How To Build & Use Custom PDF Smart Forms

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kobert here, the blue collar nerd. And in this video, I'm going to be showing you how to create and use custom PDF smart forms in ServiceTitan. So in ServiceTitan, there are two different types of forms that you can use. There are native forms, sometimes just called service titan forms, and there are PDF smart forms. Now, for most things, most of the time, I usually recommend using Servicetitan native forms. Generally, I believe that those are a better experience for the person actually filling out the form. They're specifically designed to be filled out on a mobile device, and you can incorporate conditional logic into them to make the form dynamic so that there's not questions on the form that are not necessarily relevant to the situation at hand. But the downside of native forms is that at least at the time of recording this video, there aren't a lot of like, aesthetic customization options. Native forms are very customizable in that you can put in different types of questions, different types of form fields, and the conditional logic is a huge customization option. But visually, aesthetically, they just kind of look how they look, and that's where the PDF smart forms come in. So the benefit of a PDF smart form is that you're just using a PDF file so it can look however you want it to. These are really useful for situations where you have a very specific form that you have to fill out that's issued to you from some third party. Like, for example, let's say that you have to file for permits and there's a very specific permit application form from the city. It's not like you can create your own version of it. No, they need that exact form. Well, in a situation like that, PDF smart forms are a great solution. They're also useful if there's just something in particular where you really want to prioritize aesthetics. For example, if you just really wanted to have a certain aesthetic for your sales proposals, that could be accomplished through PDF smart forms. Now, the downsides of PDF smart forms are that they tend to be a little bit less pleasant, in my opinion, anyways, to fill out on a mobile device. Still totally doable. It's just that it's a PDF form now. It's not like built specifically to be filled out on a mobile device. Text can't upload photos to them, which they can do with native forms. And you're not able to bulk export information out of PDF forms, so you can still export an individual PDF form. But what I mean is like with native Forms. If you go to the Service Titan search page and search for forms, you can then export those results into one spreadsheet that shows the results of all of those forms in one spreadsheet. Can't do that with PDF forms. The other downside is that because it's a PDF file, it's pretty static. You can't use conditional logic. And depending on what you're using them for, they can just be a little bit more finicky as far as potential for user error. And it'll become more clear what I mean by that once we jump into an example, which we can do right now. So the first thing you need to do is get a digital copy of whatever form it is we're trying to work with. So if you've already got it as a digital file, you're good to go. If it's something that you currently have as a paper form, then you need to scan that in and you need it in a PDF format. Alright, so I've got this sales proposal template here. This is what I'm going to be working with for today's example. Now these are called PDF Smart forms. You might be wondering what makes them smart. It's the fact that we can embed certain codes into the PDF file itself that will cause the form to pre populate with pieces of information. And I'll show you what I mean. So we need to jump into our web browser and we need two things pulled up. One is the knowledge base article that has all of these codes listed within it. I'll show you how to search for it and find it yourself, but I'll also put a link for the lazy in the description box down below. Okay, so I'm in service titan. I'm just going to click this little help widget up here, this question mark, and I'm just going to search for PDF Smart. And there we go. It's the first and only result smart fields in PDF forms. I'm going to click View Original to get the full screen version of this and if I scroll down, here are all of my codes. So customer name is cn, location name is ln, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, now the second thing that I need pulled up is my PDF file in some sort of PDF editor. Any PDF editor will do if you've got like Adobe Acrobat or whatever. For this example, I'm going to use a website called PDF Escape. It's a pretty popular one. It's just PDF Escape.com. once I'm there, I'm going to click Upload PDF to PDF Escape. I'm going to choose my file and Great, now that's opened up, I'm going to zoom in a little bit just so it's a little easier to work with. Okay. Now everywhere that I want to be fillable with information, I need to put a form field. So this button right down here and I click on that type text. That's fine. We're going to say select. And then in all of these fields, we're just going to kind of drag and create these boxes. So there's all those fields. Also put a field here kind of at the top just for like the. The name of the estimate. All right, cool. So now what we need to do is any fields that we want to be automatically filled out for us, we need to put in the correlating code from that knowledge base article. So like this first field here, this is a field for customer first and last name. I'm going to look over in my table here and I see customer name. The code is cn. So I'm going to click into that field and I'm just going to type in CN and then technician first and last name is the second field. I'm going to look back over in my table. The find function is going to be your friend here. So control or command F, depending on if you're on Windows or Mac, that's going to pull up a little search box where you can just search for what you're looking for. So I'm looking for tech name. Just keep hitting enter until you get what you want. So there we go. Tech name I see is tn. I'm going to come over here. TN address. Now, we've got multiple different kind of types of address fields here. I'm going to go with the location address. So that's LA technician phone number. So that's just tp, assuming there's only one technician assigned to the job. Tp. That reminds me, I need to buy toilet paper. Hang on. Toilet paper. Cool. All right, the date. I'm going to go with job date for this. So that's JD and the tech email address, which is te. So you get the idea. There's more pages to this. I'm not going to make you watch me fill out the entire thing, but there is some stuff I want to go over with you on those other pages. So I'm just going to cut to having it all done forma cadenzo. Okay. Now all of my pages of this proposal template are filled out. So the part I kind of wanted to Go over was this. So this is where it lists all of the items that are on the estimate. So I've got item name here, and the first one is E1I 