Release #60 🤠 | ServiceTitan Release Notes Overview

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the bootcaller nerd. It's that time. We've got release notes to go over. And this release, this is no ordinary release. No, this release is the beginning of an era. So, first of all, under the highlight section, we have the new Service Titan community. Hopefully, you've heard about this already. The community has been completely revamped. It's got new features like support, ticket tracking and a universal search. It's also absorbed all of the functionality that used to live in Titan Center. And of course, it's a great place to shift, share feedback, talk to the community, ask questions. And we've got the ideas page over there where you can post and vote on new ideas. I've got a whole separate video going into detail about the new community, so be sure to check that one out if you haven't seen it already. All right, next, under forms and media, we have form triggers for appointments and. Oh, what's this? That little icon indicates that this feature is part of a project that I am heavily involved in, known as you asked we listened to, or y' all for short. Howdy. So y' all was born out of a list that I was keeping of requests that I would see asked for over and over. Just little unintuitive things or product gaps or even new features, but new features that were being asked for over and over. And I just kept adding to the list and adding to the list, not even really knowing what I was keeping this list for. Until one day, bam, opportunity struck. Somebody internally said, hey, we want to start a program where we focus on just little things that bug people about the product. Just little frustrating things that people keep on asking for and asking for. But, gosh, where do we start? We'd have to aggregate some sort of list. And I said, ooh, ooh, ooh me ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh. And so y' all was born. So basically, for something to fall under this program, the y' all program, it's got to be something frustrating about the product that people have asked for over and over. It's got to be something that's beneficial to any size company, big or small. It can't be related to a pro product, and it has to be something that we expect to significantly delight a Service Titan user. Now, to be clear, the program has since expanded a lot, so not every single thing with that icon came from that original list. There are other sources at this point. Nor is this like a situation where I'm 100% the guy calling the shots. There are still, of course, a limited number of resources and other priorities to be considered. So I'm not in charge by any means, but this is certainly the strongest position that I've had with the product team. I'm able to make some much stronger suggestions here than I otherwise would have been able to. All of that to say I'm very passionate about this project and I very much want it to continue because our list is long and we are still adding to it. So I really want this to be an ongoing thing that sticks around year after year. But for that to happen, the powers that be need to know that you guys, the Service Titan users, are into this. So if you like the sound of what you just heard, please tell somebody Leave a comment on this video say it in the Service Titan Community say it in Service Titan Masterminds. If you get an email survey from Service Titan, mention y', all, y', all, y', all, y' all just bring it up all the time if it's something that you actually like. I'm not trying to sway your opinion here. I'm just asking you to express your opinion if you have one anyways Form Triggers for Appointments so previously form triggers were always on the job level. Meaning if you set up a form trigger, it was going to require that form be filled out one time per job regardless of how many appointments were within that job. But some of you brought up that you have certain forms that you would like to be filled out for every single appointment within a job. And so now we have that option. So if you go into form triggers and edit or create one, you'll see this new checkbox that says Trigger on all appointments. If you check that box off, then a new copy of the form is going to be required for every single appointment within a job. I know I've seen this asked for multiple times just in the Service Titan Masterminds group. But Facebook search is terrible and so I could only find one post from Ashley Lackey. So to Ashley and everybody else who asked for this feature.

Howdy y'.

All.

Okay, next under job booking and contact experience we have another y' all item we which is Technician two Way Chat. So should you choose to grant the permission, Technicians now have the ability to text with customers from the mobile app. In order to allow for this, first you would go into the Technician Permissions search for chat and you should see two chat related permissions. The first one is to view customer chats. That one was already there before. That just allows the technician to see the chats that have been happening between the customer and the office. But there's also this new permission that says allow full access to customer chats and that allows the technician to not only see the chats, but still send chats of their own. This is what it looks like on the technician side. So within a job, on the main job tab, they have this chat section here. They can tap on that and get this fly out. They'll be able to see the history of any chats that are attached to this job. And from that fly out, they can now send chats of their own. When there are new chats that the technician hasn't seen, they'll see this little red indicator mark. Now, I already know there's a new y' all spawning right now. You might want there to be a push notification when a customer replies versus just that red dot when I fully hear that. Here's the situation. If you're not already aware, this entire version of the technician app, it's getting the boot. It's out of here. We're currently working on building from the ground up a brand new native technician app. That one's going to be really great. I'm very excited about it. But because we're working on that, it does limit the amount of resources that we're able to pour into this version of the app. Now, we are still making updates to it, as you can see, but I'm just setting proper expectations with you. Things like push notifications for the chats that's going to be saved for the next version of the app. And of course, there are different philosophies on this. Some companies believe that communications with the customer should be fully handled by the office, and that's perfectly legitimate. That's why it is behind a permission. Now, something important to note about this feature is that there does have to be an open chat thread already in order for a technician to send a chat. Meaning a technician cannot initiate a text chat from nothing. There has to be a chat thread open. So any automated text that you have set up to send to your customer, like appointment reminders or dispatch alerts, the those do open up text threads, so those count. And obviously any manual chats that somebody from the office sends open up threads as well. So since most companies do use some sort of automated alert to remind their customers about their appointment or let their customer know when a technician has dispatched, this usually isn't any issue. But once somebody in the office marks the thread as closed and it moves over into that closed tab. The technician is not going to be able to send any chats in that chat thread anymore. They can't reopen it. This feature has been requested over and over by a ton of companies, but just to name a few, Red Royal Electric Ademic Electrical Precision Door Services, Airmetic Climate Control and Brewer Heating and Cooling. Howdy y'.

