Release #79 | ServiceTitan Release Notes Overview

What's going on everybody, it's Richard, Covertly Hated Bookaholic Nerd, and it is time once again to go over some release notes. Now a few of you may be thinking, "Again? Didn't we just do this? Is it autumn already? Have I entered yet another fugue state and forgotten my actions for the past couple of months? Are the courts going to be as lenient with me this time?" Don't worry, what's happening here is that ServiceTitan is going back to monthly releases from quarterly releases. So major releases used to come out 4 times per year correlating with the seasons, But now there's going to be a major release every month like we used to do back in the day. And by back in the day, I mean like 4 or 5 years ago.

All right.

With that said, let's jump into it.

Summertime, and you know what that means. I'm gonna go to the beach wearing my sister's jeans. It's summertime, and this is my routine. I send my sister out to the local Sprouts, then I, then I wear her jeans in the bloody sea. Between me and you, don't sell me out, don't sell me out. My sister doesn't know about the thing with the jeans. Been making these videos such a, such a, such a long time. Gotta do something dumb once in a while. Gonna risk my job, gonna risk my job for a stupid song in the video. Such a genius. Don't sell me out, don't sell me out, don't tell my sister about that thing with the jeans.

All right, first under dispatching, we have company-wide jobs tray tabs. So if you are on the new dispatch board that we've discussed in previous release notes videos, then this one is for you. It does not, however, apply to the legacy dispatch board. So in the last release notes, we talked about a feature that allowed dispatchers to rearrange the tabs on their jobs tray under the dispatch board, as well as create their own custom tabs or custom buckets of jobs, which is really cool. But if a dispatcher built out custom buckets, there was no way to then distribute that amongst other dispatchers if there were other ones who needed it. But now an admin can build a set of company-wide custom tabs one time, and then every dispatcher will have access to those custom tabs the next time they refresh the board. You'll do this from the manage tabs button right there in the jobs tray. And it is permissions-based. There's a Manage Configurable Jobs Tray System Tabs permission that's on for your owner and admin roles by default. Now, to be clear, what this feature does is allow for admins to do the work of creating the customized job buckets for the jobs tray, but it does not rob individual dispatchers of the ability to customize their own jobs tray. So if an admin creates a custom tab for dispatchers, it will show up for them by default, but they can still go in and hide it if they don't want it. And if a dispatcher takes one of those custom company tabs and tweaks it, then ServiceTitan is going to save that as their own personal version, and their version sticks even if the admin updates the company one later, unless that dispatcher goes in and hits the Use Company Version button, which then resets it to the company version. Also, as an additional enhancement, you can now filter a tab by more than one job at a time instead of being stuck to picking just one. All right, next under Enterprise Hub, push and lock payment terms with Titan Exchange. And this one is aimed specifically at Enterprise Hub users, so big enterprise-sized companies that are using Enterprise Hub to manage multiple tenants or multiple brands that are all linked together. So for those users, Titan Exchange has been your way to standardize stuff across all of your tenants, things like forms, job types, business units, price book items. You push it out from one place so that everybody matches. But previously payment terms were not on that list. So if you wanted every location billing on, say, net 30 with a 2% early pay discount, well then somebody was signing into each and every tenant one at a time and rekeying the due dates, the discounts, the penalties, the interest settings all by hand. But now payment terms is a supported Titan Exchange template type. So from your template tenant, you build out a payment term once and then push it out to as many tenants as you want. You can lock it so that the local tenants can't go and change it on you. And when you need to change it later, you publish the update and it shows up on each tenant's update screen for them to review and apply. All right, next up under estimates, we have a y'all item, control cost carryover from estimates to invoices. So here's what's been happening. When you sell an estimate, ServiceTitan carries the cost of every line item over to the invoice, which is fine except for inventory stuff that you already bought on a requisition or a purchase order. That cost already got captured when you procured it, so now it's counted twice—once at procurement and once again from the estimate—and that double count throws off your job costing. Your margins look worse on paper than they really are. But now there's a checkbox called Exclude Estimated Cost from Invoice that you can set on individual price book items, so materials, equipment, and other direct costs. And with that box checked, when you sell the estimate, the item's price to the customer still carries over to the invoice like normal, but its cost to you carries over as zero. So the only cost that's hitting your job costing in that scenario is the one from the purchase order, eliminating that double count. This one is automatically available, so there's no need to ask to have this turned on or