1N. So that's estimate one, item one name. Same thing over here at the description. E1I 1D. Estimate one item one description and E1I 1P. Estimate one, item one, price. So we're putting all this in now. It's important to point out that PDF forms share a limitation that paper forms have, which is that they are finite in space, meaning we have a limited number of fields to work with here. It's not like, you know, a regular estimate and Service Titan that's going to expand to however many items you want to add onto that. But here, okay, so we have items one through five here, and then it continues on the next page and it goes all the way down to estimate one item 18. So if for whatever reason, my estimate has 19 items on it, item number 19 is not going to be here because I just don't have that many spots. It only goes up to item 18. It's also important that this is all for E1 estimate 1. So it's important that the estimate that you want to be populating this is in the correct position. And I'll show you what I mean by that once we're at the portion where we're filling out the form. By the way, if you happen to like this template that I'm working with and you want to use it, I'll make it available to you. I'll put a link in the description box down below and I'll give you the version with everything already filled out. Because, you know, no sense in both of us doing the exact same work. Okay, so once we're done with all that, we're going to click this button to download our form. Make sure to name it something different so it's differentiated from the version without anything filled out. Okay, cool. So now we've got that downloaded and we need to upload it back into Service Titan. So back in Service Titan, I need to get to Forms. I can either go to Settings Forms, or I could hit the slash button to bring up the quick navigation search for Forms and boom, that'll take me to my forms. I need to click Add form on the display. On setting here, I want to select both Office and Technician side so it can be filled out. Either place assigned to job is good. We'll also assign it to the location. Okay, and then I need to click this button here to upload A PDF form and then I just need to select or drag in that file that we just saved. All right, that's pulled in. I need to name my form. I'll call it PDF proposal and I'm going to hit save. Okay, now let me show you on the mobile side what it's like to fill this form out. So our example was a sales proposal. So in order to populate the correct fields, we first need to have some estimates built. So I'm just going to go into estimates here. I'm going to hit add estimate and I'm just going to select one of my pre built proposal templates to make it a one tap experience here. If you don't have proposal templates set up for your company, I've got a separate video about that. Be sure to check that out. I'll put a link to it at the end of this video. Okay, so I'm going to hit present and then let's say that the customer went with this silver option here. So I'm going to say sign and accept on that silver option. I'm going to fill in all the signature boxes here with my scribbles. Let's say that we're doing this work later. Okay, so now that silver estimate is marked as sold. But remember that on our PDF proposal, we use those E1 codes. So estimate 1. So that correlates to the order that these estimates are in. So right now, the bronze 14 seer estimate, that's estimate one. It's the one on top. The one that we sold is estimate 2. But we want to send that PDF proposal for the estimate that we actually sold. So in order to do that, I'm going to tap over here where these three lines are. Look kind of like a hamburger. And we're going to just move that up into the correct position, which is the first position. So now that silver estimate is estimate 1. Cool. So now let's go into forms and let's find our PDF form that we just made. There it is. PDF proposal. I'm going to tap into that. It's going to show us a preview. You're going to note that we still have our codes here, not the actual information. That's okay. We're going to hit edit here in the upper right hand corner and you'll see that populates all of the correct information. So there's everything all filled in. Hey, just real quick, you see that? You see that right there? That is still showing a code. It's supposed to be the contract price. So the estimate total that's my fault. I put in the wrong code. It's supposed to be E1T for total, but I accidentally put E1P. So that's why that is messed up. I just didn't notice until now when I'm editing the video. All right, back to business. So there's everything all filled in now. I didn't put a code inside of every single field. Some of them I just left as blank fields. Blank fields. I can just go in and type in whatever I want. We also have some tools here at the bottom. So if I hit this little pencil icon, let's say there was a signature field, I could use this ink option. And then I could have the customer sign this PDF and once everything's all filled out to my liking, I can close out of that and then I have my finished form. You can see the information there. And if I go to page three where that signature was, you see, that's still there. And then I'm able to hit this email button to email it to the customer. It'll also be attached to this job permanently, just like any other form. Okay, so that's the mobile side. Let me show you how to fill it out from the office. So we're on a job page here. I'm just going to scroll down and I'm going to go to this files tab. I'm going to find the form in question, that PDF proposal, and I'm going to click Create. That's going to open up this preview of it here. So again we're seeing the codes instead of the information that's expected. But we're going to fill the form out here. Anything that's not already going to be filled in via the code. So I'll just put in a little special note here. Okay. And then once we're done filling it out, we need to download this new filled out version. We're going to download that with our changes. We'll give that a name that makes some sort of sense so we can find it. Okay, cool. Now we're going to go back to our Service Titan tab and you'll see that it's going to be asking us to upload a file. That's that file that we just downloaded. So we're just going to put that in hit save. And now if we go back to our files here, we'll see that the PDF proposal has the completed tag and we can view it here. And all of the information is filled in, all of the codes have turned into the correlating information and the stuff that we manually filled in is there as well. So then just like with any form, you can print or email it from here. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit like if you liked this video and found it valuable, be sure to subscribe to Service Titan's YouTube channel. If you haven't done that already, hit that bell icon so that YouTube notifies you anytime we upload a new video. And here's the that link to the video I promised about proposal templates. Or if you don't need that, then here is a video on conditional logic in Service Titan native forms. Appreciate it. Peace.