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Skipper

Tickets and mailbox

Requests from the mailbox, the customer portal and the phone arrive as tickets in one queue, with the time you bill attached right to the ticket.

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Schematic illustration with sample data.

At a glance

Skipper is the ticket system for IT service providers. Unlike a general helpdesk, every ticket carries the time you bill later, with hourly rate, materials and travel costs. Whether you are coming from another ticket system or have been working from a shared mailbox: your customers keep writing to the same address.

  • Several mailboxes, including shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365, each assigned to its own category.
  • New emails become tickets, and the sender receives a confirmation email with the ticket number.
  • If a customer replies to a ticket that is waiting, in the backlog or resolved, the ticket reopens.
  • You record phone calls and on-site conversations as a customer message in the conversation.
  • Reply templates fill in the salutation, contact person and ticket number for you.
  • You merge duplicate tickets, including messages, attachments and booked time.
  • If you wish, a separate queue collects tickets that lack required attributes such as customer or project.
  • The change history shows who changed status, priority or assignee, and when.
Good to know
  • Mailboxes in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, on your own Exchange server or via IMAP. Skipper fetches new emails every minute.
  • Skipper recognises the customer by the domain of the sender address. If a contact writes from a private address at a free email provider, the ticket lands under “Not assigned”, even if the address is stored as a contact.
  • There are no rules that route or filter out emails by sender or subject. Your mailbox’s filter deals with spam.
  • Statuses and priorities are fixed. There is no response-time tracking (SLA), no tags and no custom fields.
  • Search finds the subject and ticket number, not the text of the messages.
Comparison

Skipper next to other ticket systems

Many have a mailbox, a customer portal and time tracking. What Skipper has built in for IT service providers comes with others only as an extension, or not at all.

Comparison of Skipper with Zammad, Zendesk and Freshdesk by built-in features
Feature Skipper Zammad Zendesk Freshdesk
Tickets from your mailbox Yes Yes Yes Yes
Customer portal Yes Yes Yes Yes
Time tracking on the ticket Yes Yes Partly Yes
Hourly rates per customer and activity Yes No Partly Partly
Materials and travel costs on the time entry Yes No No No
Service record as a PDF for your customer Yes No No Partly
Invoice draft in Lexware Office, built in Yes No No No
Self-hosting Yes Yes No No

As of November 2026, based on the vendors’ public information. “Built in” means without an app or extension. Zammad, Zendesk and Freshdesk are trademarks of their respective owners.

Time tracking on the ticket

Zendesk

Via Zendesk’s Time Tracking app, only on certain plans.

Time tracking on the ticket

Freshdesk

From the Growth plan.

Hourly rates per customer and activity

Zammad

Zammad records time without rates or amounts; activity types are only for grouping.

Hourly rates per customer and activity

Zendesk

Only via third-party apps in the Marketplace.

Hourly rates per customer and activity

Freshdesk

Only via the QuickBooks or Xero apps.

Materials and travel costs on the time entry

Zammad

Travel time can be recorded as an activity type, but without costs.

Service record as a PDF for your customer

Zammad

Recorded time can be downloaded as CSV.

Service record as a PDF for your customer

Freshdesk

From the Pro plan as a time sheet report in analytics, exportable as PDF.

Invoice draft in Lexware Office, built in

Skipper

We set up other accounting programs with you during onboarding.

Invoice draft in Lexware Office, built in

Zammad

Only via general third-party automation services.

Invoice draft in Lexware Office, built in

Zendesk

Only via general third-party automation services.

Invoice draft in Lexware Office, built in

Freshdesk

Invoices via the QuickBooks or Xero apps; Lexware Office and sevdesk only via third parties.

In detail

From mailbox to reply

Your mailbox becomes the ticket inbox

Skipper checks your mailboxes every minute, including shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365, and needs no forwarding rules. New emails become tickets, and the sender receives a confirmation email with the ticket number. This confirmation can be switched off. Replies reach the ticket through the number in the subject or the email’s reply reference, and a closed ticket reopens. Skipper recognises the customer by the email domain, and unknown senders appear under “Not assigned”.

Automatically generated emails such as out-of-office replies do not become tickets. You assign a category to each mailbox, and replies also go out from that mailbox. Skipper only reads the inbox, not subfolders, and people in Cc are not added to the ticket.

Email and sign-in

Reply, customer message and note in one conversation

On a ticket you write in three modes, each in its own colour. By default, a reply goes to the customer by email, with attachments, and other contacts you have added to the ticket are already in Cc. A customer message records a phone call or an on-site conversation: it appears in the customer portal as a message from the customer, noting who recorded it, and reopens a closed ticket. The customer never sees an internal note. A quick “seen” or “done” is an emoji reaction on the message, without writing a note.

If a reply to the customer contains an @ mention, Skipper asks before sending. If someone calls for the first time, their email address is enough to create the ticket. Replies are sent from the shared mailbox, with one signature for everyone. An emoji reaction triggers neither a notification nor an email to the customer.

Status page in the customer portal
Woman with a headset typing on a laptop

Categories as queues

Categories such as support or repairs form your queues, and for each category you decide who sees its tickets. Every ticket has one of seven statuses, one of four priorities, a due date and a scheduled date. If a customer message arrives for a ticket in Backlog, Waiting, Resolved, Canceled or Archived, Skipper sets it back to Open. Skipper numbers tickets sequentially with a prefix, or at random.

Statuses and priorities are fixed, and dates apply to the day, without a time. Skipper does not measure response times.

Access and permissions

Reply templates and emails to your customers

Reply templates fill in the salutation, contact person and ticket number for you, and for each template you decide which categories it applies to. Every automatic email to your customers is a template you can edit, and most of them can be switched off individually.

A reply template replaces the entire text in the reply box. Each automatic email exists in one version only, in German. When the status of a ticket changes, no email goes to the customer.

Replies only in the portal

Preparation and merging

If you wish, you define required attributes: customer, project, assignee, contact, due date or description. A separate queue collects tickets that are missing any of these, and if you wish, staff only see them once everything has been filled in. This is also where you delete tickets created from spam. You merge duplicate tickets including messages, attachments and booked time, and later emails to the old ticket end up in the target ticket.

Preparation is done by administrators. Tickets of different customers cannot be merged, and a merge cannot be undone.

Change history

The change history shows who changed the status, priority, category or assignee of a ticket and when, each with the old and the new value. Anyone in the team who can open the ticket can see it.

By default, the history goes back 365 days. For the description, it only records that it was changed, without before and after.

Other areas

Related areas

All features

  • Team planning

    List, board and monthly calendar show what is coming up, and recurring tickets create repeat work in good time.

  • Customer portal

    Your customers submit requests via a form, see the status of their tickets and reply directly.

  • Time tracking

    You book time with a timer, in a form or directly on the ticket, at the hourly rate that applies to the customer.

As of Skipper 1.22.1, October 2026. This page describes this version.

See Skipper in a demo

We show you the areas that matter to your business, using your own workflows as the example.

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