anything like that. You can just go and find price book items whose cost is usually already coming in through a requisition or a purchase order, and then check the box on for those. And also, just a heads up for anybody who does like importing and exporting of their price book there is a new column in the spreadsheet export for the setting now. So if you've already got an exported price book file sitting on your computer in limbo right now, you should account for this setting before importing it back in, or else any work that you did messing with the setting in the user interface will get undone. Howdy, y'all. All right. Next, under financing, we have an early access graduate from our last release notes. So Affirm as a financing partner was in early access back in the 78 release, but it is now fully out and generally available. Again, Affirm specializes in financing for lower-ticket items, so it's perfect for service work. Now, Affirm is United States only at this time, and it's mainly aimed at the residential side of things. All right, next under Inventory, we have Requisitions 2.0. And just a heads up, this one is a mandatory change. So if you are using Requisitions right now, that experience will be updated for you. So with the old Requisitions workflow, you know, the bones of it were powerful. It could always handle complicated buying on the backend, But the problem was more on the front end. If you wanted to find which sold estimates still needed a PO or a transfer, well then that meant hunting across jobs and projects. The screen itself was pretty dated and like when you hit save, you didn't get a clear picture of what you just created. So Requisitions 2.0 refreshes that experience. First, there's a sold estimates tab sitting right at the front of the requisitions landing page. So instead of having to dig around, your purchasing folks just open that in the morning and see everything that needs a procurement action. All sitting there in one consolidated queue. Second, the whole requisition workflow got a modern redesign, so adding and removing items, moving through it, it's just generally cleaner, and you can build multiple outcomes in one pass. So like, you can do a couple different vendor POs plus a transfer to the job all in one requisition instead of three separate ones. And third, there's a new pre-confirmation review screen before you commit, so it shows you exactly which POs and vendors are about to get created so that you can catch an error before it becomes a real purchase order and and not after. And all through the landing page, your jobs and project details stay visible across every status, so you're not clicking into each record to figure out what you're even looking at. Okay, next, under Job and Project Management, we have Findings on the job screen. So Findings is a feature that lets technicians attach a particular finding to a particular piece of equipment. So it's a way for them to record, hey, while I was out here, I found this capacitor reading low, this compressor pulling high amperage, whatever. The findings feature itself is not what's new. That already existed, and findings are recorded over in the equipment record. The problem was that they were rarely looked at because they were only on the equipment record. So the only way to see it would be to leave the job, go to the location equipment screen, and dig up the exact piece of equipment. But now there's a finding section right there on the job screen. So every finding tied to that job shows up in the same place where you're already managing that job from. You can see the status, the urgency level, and all the details in the side drawer. And you can add a new finding or edit an existing one without ever leaving the job, which makes the feature a lot more practical and useful in my opinion. All right, next, under Payables, we have AP approval workflows. So previously, a bill comes in, it gets reconciled, it gets exported, and a 5-figure bill from a brand new vendor with no PO attached goes through basically with the same oversight as a $50 supply house charge. There was no built-in way to say, hey, before that one in particular goes anywhere, somebody needs to look at it. So you were just relying on people catching it by hand. But now you can build out actual approval workflows inside of ServiceTitan. So you set the conditions—bill total, vendor, business unit—and then bills that don't match any of your special conditions just get approved automatically and keep moving. So you're not slowing down staff with just like routine stuff. But the bills that do match your special conditions get routed over to the approver that you assign, and then they review it and can choose to approve or deny it. Once it is approved, ServiceTitan marks it as approved and reconciled in one step, and then it's ready to export. You build these under Settings, Accounting, and Bill Approval Workflow, and any bills already in flight show up on a pending approval tab. There are some backend feature gates to get this turned on for your account, so you do have to go to support or your CSM if this is something that you want. Next, under Roofing and Exteriors, you can now import measurements if you already have them. So let's say you've got a measurement report already in hand. Maybe it was run before you were on ServiceTitan, or maybe a supplier ran it, maybe a previous contractor who worked on the mouse already pulled it from EagleView. Whatever, one way or another, you have it already. Well, up to now, there was no way to bring that report into ServiceTitan. You basically just had to rekey all those measurements by