A short instructional video (hosted by Richard Kohberger) that explains default customer signature requirements in ServiceTitan, the technician workflow for estimates → invoices → payments, reasons for multiple signatures, and options to reduce or change required signatures (backend feature to carry estimate authorization to invoice, job-level and job-type settings, and e-sign). It cautions about proper workflow and legal coverage and notes where text for authorization paragraphs can be edited.
What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the bluecon nerd. And in this video, we're going to be talking about customer signatures in Servicetitan. And the main questions that we are going to answer in this video are, how many signatures are there? And does there have to be that many? So by default, ServiceTitan is going to require your customer to sign three to four signatures on a typical job. And those break down like this. So first, your technician makes an estimate and presents that to the customer. And the customer says, yeah, let's go with that. And so they will sign an estimate authorization signature saying that they want to go with the work. Once that happens, the estimate is converted into an invoice, and that invoice by default will require two additional signatures, an invoice authorization signature. Basically, the customer saying, I agree with what's on this invoice and I'm going to pay for it. And a customer invoice acknowledgement signature, which is basically the customer saying, I acknowledge that this work has now been completed and I am satisfied with it. So the invoice authorization signature is intended to be collected before the work actually is done, and the acknowledgement signature is intended to be collected after the work has been done. Then finally, if the customer pays with a credit card, then they will be asked for one more signature to sign off on the payment. Now, some Service Titan users do feel that that's an excessive amount of signatures, and they say that their customers make comments about it from time to time, and they wonder, is there a way to trim that down? Well, the answer to that question is yes. But before I tell you about it, I do want to make one point. If you're getting a lot of customers complaining about how many signatures there are, I would bet that that's probably because the technician is using an improper workflow where the customer is signing all four signatures at the same time, back to back to back, with no explanation as to what it is they're signing. And yes, I do think from a customer standpoint, that would feel weird and excessive. But if the technician is following the proper workflow and explaining why they're collecting every signature, I suspect that the complaints would go way down. And again, the proper workflow is this. The technician creates some estimates. They then present those estimates to the customer, and the customer chooses one. A signature is collected saying that the customer does want to do the work that is presented on that estimate. The estimate is then converted to an invoice, and the technician presents that invoice Then the customer signs off on the invoice saying that everything on here looks good and I agree to pay this price. And I just want to pause here to explain why those two signatures, why a signature authorizing the estimate and authorizing the invoice, aren't they the same? Well, they could be, but not necessarily. You see the default text on the estimate authorization, which you can edit if you want to, but by default it says, and I'm going to paraphrase here, this is just an estimate, this is not a final contract, and this is not a guarantee of the final price of the work to be performed. So that is why they're also signing off to authorize the invoice, because now when it's an invoice, it is guaranteeing that price. Okay, so moving on in our technician workflow. So now the technician performs the work and they go back to the customer to say, I'm all done. And at this point, the customer would sign off on the invoice acknowledgement signature saying that everything is done to their satisfaction. Then the technician would collect the payment. And if the customer is paying with a credit card, then they would collect one more signature authorizing that payment. Okay, so now that you understand all that, if you still think that's too many signatures, there is a way to eliminate one. There is a back end feature that carries over the estimate authorization signature to the invoice, so you don't have a separate invoice authorization signature. So if you're confident that what's on your estimate will never vary from what's on your invoice, it's always going to be an exact copy. Then you could ask your CSM to enable that and it will eliminate a signature for you when you're talking to your CSM to ask for it. The name of the feature on the back end is called Enable Separate authorization paragraph for estimates, and that is enabled by default. So if you didn't want that extra authorization signature, you would ask your CSM to disable it. So I may have said earlier that you could ask your CSM to, quote, enable it for you, but actually in this case, you're asking them to disable something. Now, if you do this, something important to note. So on the office side in your settings under business units, this is where you can change the text for all of these authorization paragraphs for what the customer is actually signing off on. So there you'll see where you can edit your invoice authorization paragraph, your invoice acknowledgement paragraph, and your estimate authorization paragraph. If you enable this backend feature to carry over the estimate authorization to the invoice, that is going to completely eliminate the estimate authorization paragraph. And so you will no longer see it on this page. That means that when the technician is presenting their estimates and the customer is about to sign off on one the instead of seeing the text from the estimate authorization paragraph that no longer exists, and so what they will see is the text from the invoice authorization paragraph. So with that in mind, it might make sense to edit the invoice authorization paragraph. So it makes sense for signing off on an estimate as well. So by default, the first sentence of the paragraph is this invoice is agreed and acknowledged. That could be confusing now that it's applying to the estimate as well. So maybe you want to change it to the work above is agreed and acknowledged. Or maybe not. Maybe you want to leave it alone because in a way this estimate is now an invoice because you're saying that it's not going to change. Consult a lawyer. Okay, I'm just here to tell you what ServiceTitan can do. This is very far from legal advice. So if you want to make sure you're covered, consult with a professional. All right, now that we understand all that, there is another way to manage how many signatures are required on a job without getting your CSM involved. So you can mark whether or not invoice signatures are required on a particular job. And you can do this either on the individual job level. So you can mark whether or not it's required when you're booking the job as well as from the job edit page. Or you can do it on the job type level. So on the job type edit page, you can adjust this checkbox to say whether or not customer signatures are required for invoices on jobs of this type and by invoice signatures, that includes both the invoice authorization signature and the invoice acknowledgement signature. So if you mark those as not required, the technician can still collect them, but they will be marked optional. Now I want to reiterate, this makes both invoice signatures not required. I really only recommend this for job types that you know are always going to be $0 job types. Maybe you don't charge for estimates, and so your estimate or consultation job type you don't want to require a signature for because it's a little bit weird to make a customer acknowledge their $0 invoice. Remember that for situations where the customer isn't present on the job site to sign off on an invoice we do have the E sign feature where it can be texted to they can sign off on their own personal device. So that's customer signatures in Servicetitan. Now I just want to close by saying that in general from a butt covering standpoint usually the more signatures the better but there are certainly some situations where not all of the default signatures are strictly necessary. Again not not not legal advice no very dumb but hopefully now you have a better understanding of what your options are. Anyways that's all I got for today. 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