Maintain steady year-round revenue with Recurring Services in ServiceTitan

Hi there folks, Erica Jeffries here, program facilitator at ServiceTitan, and welcome to another TAD tune-up video. This time where we're talking about using recurring services to keep your revenue steady. Before we get into that too much, let's just kind of refocus on what Titan Advisor is. Titan Advisor is a little rocket ship icon in the top right hand of your ServiceTitan screen. It is essentially a business best practice guide or kind of partner to make sure that you're utilizing the most of this software. So the feature that we're gonna go through today is that use recurring services to keep your revenue steady. Once we are in ServiceTitan, we click on that little rocket ship icon. We are going to be on our Titan Advisor overview page. We are looking for use recurring services to keep your revenue steady. I pulled it right into my current plan by hitting customized plan and then searching for it. Alternatively, you can pop into the business section that is lead generation. So we're on our overview page. We click on lead generation. We're going to go into that acceleration tab, and then we're able to find that feature, use recurring services to keep your revenue steady. So once we are in there, we have this beautiful popup telling us what we're trying to do today. So essentially what this feature is talking about is making sure that our recurring services are set on our memberships. So let's say you have a membership plan and you have two recurring services is included with that membership. We want recurring services to be attached to that, um, and we want it to show up in our follow-up screen so that our CSR dispatchers during downtimes are able to call and book out these recurring services for our customer base, for our membership base. So this does say that this is specific to residential service and replacement, but also to commercial service and replacement. That might feel a little confusing because typically in our commercial we do see service level agreements, but there absolutely are some folks who still use memberships even in that commercial space, and that is a-okay. Um, and then of course it serves our residential markets as well. So once we get this set up, and we will go through the setup pieces together, the affected KPIs are going to be our leads, our revenue, our membership revenue realized, and our tech utilization. All of these make a ton of sense, right? Because we know that if we're booking out our recurring service, um, we are recognizing, um, our deferred revenue as we're doing these services. And we're making sure we, we have jobs on the books, maybe in some slow season. So what to set up? There are 6 setup pieces for this feature. The first being set up membership types with recurring services. It is looking for you to have at least 1 membership type with at least 1 recurring service attached. We'll go through that together. Next, it is asking to set up recurring service types. So in that first success criteria or that first setup piece, right, it says we need memberships that have recurring services. And then this is saying, okay, well, we need to have those recurring services set up. The success criteria on that is that all of your recurring service types have entries for business unit and job type. Our third setup piece is set job types for recurring services. The success criteria is that at least 60% of jobs attached attached to recurring services, have the make selecting a recurring service event required box selected. What that does is it makes it so that when somebody calls in or somebody outbounds to get one of these calls booked out, that rather than creating a brand new job, it is attaching to that recurring service event that already gets made, um, when a membership is active. So to have that enabled, to even have the ability to be able to select that box, it is first a feature that needs to be enabled by your Successor Implementation Manager, your CSM. So keep that in mind, but we will go through together, um, what that little box looks like and where to get that done. Then we have balanced deferred revenue on invoice templates. The success criteria on this one is that all deferred revenue membership types have invoice templates with both a plus/minus task tied to GL accounts. This is because if we have our deferred revenue, right, that means we're taking the money, we're putting it in a liability account. So we need to have our plus-minus tasks for those GL accounts. This is also a feature that first needs to be enabled by your Success or CSM. Okay, we will go through this together as well. Then we have assign payments to liability GL accounts. The success criteria on this one is that all deferred revenue membership sale renewal and billing tasks related are assigned to liability GL accounts. So again, we're making sure that anything that is in our price book, whether it be the sale, the renewal, or billing, um, that they are then assigned to an account where that money is going to go. Keep in mind, um, as we're going through this, if you're looking, going, well, we don't do deferred revenue, we do point of sale, totally a-okay. We still can get our recurring services, um, set up appropriately. Some of these steps are just specific to that deferred, uh, revenue model. Our final setup piece is configure recurring services for deferred revenue. So, um, the success criteria on this is that none of your active membership types include recurring service, or the first visit complete is selected. This gives a really nice description of what we're looking for here, but essentially, um, there are use cases where you would want to have that clicked off, but if you are doing a deferred revenue model, then we want that to be selected. These are all of our setup pieces. Okay. And then we do have our utilization metrics down here as well. And that is looking on actually booking these recurring events into jobs. It is measuring the percent of recurring service events dated within the last 90 days. So that is 3 months. This is one of those scores. or utilization points that are a little