2024 Best Feature Roundup | HAPPY YAWLIDAYS

Well, howdy. Welcome to the Nerd Dude Ranch. Yeah, no, you're in the right place. Yeah, we used to call it the Nude Ranch, but people got the wrong idea. Well, I hope y' all have been enjoying your y' all a day. You know, as one year ends and another begins, I find it to be an opportune time to really reflect back on the things that matter to you in life. For me, that's New features that got released in Service Titan. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. We have Invoice templates available in the Document Manager. So let me explain this Service Titan, for a while now, has been working on something called the Document Template Engine. The Document Template Engine is something that allows Service Titan users to use a nice graphical user interface to build out document templates so that their documents can look however they want them to look. So that Document Template Engine is now this kind of core thing, this core feature that other features can tap into. So going forward, you're going to start seeing more and more things utilizing this Document Template Engine. For example, Commercial Service Agreements already uses this, so you can format commercial service agreements to look however you want, have whatever pieces of information you want, and exclude anything that you don't. And now with this release, invoices are using the Document Template Engine as well, meaning you can make your invoices look however you want, and you can make multiple templates and decide at the time of printing or sending the invoice which one you want to use. So to build your first template, you're going to go into settings, operations, and Document Templates. As I'm making this recording, I'm remembering that we also have an older feature called Invoice Templates. So that's a little confusing. But one thing at a time here. What we're looking for is Document Templates. This sample account that I'm using has Commercial Service Agreements enabled. So you can also see that I have a Service Agreement template in here already. But we're going to come up here to the Add Template button and say, new template. We're going to give our template a name. Let's call this the Residential Invoice Template. And then we click this dropdown to select the template type, which in this case is going to be Invoice, and then we're going to click next, and that takes us into this. This is the Document Template Engine. This is the builder that we use to set it up. So I'm not going to spend too much time in this video going over all the nuances of how to use this but definitely jump in there and play around with it. But anyways, once you have some invoices built out, anytime you go to print or email an invoice, you'll have the option to pick between your templates. So you can now select individual estimates to email when you're sending out an estimate. Not just all or nothing. So previously, okay, you went out on a job that creates an opportunity, and you create five estimates within that opportunity. When you went to go and email the estimates, you had this checkbox where you could send all of the estimates that were within that opportunity, or you could uncheck that and send just the one. But if you were only trying to send three out of the five, there was no way to do that. But. But now there is. So when you go to email and estimate, you'll see the section here with all of the estimates on that opportunity and you can check to include all, or you can just check off individual estimates. So there's now a new forms submissions data set within reporting. And this new data set allows you to access information captured within a form via reporting. Now, there was previously a forms data set, but that didn't show you the information contained inside of those forms. This new data set form submissions does, which opens up a whole world of possibilities. You now have the ability to create a template price book item. So what exactly does that mean? Well, hopefully we all know and understand that it is the best practice to have everything that you ever sell in your price book. However, building up to that point takes time. There's a lot of stuff out there. So every once in a while you might run into some thing that you've never had to sell before and you're like, well, that's not in the price book. So what do we do? Some people would create a miscellaneous task and then let the technicians have the permission to edit prices. But that is very much not best practice. You really shouldn't have every technician just able to edit whatever price they want whenever. So with this feature, you can still have a miscellaneous task, but you would mark that as a template price book item, which means you can remove the permission for technicians to edit prices in the price book. But this one task, this one task in particular, they will be able to edit the price on. Now, I will note that this is a gated feature. Once that is enabled, you would go to Settings, Operations and template price book items and then toggle that setting switch on. After you do that, you'll have this other checkbox to choose whether or not you want to enable editing of that item in mobile. So if you want to trust your technicians to handle this themselves, you can check that off. Or if you want somebody in the office to have to handle these types of situations, you would leave it unchecked. So with this enabled, it's going to create a new category called template items in your price book. And that's going to have a template service material and equipment. And when you add template items to an invoice or estimate, you'll be able to edit the description and price fields. Now, I do just want to throw this out there. This feature is for like break glass in case of emergency. Please do not use this as a giant band aid over an inadequately set up price book. So there is now a new notes section in office and mobile Estimates, meaning you can now leave internal notes on estimates. So on the office side, on the estimate screen, next to costing, there's a new tab called Notes and that's where you can of course leave notes. And you're also able to pin notes to the top. And in mobile, on the estimate page, there will be a new section called Notes and tapping that will open any notes associated to that estimate. And text from the mobile side can add their own notes as well from that add note button. Oh yeah, I forgot this was in here. I might cry. This one. I've been asking for this one forever. We have the ability to add tags using conditional logic in forms. So you can now add tags to the job, the customer, the location, or the equipment records when specific responses are entered in forms. This is hugely useful