket status and priority values, a charge type value, and a product or billing code on anything you'll charge.
• ＋You know which of your Autotask ticket queues are machine noise rather than customer work — alerts and monitoring, RMM automation, backup and BDR jobs, spam and internal-IT — so you can mute them and keep support history, sentiment, SBR stats, and AI insights honest. The setup wizard's Mapping & noise step flags the usual suspects "Recommended off" and you decide; the same toggles live in Integrations → Autotask → Manage. See "Ticket-queue noise: which queues and boards to sync, and which to mute".
• ＋Duplicate companies are merged, blank company names are fixed, and dead companies are the ones you're genuinely willing to import — because all of them will import.
• ＋No live company points at a deactivated companyType, classification, or market segment picklist value.
• ＋Every market segment you need already exists in Autotask.
• ＋Recurring contracts carry a type label containing "recurring" and an active status label, with current-dated contract service unit rows behind them.
• ＋A holiday set is populated, and time off is approved.
• ＋A "ZZ-Current Test" company (or a legacy "ZZ-Cascade Test" one) exists in Autotask for your CRM write-mode test pass.