“Before Trails, making a guide felt like its own project. Now I can hit start, do the work and have something polished enough to share.”
When Beacon IT helped a customer move from Dashlane to Keeper, Joe Samuels knew the migration could turn into a pile of support tickets.
Each person needed to set up their account, import their personal vault, and understand the permission structure. It wasn't necessarily complicated, but it was the kind of task that can still create confusion. And a when confusion is multiplied across 50 people, that time adds up fast.
So Joe made a Trails guide and sent it out.
“Everyone can do it themselves. It was a 50-person company. No one asked a question.”
That kind of quiet makes a big difference for a service desk handling 6,500 tickets a year.
“Anything we can do to reduce pressure on the service desk is great, because we can then spend time on issues that need it.”
Growth made documentation harder to ignore
Beacon IT is a managed service provider in its 10th year. The company supports law firms, mortgage brokers, manufacturers and other small and midsize businesses across the UK.
Its service model is built around partnership. When customers need help, the team wants to be useful, clear and consistent.
That became harder as the business grew. In about 18 months, the technical team doubled. More people meant more deployments, customer rollouts and processes that needed to happen the same way every time.
As Joe put it:
“When you're scaling the business, you want to make sure you've got everything documented.”
The old way took too long to repeat
Before Trails, Beacon created guides with the standard set of tools.
Snipping Tool for screenshots. Word for structure. Sometimes PowerPoint to make the images look right. Then a PDF at the end.
“You could easily spend an hour making a bit of documentation,” Joe said.
The issue presented itself in two ways. First, guides often didn't get made. Second, when they did, they could be inconsistent or not polished enough for customer-facing use.
For an MSP, that's more than an internal annoyance. Beacon often rolls out the same tools across many customers. Password managers. Security awareness training. Single sign-on integrations. If each engineer has to piece together the process from memory or vendor docs, the work can drift.
Vendor documentation didn't always solve the problem either.
“Quite often you only get half the story,” Joe said.
A single sign-on setup might require instructions from two vendors, plus Beacon’s own internal choices about how the configuration should work. Joe needed one clear guide that captured the whole task in Beacon’s way.
Trails made the guide part of the work
Beacon had been using Scribe, but compliance needs pushed Joe to look for something else. Trails stood out because it paired fast guide creation with local redaction, video guides and a cleaner workflow.
For Beacon, those features were practical.
Local redaction was important because the team often works inside customer environments. A client secret can appear on screen while an engineer is documenting a task. Trails lets the team clean that up before a guide sent to the server.
“With what we deal with, there'll quite often be a client secret hanging about. It's nice to be able to redact that locally.”
In addition, Trails gave Beacon both formats from the same capture, which made customer-facing help easier to follow.
“Everyone has their preference. It's nice that people can open a link and have the option for both.”
And because Trails is a creation tool for Beacon, not a new knowledge base to manage, it fits into the system the team already uses. Internal guides live in SharePoint with Trails links inside. Customer-facing guides are shared through Beacon’s service portal or sent as direct links.
Setup didn't become its own project
MSP teams don't have much patience for tools that create more work before they save any.
Trails kept the setup small. Install the extension. Start recording. Do the task. Get a guide.
“It probably took me longer to push the deployment of the browser extension than to actually create my first few guides,” Joe said.
The Beacon team was using Trails the same day it signed up.
Guides are faster to make and easier to ask for
Joe estimates that Trails makes guide creation about 80% faster than Beacon’s old manual process.
“Easily. If not more.”
That saves hours every week, but it also changes the way documentation feels inside the team.
Before, asking an engineer to create a guide meant asking them to stop and spend an hour doing tedious manual work. If the workflow changed a few weeks later, they might have to do the whole thing again.
With Trails, the ask is lighter. Start recording. Do the work. Get it done in minutes.
The bottom line
For Beacon IT, Trails helps documentation keep pace with the work.
Guides are faster to create. Engineers can follow the same process across deployments. And customers can answer more questions on their own, at the moment they need help.
“Trails helps us save time, but the bigger thing is consistency. Everyone can follow the same process, every time.”
The first guide showed Joe what was possible.
“The first guide sold it for us. It was accurate, polished and ready to use in a way we hadn't been able to do manually.”
Documentation used to be the thing that happened later, if there was time.
With Trails, it happens while the work happens.