All.

All right, time to take the y' all hat off. Oh, there's another one. Under Jobs and Projects we have the ability to delete unused appointments. So previously you could only delete unused appointments on completed jobs if they didn't already have an exported invoice. So if someone forgot to delete them before the export, then you had these unused appointments that were sticking around in your search and in your reports. But now you can delete unused appointments at any time, provided that they don't have any timesheets attached to them. Again, I've seen this one asked for a ton, but to name a few Beck with Heating & Cooling, DG Service Co. And HR Stewart.

Howdy y'.

All.

Alright, next, under purchasing an inventory we have a new KPI in reporting last purchased price. So when you create a purchasing report using the inventory line items template, you can now add the last purchase order and last bill cost columns to your report. Next we have the new overview section. Now this one is a pretty big deal if you use full inventory. So now under the main inventory tab you have this section called Overview and under that section you have items and inventory locations. So under items you have this master parts list that gives you this high level overview of everything that's going on with your inventory. So you can see your total inventory valuation. You can see how many of your items are in the negative, how many negative inventory items you have, and the total number of items that you have in inventory. You also have this table here where you can see your inventory items and see how many are available on hold on order on hand, your average cost on that item, your total value on your inventory of that item. You also have a very robust set of filters here. So floating there at the top are some quick filters. Item name, item code, item description, inventory tags, average cost. Those are just floating there for quick access. But then you can also click this button right here to see the full list of filters. And as you can see you have a lot at your disposal. And by the way, most everything on this page is able to be drilled into. For example, if you clicked on total negative items there at the top, you would get a list of all of those negative items. If you click on an item name or code in the table, it's going to take you into a more detailed view of that item. From an item's details page, you can create an item count. You're also able to initiate a transfer or a purchase order from here if you need to do that. And if you click on a number under the hold column, and that's going to take you to the on hold section where you can see all of that inventory that's sitting on hold. And overall, this new items overview screen is just a really handy place to get high level insights into your inventory. Okay, next we have another yawl. It's the option to update the inventory location when you update the assigned technician on a job. So previously, if you change the technician that was assigned to a job, you would have to then remember to manually update the inventory location for that job so that the parts get consumed from the new technician and not the technician that was originally assigned. Which is really difficult to make happen because the people who are reassigning technicians to jobs are typically not going to be the same people who are in charge of inventory and worried about this sort of thing. So now when somebody reassigns a technician, they're going to get this pop up, allowing them to update the inventory location as well. I don't have any specific names to tie to this one, but it affects pretty much everybody that uses inventory. So to all you inventory users out there, howdy y'.

All.