and let me give you some examples to demonstrate why. I know for a fact that a bunch of you H Vac people out there have a question on your maintenance or tune up form that asks what the customer's filter size is. And when a technician fills that out, what does it do? Kind of nothing. It just stays on that form. So the next technician that goes out still doesn't know what kind of filter they need to bring inside with them. They still have to go inside and check and then come back out and get the filter and go back in. But now you'll be able to say, okay, when a technician enters 16 by 25 by 1 as the filter size, add the 16 by 25 by 1 filter tag, and then the next technician that goes out can see the tag and know ahead of time what filter they need to bring inside with them, eliminating a trip back out to the van. So now a field that was previously kind of just there for fun, like it wasn't really Helping anybody. Now it does something, I guess, something other than inform the customer what their filter size is if they didn't know. Another use case might be for happy calls. So you can have a happy call form that somebody in the office fills out and then you can have a question on that form that says like, do we need to have a manager call back? And if it's no, then you can just add like a happy call completed tag that just says, hey, the happy call is done, everything's good. But if the answer is yes, we do need to have a manager callback, then you can have a different tag with a big red X and you can have an alert tied to that tag that goes to the manager to let them know, hey, something's wrong here. We've got a customer that's maybe upset and we need to reach out to them. That's just a couple of examples, but this, in my opinion, super, super valuable. We have a new teams management feature for the dispatch board. So in Service Titan you can separate your dispatch board into teams. That part's not new. So you can have like an install team, a service team, whatever you want. And that was managed from the technician's profile. So if you wanted a particular technician to be under the service team, you would fill in that field under their tech profile. This was kind of hard to manage. You had to make sure that team names exactly matched or else you'd get a duplicate team instead of adding the technician to the pre existing team. Plus, the teams were just sorted on the dispatch board alphabetically. There was no way to manually control what order they were in, resulting in the onsightly workaround of just adding various numbers of symbols, like an asterisk before the team name. Because it was sorted alphabetically. And the more symbols that were in front of the letters, the higher up on the dispatch board it would show up. So it'd be like install would show up before service. And you know that that worked, but it was kind of janky. So we don't have to do that anymore. We have teams management. So let me show you how this works. Now, to get to teams management, you're going to go to the main settings here and go to dispatch board and teams management. And here we'll see a list of all of our teams. You see, you've got the team name here, the number of technicians currently on that team and the status, whether it's active or deactivated. And if it does get deactivated, it'll move over into this other tab for deactivated. Teams. Now here in the upper right hand corner we've got a button where we would go to create a new team. Any of our pre existing teams here we can hit this little arrow to expand and see exactly which technicians are on that team. We'll collapse that back down. We've also got an edit pencil here where we can click to edit the name of any pre existing team names. We've got this little plus button here if we wanted to add a new technician to this team down here at the bottom we've got a row for all of the technicians with no team assigned. So we can expand that and then these are all the technicians that are not currently assigned to a team and we could just assign them from here. So we'd click this little arrow here and then choose the team where we want to assign them and then they get assigned to that team. And my favorite feature, we can move teams around and that will affect the order in which they show up on the dispatch board. I could do that either with these little arrows over here. I could just click that and say move up or move down, Move to top of list, move to bottom of list. Or I could also check off a team and then say move up or move down from up here. And this is more useful if I needed to move multiple things at once. So I can check off all three of these and move all three of those up. So let's say this team H Vac Install lead. Let's say I want that to be at the very top. I want that to show up first on my dispatch board. I'll go ahead and hit Save in the bottom right hand corner here. And then let's check out our dispatch board. And we see that now H Vac install lead is at the top. And now configurable services are available for everybody with or without Pricebook Pro. Let me walk you through how this works. So here I am in a just sample price book. Ignore the red alert. We're just in a sample account here. We're under my materials tab. And you see we have a few materials here. We have one material that's just called capacitor. This is just a generic capacitor material. And then we have some more specific materials. These are like the actual SKUs that we order from our vendor. So basically what configurable services allows us to do is just have one service in our price book that encompasses all of these potential materials that we could use. So with configurable services, we don't need to have separate services. In our price book for capacitor 35 at 5 capacitor 45, we don't need to do all of that. We can just have one capacitor task and then the technician or the person building the estimate in the office chooses which material is going to be used. And then if you're also using dynamic pricing, that will affect the price of the service. So to set that up again, we have our real SKUs here and our generic material. Now, it's kind of up to you whether you want to have a generic material that you make the configurable material, or if you just want to make the most commonly used material, the configurable material. Either way works. But for this demonstration, I've made a generic material that's going to be the configurable one. And then on the generic material, if we click into this, into the main page there, you'll notice we have a tab for configurable material. So we'll click into that. We will enable configurable material on this generic material. And then we will add down here all of the variations. So for example, I've got one