Canned Responses

Canned responses (reply templates)

Every service desk has a handful of replies it sends over and over — the password-reset confirmation, the request for a screenshot, the "I've escalated this to our supplier" note. Canned responses let you write one once and then drop it into a reply with a single click.

They live in the reply window as a Templates button, and there are two kinds: ones your whole team shares, and ones that are only yours.

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Using a template

Open a ticket, click Reply, and you'll see a Templates button on the right-hand side of the Message row, just above the editor.

Click it and the menu splits in two:

• Team — the shared templates an administrator has set up for everyone
• Mine — your own private ones, which nobody else can see

Click any name and the text drops straight into your reply.

💡 It inserts at your cursor — it does not wipe your draft. A canned response is usually the middle of a reply, not the whole thing. Type your opening line, drop the template in, add a closing line. If you'd already typed something, it stays.

Once inserted, the text is just ordinary text in the editor — edit it, delete a paragraph, change a word. You're never stuck with the template's exact wording.

Merge codes fill themselves in

A template can contain merge codes — placeholders that become real values the moment you insert it. Write this once:

Hi [requester_first_name],

I have reset your password on [ticket_reference]. You'll be prompted to set a
new one at your next sign-in.

Thanks,
[analyst_name]

…and every time you insert it you get "Hi Sarah, I have reset your password on INC-482-11920…" with your own name at the bottom.

These are the same merge codes as the automated email templates, so there's nothing new to learn if you've written one of those.

Code	Becomes
[requester_first_name]	The requester's first name — for friendly greetings
[requester_name]	Their full name
[requester_email]	Their email address
[ticket_reference]	The ticket reference, e.g. INC-482-11920
[ticket_url]	A link to the requester's own view of the ticket in the portal. Needs the public web address set, or links sent from a scheduled job have no site name in them
[ticket_subject]	The ticket's subject line
[ticket_status]	Its current status
[ticket_priority]	Its current priority
[analyst_name]	Your name — so one shared template signs off correctly for everyone
[department_name]	The ticket's department
[created_date]	When the ticket was raised

You don't have to memorise them. In the template editor, each one is a button — click it and it drops in at the cursor.

A code that isn't recognised is left alone, visibly, as [like_this]. That's deliberate: seeing the raw code in your draft tells you something's wrong, whereas silently blanking it looks like a finished sentence and gets sent.

Rich text

Templates are written in the same editor as a reply, so bold, colours, bullet lists, headings, tables and links all survive the round trip. A long "new starter accounts created" checklist keeps its bullets.

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Your own private templates

You don't need any special permission for these. Anyone who can work tickets can have them.

Saving one

The best moment to save a template is the second you finish typing something you know you'll type again:

1. Write your reply as normal.
2. Click Templates → + Save draft as template.
3. Give it a name and click Save.

The name is what you'll see in the menu, so name it for the situation ("Printer offline — first steps") rather than the wording.

You have to type something first — there's nothing to save from an empty editor, and FreeITSM will tell you so rather than saving a blank template.

Changing or deleting one

Hover over any template under Mine in the menu and two small icons appear:

• ✎ Replace with current draft — updates that template's text to whatever is in your editor right now (and lets you rename it). This is how you edit a template: insert it, fix the wording, then save it back over itself.
• 🗑 Delete — asks first, then removes it.

Those icons never appear on Team templates — you can't change the team's wording by accident.

Who can see them

Nobody but you. A private template is not visible to your colleagues, your manager, or an administrator — it doesn't appear on the settings page and it isn't in anyone else's menu. It follows you, so on a multi-company install it's there whichever company you're working in.

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Shared team templates

These are the ones everyone sees under Team, and they're managed in Tickets → Settings → Reply templates.

Because a shared template puts words in front of your customers under the company's name, editing them needs the Manage the shared reply templates the whole team can insert permission — see Roles & Permissions. Analysts without it still use every shared template; they just can't rewrite them.

Setting them up

On the settings tab, Add opens the editor:

Field	What it does
Name	What analysts see in the Templates menu
Template text	The rich-text body, with merge-code buttons underneath
Display order	Lower numbers appear first in the menu — put your most-used at the top
Active	Turn a template off without deleting it. Inactive ones vanish from the menu but stay on the settings tab

The list shows a plain-text Preview of each template so you can tell two similarly-named ones apart at a glance.

⚠️ Deleting a shared template removes it from everyone's menu immediately. If you're only retiring it for now, switch Active off instead.

Some that earn their keep

• Need more information — "To look into this I need the exact error message, a screenshot, and roughly when it started." Pairs well with asking for a screen recording.
• Awaiting your reply — the nudge before a ticket auto-closes.
• Escalated to our supplier — with a reference and a realistic timescale.
• Out of scope — the polite decline, worded once and agreed by the team, so nobody has to freelance it under pressure.
• New starter setup complete — the long checklist nobody wants to retype.

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Multi-company installs

On a multi-company install, shared templates follow the same "global default + per-company" model as ticket types and priorities:

• Working in the MSP / Default company, a template you create is a global default every company can use.
• Working in a client company's context, a new template belongs to that company alone.

Your private templates are never company-scoped — they're yours, and they follow you everywhere.

On a single-company install none of this is visible: every template is simply available.

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Where it isn't (yet)

Being straight about the edges of the first version:

• The picker is on the email reply window. Portal, WhatsApp and web-chat replies don't have it yet.
• There are no folders or categories — templates are one flat list per section, ordered by Display order.
• There's no usage reporting, so you can't yet see which templates actually get used.
• New installs ship with no templates at all — the list starts empty and you fill it with your own.

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See also

• Tickets — the inbox these live in
• Roles & Permissions — who can edit the shared list
• Canned Responses — Developer Guide — how it works under the hood
• Internationalisation — the UI is translated; your template text is not