Alright, next we have the Technician Scorecard redesign. And this redesign solves lots of problems that we had with the old technician scorecards. For example, previously the scorecard didn't have its own filters. It always inherited the filters from the dashboard, meaning if you wanted to look at different business units or different date ranges, you had to go back to the dashboard and then navigate back to the scorecard. But now that's no longer the case. The scorecard has its own set of filters. Also, the old technician scorecards were still using pre reports 2.0 calculations, meaning number one, it wasn't easy to understand how the scorecard was getting the numbers that it was getting. And two, you could end up with numbers on your scorecards that didn't match KPIs in reports 2.0. The previous scorecards didn't include any customer satisfaction metrics. Now they do. And overall, the new scorecards just have better visualizations with easier to understand metrics and numbers. So here at the top of the technician scorecard, you have this quick switch to go between service metrics and Sales metrics service is more focused on conversion rate metrics, whereas sales is more focused on close rate metrics. You can also export information from these scorecards. You've got these really nice new pie charts here where you can see metrics broken up by division or by job type. You can click this see more button here under the technician name to get all of their personal info, things like their role, their skills, what truck they're assigned to. You've also got a link there where you can quickly go and edit that information. Definitely a nice improvement over the previous version of the tech scorecard. All right, next, under the improvement section of these notes under dispatch, you can now add the location column to the jobs tray. So the jobs tray, that's that table that lives underneath the dispatch board. Previously there was only a customer column, but now you have the option to add in the location column as well. To edit the columns that show up in the jobs tray, you just click that little settings cog right there above the jobs tray and then you can add or remove columns from there. All right, next we've got another y'.

All.

So we've got some new technician alerts. So you can now set up a dispatch canceled alert that will notify the technician if they were dispatched. And then somebody in the office canceled that dispatch as well as a technician next job alert that will send the technician an alert a certain amount of minutes that you're able to confirm configure before their next job is set to begin. So you have this checkbox here on both of those alerts that allows you to send it to the job related technician. And of course you have other filters so that you can send it for just certain job types or just certain job priorities or whatever you want. Dispatched, canceled. That was pretty self explanatory. If somebody wants the technician to stop going to that job, they should get an alert about that. And then the technician next job alert is handy so that you don't have technicians just kind of go home because they think thought they were done for the day. But actually the office had since put something new on their schedule. Now you can make sure that they're getting alerts about that to kind of remove some excuses. Now I'm sure people have asked for these features before, but that's not really why this is a y'.

All.

This is a y'. All because both of these alerts previously existed, but they were gated features. And everyone do we like gated features? So if we can identify some features like this that are gated but don't really need to be. There's nothing dangerous about this because it is optional. It just adds this alert as an option. It doesn't automatically set up the alert for you. So wherever we can identify gated features that we can ungate, we're going to do that and we're going to call that a y'.

All.

Howdy y'.

All.

Alright, next, under equipment, I'm leaving the hat on. We have new equipment statuses. So as you hopefully know, in Service Titan, you can tie equipment to locations. This is really handy. You can see the history of that equipment. It's great for marketing data. You can see how old that equipment is. And if you've got Marketing Pro, then you can set up certain email campaigns to go out to people who have older equipment versus newer equipment. But there was this problem which is that equipment gets replaced sometimes. And previously your only option was to delete that replaced equipment off of the location. But that means you lose that history. So now equipment can have statuses and the status can either be installed or replaced. That way you no longer need to completely delete equipment off of a location. You can just change the status to replaced. Now, the introduction of these new equipment statuses are just the prerequisite to some more benefits that we can introduce down the line. For example, there's no equipment status filter in the Marketing Pro audience builder just yet, but now that it at least exists, we can get that added. Again, I don't have specific names aside to this one, but it's beneficial to pretty much everybody who installs and replaces equipment, so to pretty much everybody.

Howdy y'.

All.

Okay, this next one is related to the one we just talked about. So it's kind of a y', all, but kind. It's a baby y'.

All.

