Your CRM upgrades itself. Someone should be watching.

Ascendix supports its own product, and that is a different thing from supporting your org. A vendor fixes defects in the package and publishes documentation; it does not know how your desks transact, why your commission splits are structured the way they are, what previous customization added, or which of your integrations matters most on a payout day. A managed service covers the org-specific half: regression testing releases against your configuration, administration, commission and reporting changes, data quality and integration monitoring. Where a genuine package defect appears, we reproduce it and raise it with Ascendix on your behalf — that part remains their obligation.

Because automatic means you do not get to decline it. Ascendix has shipped an unbroken line of releases since 2017 — 34 published release notes carrying the version line from 1.12 to 1.42 — and across that history the package has reworked rent table calculations, moved commission privacy to a role-based model, changed how files and notes are stored, and repeatedly adjusted deal close behaviour. Any configuration, integration or custom code resting on those behaviours can be affected. Regression testing against your real transaction types turns each release into a short, boring check rather than an investigation that starts when a broker reports a missing comp.

Often yes, and we will say so when it is the right answer. An internal admin is close to the business, available immediately, and cheaper at steady state once the role is genuinely full-time. The two risks are breadth and continuity: one person rarely covers configuration, Apex, integration monitoring and release regression equally well, and a single admin with no documentation is a continuity risk. The arrangement that works best for most brokerages is a capable internal admin handling day-to-day configuration and user support, with a retained partner covering release testing, development and integration work. That is a genuine option, not a consolation prize.

Yes, and it is most of the support work we take on. We start with an org audit — a describe and metadata review that separates what the managed package does, what previous customization added, and what is an interaction between them. That distinction is usually the hard part, because a behaviour blamed on the vendor often turns out to be an old Flow. The audit produces a risk register: what will break on the next release, which integrations have no monitoring, where commission configuration has drifted from the agreement, and what is undocumented. We would rather find all of that in month one than during an incident in month four.

Agreed in the service schedule rather than published here, and that is deliberate. A number on a web page is not a commitment, and a single figure would misrepresent how severity actually works: a commission calculation failing during a payout run is not the same urgency as a report layout request, even though both are tickets. We set response and resolution targets against your working hours and time zones, with severity defined by business impact in your terms. What we will commit to publicly is that the person who responds is on the team that knows your org, not a triage desk reading a script.

Yes, with the caveat that these are separately packaged and separately licensed, so scope is confirmed per engagement. Ascendix Search ships as its own package with its own permission set and connected app, and its per-object configuration, geo-filtering and geocoding setup are all administration we handle — including the Google API key behind Property geocoding, which is a chargeable service rather than a native capability. Composer is licensed separately and its templates need maintaining as your documents change. The AI Suite is billed per org rather than per user, which changes the adoption question: the cost does not scale with how many people use it, so under-adoption is pure waste and worth measuring.

It runs as a defined process rather than an improvisation, which matters because broker departure touches confidential data and live money. Ascendix documents user impersonation, licence reassignment and record reassignment flows, and commission sharing logic explicitly covers ownership changes and deletions. Our runbook covers the same ground every time: access revoked, licence reclaimed, open deals and listings reassigned to named owners, commission records handled according to the partnership agreement rather than ad hoc, activity history preserved, and the departing user's reports and dashboards transferred rather than orphaned. Done consistently, this is routine. Done differently each time, it is how pipeline goes missing.