Current + Autotask integration

Current is built to run alongside Autotask, not replace it. Autotask stays your system of record for billing, contracts, and financials. Current adds the delivery layer on top: dependency-aware scheduling, a native critical-path engine, Kanban and Gantt boards, milestones, and a partner portal with database-level financial isolation. The Autotask integration is a genuine two-way sync, so the two systems stay in agreement instead of drifting apart.

What the integration does

Every project in Current carries a sync mode. Projects set to 'autotask_synced' keep Autotask as the billing source of truth while Current owns scheduling — start and end dates, task criticality, dependencies, and milestones. Time entered against those projects flows to Autotask so your billing records stay complete and accurate. Projects set to Current-native never trigger an Autotask API call at all, which is ideal for internal or cross-department work you would never bill through the PSA.

What data flows

The sync is bidirectional across the fields that matter to delivery and billing:

• Projects, phases, and tasks — created and updated in both directions, with last-editor-wins arbitration on the two-way fields.
• Scheduling — Current pushes start dates, end dates, and milestones back to Autotask so your PSA reflects the real plan.
• Time entries — native time logged in Current flows to Autotask for billing.
• Companies and contacts on the CRM side — with account-manager reassignment arbitration, email-domain gating, and NeverBounce verification so your book of business stays clean.
• Resource assignments — with a keep-versus-wipe convention so an absent value is treated as 'no change,' not a deletion.

Why it matters

Autotask Projects is billing-native and mature, but native critical-path scheduling usually needs a bolt-on like Moovila or TopLeft, and Autotask task dependencies are finish-to-start only. Current gives you PTO- and availability-aware scheduling, back-scheduling, an interactive dependency map, and a real cycle-detecting critical-path engine — then keeps Autotask authoritative for the money. You get modern project delivery without giving up the PSA your billing and contracts already live in.

Current syncs two-way with three PSAs — Autotask, ConnectWise, and Halo PSA — and one connects per workspace. The two-way push is gated by a tenant setting so you stay in control of when Current writes back to Autotask, and Current-native projects are guarded to never make a stray API call to your live instance.

Which system owns what

The boundary is deliberate and worth stating plainly, because it is the thing that makes a two-system setup safe. Autotask remains the system of record for time, contracts, and billing. Current owns scheduling: dependencies, computed dates, critical path, and the assignments that follow from them. Neither system is asked to be authoritative about something the other does better.

• Pulled from Autotask: projects, phases, tickets, tasks, and time entries, plus companies and contacts for the CRM.
• Pushed to Autotask: task dates and estimated hours, project creation, and time entries.
• Never leaves Current: the dependency graph itself and milestone flags, because Autotask has no field to hold them.

Two-way push is a switch you control

Pushing to Autotask is a tenant setting. With it off, the integration is pull-only: Current reads Autotask and computes schedules, and nothing is written back. That makes an evaluation genuinely safe, because you can run Current against real data for a month without a single write reaching your PSA. Turn it on when you are ready.

What happens when a date will not stick

This is the part most integrations handle badly, and it is worth knowing Current names the reason rather than failing silently. Autotask can accept a date and store something different, and there are several legitimate causes: its own predecessors recalculating your date away, a completed task locking its schedule, an end date that is read-only for that task type, or a fixed-work task deriving its end from effort. Current detects each case and reports it.

It also self-heals where it safely can. Autotask schedules on business days, so a date landing on a weekend is stored as the next working day; Current detects that and adopts Autotask's business-day answer, but only after proving no other cause is in play. If a task will not fit inside its parent project or phase window, Current widens the parent and retries before giving up.

Getting set up

You need an Autotask API user with permissions for the entities above. Current probes actual read and write access at connection time rather than trusting the reported permission set, so you find out immediately if something is missing instead of discovering it mid-sync. Each workspace connects one PSA.