We'll call it a baby y' all and we'll put on the baby y' all hat. So the ability to remove equipment is now a permission. So now that we have these new equipment statuses, it's usually going to be more beneficial to change the status of the equipment rather than delete it. And so you might want to limit who is even able to delete equipment at all. And so therefore the ability to remove equipment is now its own permission. Okay, next, under estimates, we have a new way to add estimates to a project. So you can now create estimates on customer or location records and then once those estimates are sold, you can attach them to a project. This is a workflow enhancement mostly beneficial to new construction type quotes. Previously for a quote like that, you'd have to create a project first in order to put estimates inside of it, but then you're creating a project for estimates that might not even sell. So this new workflow makes a little bit more sense. Next, under FinTech we have FinanceIT custom rules for Canadian customers. So now Canadian customers who have signed up for financing through Finance IT can choose which financing plan and amortization period they can use when technicians offer financing out in the field. Custom financing rules are a super handy feature that are great for making sure you protect your profit margins when using financing. I have a whole separate video on custom financing rules. You should definitely check that out if you haven't seen it already. All right, next, under Forms and Media we have a note about PDF Signature fields. So Service Titan Mobile now supports signature fields added to PDF forms using softwares like Adobe Acrobat. With this change, signature fields will now open in a pop out so customers can easily provide a signature. And again, this note is referring specifically to signature fields in PDF forms. Next, under Jobs and Projects there's a new bill to dropdown when editing a project. This is helpful for when a project's invoices will be paid by a third party. And do note that that bill to drop down field can't be edited once any invoice on the project has been posted, exported or paid. Next, we've got some new reporting KPIs available for project reporting. Those KPIs include project name, project status and Sub statuses, Project Manager, start date, target completion date and actual completion date. Alright. Next, under memberships we have some enhancements in the recurring service reminders via SMS campaign triggers. So from the overview step of creating a marketing campaign, you can now add stop triggers to a recurring services SMS drip campaign. For example, you can set a trigger to remove customers when a job is booked, when a call is created, or when a customer leaves an audience. So by default the pre built audience will stop sending messages once the customer has booked the recurring service because the default audience only includes the statuses of not attempted or unreachable. But this just gives you additional stop triggers. Like you can stop sending them messages once they call you, whether or not they actually book the recurring service. All right. Next, under Payroll and Timesheets we have the new Employee Payroll Settings page. So we now have a global Employee Payroll settings page. You get there by going to Settings and Payroll and from this page you can either quickly edit your individual employee payroll settings in line right here from the page, or you can check off multiple or all of your employees and perform bulk actions. So you can quickly update multiple people's manager or their pay frequency or pay type, set multiple hourly rates at one time. Just generally update payroll settings much more quickly either in line or in bulk. Multiple people have asked for this, but in most recent memory is this post from my friend Jessica Woodruff Smith who was noting how tedious it was to individually, one by one, update everybody's manager. Well, no more. Now you can do it in bulk. So to Jessica and everybody else who asked for this.

Howdy doll.

Okay, next, Under Payroll Pro, you can now bulk download and email employee pay stubs. This is helpful in a situation where an employee leaves for whatever reason and you need to give them all of their historical paystubs. This allows you to really quickly and easily do that in bulk versus having to go into every individ individual pay period to download the pay stubs. By the way, if you're not familiar with Payroll Pro, I've got a whole separate video on that and I highly recommend checking it out. I'll put a link in the description down below. All right, next, under Purchasing and Inventory, when you use the Copy Invoice items to purchase order button, all of the item costs on that original invoice are going to be set to $0. That avoids double job costing because now all of those item costs are going to be on that purchase order that's tied to the job. Okay, next I'm going to call this I'm going to call this a baby, y'.

All.

We have improvements to the Purchase order PDF view. So previously if you tried to email or print a PDF purchase order in a horizontal landscape view, some of the columns were obstructed. But now under Purchasing and Configuration you have this new section for Purchase order format options, and there you can choose to format the POPDF view in a landscape layout layout. You also have this option to show the item description on the PO Print view, and that option to show the item description that was previously gated but is no longer. These options are pretty universally helpful to anybody who ever prints or emails pos, but I know it was specifically asked for by Hiller Plumbing, so to everybody at Hiller okay, next, under Scheduling we have a new Schedule Assistant Technician filter. So you can now filter to only see one or multiple technicians in Schedule Assistant. This is useful when a homeowner prefers a specific technician or when you're looking to balance workload across specific technicians. And if you don't know about Schedule Assistant, I've got a separate video on that be sure to check that one out. Schedule Assistant is a really cool feature. Okay, next, under Telecom, we have the new default call type filter in phone number settings. So you can now configure tracking numbers so that any phone call that comes in through that tracking number is by default marked as either a lead or not a lead. Why is this helpful? Well, you can create a phone number that is specifically for your technicians and vendors to call into the office on, and then you mark that phone number as not a lead by default. And that means when your technicians and vendors are calling into the office, you don't have to worry about reclassifying those phone numbers. They're by default going to be marked as not a lead. That is super helpful and saves a ton of time. This one's a y', all because number one, it's super helpful and it affects everybody. But number two, because it's another one of those things that was already a feature, but it was gated and it really didn't need to be. So now it's not. So to everybody who is in charge of reclassifying calls at your company, we saved you a good chunk of time there.

Howdy, y'.

All.

Anyways, that's all I got for today. Again, if you're into the idea of this whole y' all thing, you asked, we listened. Let somebody know. Shout it from the rooftops. There is so much more on the list. And to make sure we don't lose steam, it's really important that everybody in Service Titan leadership knows this is what the people want. Be sure to hit like if you like this content 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. Also link in the description down below to the full release notes if you want to see every nitty gritty detail. Appreciate it. Peace.