bit less volatile because it is over such a long period of time, those 90 days. Um, and it's looking if jobs have either scheduled, are in progress, completed, or have been dismissed. If it's over 31%, you're getting 2 points. If it's over 60%, you're getting 4. So let's scroll back up here and talk about the things that we have to set up and look into. So the first one is set up membership types with recurring Services. I duplicated my tab here and what I'm going to do is pop into my settings menu at the top, right? So that little gear icon, and I'm searching for my membership types. Once I'm in my membership types, you folks see that in my, my crazy demo account, I have quite a few here. Rather than going through the wizard, the membership wizard from step 1 all the way through, um, I'm instead going to edit a membership that I already have so that we're able to at, um, a membership that does have those recurring services. So I'm going to pop into this Ignite 100 membership. I'm hitting edit. This is our membership wizard. So you folks have likely seen this before. If not, um, Customer Programs has a really lovely webinar, uh, Memberships 101 and Memberships 102 that goes through this, and that will be linked below as well that you can go through. Um, but what we're looking at is having a membership that has recurring recurring services attached. So if you look at this membership, I'm in step 3, and of step 3, I'm in step 1, and it is looking for these recurring services. So attached to this membership, I have a cooling tune-up and a heating tune-up, um, that is attached to this membership. Now I can either grab these services out of my already recurring service events that I have set up, or you are able to create a new service right here. But that's actually our second step setup piece. So if we look down here, this said we want to have at least one membership type with at least one recurring service attached. We just looked, that one does have it, but okay, how do we actually get these, um, recurring service types to be able to attach them? Like I said, you can absolutely create a new service. Alternatively, you can go into your settings menu, you're going to look up Recurring Service Types, and we can either create a brand new one, or again, in this case, I'm going to edit the ones that we already have. So in that Ignite membership that we were looking at, we have a cooling tune-up and we have a first visit. To create one, we would click there, but instead I'm gonna hit edit so we can look at this together. A lot of this stuff is pretty intuitive, right? Um, name. What you want the display name to be, any tags associated, job type details. So we want our business units, we want our job types. I'm going to pop back into Titan Advisor so we can look at this second setup piece. So it wants us to set up a recurring service type, and all of the recurring service types have entries for BU and job type. Now when I pop into here, this one has a BU and a job type. Okay, I'm gonna hit save even though we didn't change anything. And then I'm also going to look into this heating tune-up one, um, because that was the other recurring service event that was attached to that Ignite membership. As I scroll down, the success criteria was that we have a business unit attached and a job type attached, which we have both. So I'm hitting save. That is our step 2, or our second kind of setup piece, which is recurring service events that have a BU and a job type attached. Like I said, I went in and edited ones that I already had created, but you are absolutely able to come through here and just add a recurring service type as well, um, to fit what, what you're looking to achieve. Okay, so next is set job types for the recurring services. Now, We know that to have this feature enabled, we need to first contact our CSM, but then it's looking at our success criteria. It wants at least 60% of job types attached to recurring services have the make selecting a recurring service event required selected. So what am I gonna look at? I'm going to pop into my settings menu again. So I'm in a different tab here and I'm in the gear icon from the top right, which is my settings, and I'm going to search for Job Types. It is under the operations portion of our settings, and I'm clicking on Job Types. Now again, you folks are going to see that I have a bunch of different job types in here. Let's pop into that job type together, Ignite Maintenance Member Visit. So I am hitting edit, and as we look through here, right, we have our details, our default services, payroll. We are in the details tab. Um, as we scroll down, the box that it is looking for is make selecting a recurring service event required when booking jobs if recurring service events exist for that location. So again, that's making sure that these recurring service events exist. And when we are either outbounding or when we potentially get an inbound call for a recurring service, rather than creating a brand new job for this, we are booking into that recurring service event and creating a job for that recurring recurring service event. So we want to make sure that of our job types that are attached as a recurring service event job type to our membership, that at least 60% of them have this checked. Okay, so we're back in Titan Advisor. Then we're looking at balance deferred revenue on invoice templates. The success criteria on this one is that all deferred revenue membership types have an invoice template with both a plus-minus sales task tied to GL accounts. How we're going to look into this one is to pop into our Ignite membership again. That is a deferred revenue recognition model, and we are going to look at the billing template. So I'm in another tab here. I went to my settings icon and I searched for membership types, and I did pull up the Ignite 100 membership. So we'll do that again here. I'm going to hit edit. We are looking to go into our step 2 here. We're actually looking at our billing templates. It does say right here the membership billing template is an invoice template, which is what we're looking for, for creating recurring billing invoices. Now