missing here. So I'll hit add material and I will choose my 50 at 5 capacitor there. Great. So now these are all the variations of this capacitor material. We also have this checkbox here to enable Titan Intelligence continuous learning. If you're on Core pricebook, meaning you don't have Price Book Pro, then this will be grayed out for you. This is the pro exclusive feature that essentially makes it so that you don't have to do this part, you don't have to manually map things that the AI will map it for you. Cool. So that part's done. We're going to hit save. And now we've got one generic capacitor material with all of the variations tied to it. By the way, you can edit the variations right here in the inline editor. So you don't need to click all the way into that page every time if you need to make some adjustments. Okay, now we need a service that this generic capacitor material is tied to. So we'll go into our services here. And then I've got this service here for remove and replace capacitor. And under linked materials, I have that generic capacitor tied to it. So we're building an estimate out here. I'm on the office side, but this will also work on the technician side. We're going to add that remove and replace capacitor service that has our generic material tied to it. And then I get this fly out that asks me which specific material I am planning to use. And everything that I've linked to the generic material is right here. So I would just select whichever one it is. If for some reason, though the material that I need isn't mapped here, I can come over here to find more items and I can search the entire price book. But if you do not want people to have that ability to just add whatever, you can turn that off. I'll show you how in just a minute. But for now, let's say that I'm going to use this 35 at 5 capacitor. Now notice I've got a dynamic pricing rule tied to this. So right now the total price is 19981. But as soon as I choose that specific material and hit save, the price gets updated. Now it's $211.40 because it's following my dynamic pricing rule, taking into account the exact cost of the material that I'm planning to use. If for some reason you didn't want that to happen though, and you wanted to always use the cost of the default material, then you can do that. It's a rule you can set up in your dynamic pricing settings. All right, then I'll just hit add here. And also notice automatically appended to the end of the description for my service here, it specifies which one I'm using. It says dual run capacitor 35. 5. That way the customer has that detail of exactly what they got. However, again, if you don't want that to happen, you can turn that off as well. So let me show you where to control those settings. So back in our price book, we're going to go back to our materials tab. And notice now we have the settings cog up here. So we're going to click on that and then we get this flyout that has those two settings. Do we want to allow find more meaning. Do we want to allow that search box that allows people to tie other materials other than the ones that we've hard tied here in our settings? And do we want to display the variation name appended to the end of the service and item group descriptions? Overall though, this is a great feature that allows you to have a much cleaner and easier to use price book while still maintaining that granular control? Now, in case you're not familiar, this is what the new global search looks like. So it's up here on top of the navigation bar now. So no matter where you are in service Titan, it's always very easily accessible. There's also a keyboard shortcut for it so that you can just invoke it wherever that's control slash. And as the name global search implies, it is global so you don't need to specify what it is you're looking for. Like in the old search experience you had a dropdown where you had to say I'm looking for a customer or a location, a form, whatever. But here we can just start typing and you see that just pulls up results in these different categories. So you can search for customer names, addresses, invoice numbers, whatever you need. You can even search like within SMS messages. Although if you are getting too many results and you're not able to find the exact thing you're looking for, we do have this dropdown over here where you can specify the exact thing, the category that you're looking for. And we also have these handy breadcrumb trails up here. So these are my job results and it's showing that these job results are under John Richards the customer and then John Richards the location. So I could open the location page or the customer page by clicking on these and if it was a specific job I was looking for, but I wasn't seeing it here, I could click View all up here to take me into all of the job related results. And this new search is very typo tolerant. So if you're looking for a customer, you're not quite sure how to spell the name or something, you can still easily find it. Overall, so much more convenient than the old experience. Although I will mention that the old experience is still here. If we click Advanced search, that'll take us to the old page. Or if we click this icon over here that takes us back to the old search page. So you haven't lost access to that if you still need it. But I love this. Again, people have been asking for it forever and so far the feedback from people who have it already has been fantastic and it's only going to get better with time. There's a lot of plans for this that's going to make it even more useful and I very strongly believe it's going to be a very integral thing as far as how we use Servicetitan in the future. So you can now enable a new Save card by default feature to streamline your payments and reduce collection times. This is another one from my original y' all list back in the day. And I don't say this a lot, I think I've said this one other time, but I don't think you guys were complaining enough about this one. I remember back when I was operating we were trying to transition from our like manually renewed memberships to auto renew on either an annual or a monthly plan. And of course in order to bill for those, you need to have a card saved on file. And I remember just being so absolutely devastated to learn that I had to rely on a technician manually checking a box to save the card. I was horrified. I was appalled. I would go so far to say I was a bit insulted, but thankfully now that's no longer the case. So you can go into settings, invoicing and online payments and choose the option from there. Yeah, we sure did get some good ones. Well anyways, I've chatted yalls ears off enough. Happy y' all a days and a happy New Year to ya. Sam.