as I scroll down, I see— perfect, I have a positive, uh, sales task with the code IGNIN, and then I also have a negative sales task which is IGNLIA. So how do I check to make sure that these things are tied to GL accounts, which when we pop back over to Titan Advisor, we know that, that that's what we're looking to do. That's the success criteria on this one. So what I'm actually going to do is pop into my price book. How do I get to my price book? I do have this little tab, um, here for price book, and then I'm going to search for this sales task to ensure I'm going to go and edit that it does have a GL account associated with it. So when we come down, we see that this, which is the— this was the positive sales task, it does have a general ledger account associated with it, and that is for memberships. I'm going to pop back. Perfect. I'm going to edit, and as we scroll down we see this has a general ledger account of membership agreements attached to it. Okay, our next setup piece is assign payments to liability GL accounts. The success criteria on this is that all deferred revenue membership sale, renewal, and billing related tasks are assigned to a liability GL account. So everybody's going to look a little bit different depending on how your accounts are set up, but I am hopping into another tab here. I'm In my price book, I'm going to search for membership. I'm looking for a snail sale renewal or billing, and I do want one that is on a deferred revenue template or deferred revenue model. As I scroll down here, I'm looking at the general ledger account. In this case, we already had something in here, but, um, on this account, I would want to make sure that it is in the membership liability GL account. And once I select that, I can hit save. And that is going to fulfill that. My, in that case it was my sales task, but I want to make sure that's also for my renewal and billing related tasks that they're assigned to those liability GL accounts. Lastly, we have configure recurring services for deferred revenue. So we had already looked at the box, and this one sometimes gets confused, the box that was, um, up here, which is make selecting a recurring service event required box selected. This is actually a fully separate thing. This is looking if first visit 'First Visit Completed' is selected. Um, so the success criteria is that none of your active membership types with recurring services where 'First Visit Already Complete' is selected. So we do not want this selected here. So what we're going to do to check this and to ensure that this is the case, we're gonna go back into that Ignite Membership Wix, but now we're gonna look into our recurrences step and we're going to edit existing service. We're gonna make sure that this is set up appropriately. So When I go into edit this recurring service type, keeping in mind I absolutely can do it through here. I can also go into my recurring service types, um, through my settings menu and edit them that way as well. But in this case, we'll just do the check on the two that are associated with this membership, and we will see that this actually is not, um, completed or checked off rather. So first visit already complete. You also see right here if the recurring service is intended to be used with memberships using deferred revenue. In our case, that is what we're doing. Doing, do not choose this option. So perfect, that one is set up appropriately. And then if we look at our heating tune-up, we want to make sure the same thing is done here. Okay, so if we pop back into Titan Advisor, now we're looking at our utilization, or how to use— how we're getting those sweet, sweet points. So like we said earlier, we are measuring the percent of recurring service events dated within the last 90 days that were less volatile— rather, those 90 days, right? Um, that either have jobs scheduled, in progress, completed, or have been dismissed. It's over 31 we're getting 2 points. If it's over 60% we're getting 4 points, which is huge. So okay, once all of these things are set up, how are we actually making sure that our revenue is steady by booking out these jobs? Of course some things are going to come inbound. We're going to have customers who are calling to get the recurring services booked out, but alternatively we are going to be booking these things out through the follow-up tab. So I'm going to pop into the follow-up tab. How do I get there? There should be on your menu a follow-up tab, and it will likely bring you right into unsold estimates to start. But we're actually looking for recurring service events now because I am in a very interesting account. I got some, some stuff going on in here, but we will look for the cooling tune-up again, just in my account. Because we know that that is a recurring service event type that is attached to a membership that I've sold. So if you look here, we have cooling tune-up. I know that I need to call and try and get this thing booked out, right? So if I click on this, it is going to pull up a follow-up screen for the appointment. I can absolutely call and get this booked out and As long as I get a hold of these folks, I am able to then go through and book out this job. Okay, now I have some stuff going on with zones, don't worry about that, but I can get the job booked out if I get a hold of the customer, and that is going to, um, ladder up into my utilization metric for this one because now we have a Ignite Maintenance member visit booked out. Alternatively, if you go into a follow-up and let's say you are not able to book this job out time of, you can absolutely log a follow-up right through here as well. Alrighty, I'm going to pop us back into our Titan Advisor. We have gone through all of our setup pieces, our what to set up. We've talked about how to actually book these service events into jobs through that follow-up tab. Thank you so much for joining me for this TAD Tune-Up video. I will share some resources below with Membership 101 and Membership 102 that goes through the setup in the membership wizard and some other really, really helpful tips through there. But thank you so much and see you for the next one.