hand into your estimate, which is of course slow, frustrating, annoying, and introduces a ton of room for human error. But now you can import a report that you already have into the measurements table on the job or location. You open that measurements table, hit import, and you either pull it from a connected provider— GAF, QuickMeasure, EagleView, or HOVER— Or you choose Upload from Device and drop in the file yourself. It takes JSON, XML, PDF, or Sketch files. Confirm the source and the name, finish the import, and then the measurements populate in the table ready to build an estimate on without any retyping necessary. And just to be clear, your normal way of ordering a fresh measurement from these providers works exactly like it used to. This is just an additional path that's available for a situation where you already have the data. There are, however, two separate permissions for ordering measurements and uploading measurements. Both are on by default, but you can give somebody just one or the other if you wanted to. All right, next, under Service Agreements, we have Linked to CRM Opportunities, and this one's only relevant to you if you're using both commercial service agreements and ServiceTitan CRM. So here's the disconnect today. Let's say an account manager is looking at a service agreement and they wanna know which sales opportunity actually produced it. To find that, they've gotta leave the agreement and go dig it up separately in CRM. So these two things that are related just don't really talk to each other on the screen. But now the linked CRM opportunity shows up right on the service agreement follow-up screen. There's an opportunity column sitting right after the created on column, and it's a link. If you click it, the opportunity opens up in CRM in a new tab, so you can glance at the deal notes before a renewal call without losing your place. Also, as an additional little convenience piece, when you create an agreement off of a customer or location record, the account manager field now fills in automatically from what you record instead of you setting it by hand every time. And if you duplicate an agreement, the opportunity link comes along for the ride. This feature is automatically available for anybody who's already using both Service Agreements and CRM. All right, moving on into pro products. Under Contact Center Pro, we have voicemail follow-ups. So this is how voicemails used to work. Let's say somebody leaves a message in a personal or group inbox. To even know that it's there, an agent has to physically dial into the voicemail box and punch in a PIN. Then they have to listen to the messages one at a time and either remember or scribble down who they're supposed to call back, which is slow, a pain to prioritize, and callbacks tend to fall through the cracks. But now voicemails from both personal and group inboxes show up automatically under Urgent Follow-ups in a Voicemails table, each one with a status and assignee and playback right there in Contact Center Pro. So the manager sees 5 new ones came in overnight and just assigns them out to available CSRs. Then agents can play the recording, make the call back, and update the status. And because it's stored within ServiceTitan now, you keep long-term access to those recordings even after the message gets deleted off the phone system. Setup-wise, your group inboxes get set up in routing workflows, and then you assign people to the inboxes that they watch under user management, assign voicemail inbox. Personal voicemails though, just auto-assign to their owner, so you don't have to do anything there. And there are also two new permissions associated with this. Edit voicemail follow-ups and assign follow-ups to others. Both of those are off by default, so you've got to go and turn them on for the right people before this actually does anything. One heads up on this, it does not transcribe the voicemail, at least not yet. It's audio playback, not text. All right, and before I let you go, I'm just going to do a quick lightning round of a few minor enhancements and bug fixes. So we've got a nice handful of enhancements for the dispatch board. For example, you can now adjust an appointment start and end times without triggering a full reschedule. So you can make a simple time correction without automatically sending new notifications to your customers or having to redispatch your techs. You can also now lock the timeline so that the board quits auto-scrolling horizontally as the day rolls forward. You can also now set a default saved view so that the board opens up to your filters and layout every time. And you can now hide equipment tags on the dispatch board specifically without hiding your other tags, which is super nice for locations with a ton of equipment. You can end up with just like a super long cluttered list of equipment tags, and, and all other tags would just get totally lost in that situation. So I'm really glad to see that one. A few more quick enhancements, uh, with estimates, material costs on estimates now include vendor-specific tax. So that way you see your true material spend before you sell, which protects your margin. For inventory, there's a new proximity-based fulfillment option that checks the closest warehouse with stock first on install requisitions instead of you comparing them by hand, plus a next scheduled job column on the sold estimate so you can prioritize buying by what's actually happening first. With service agreements, you can now build an agreement with no visits. So subscription style stuff like remote monitoring is finally supported. Plus you can add a visit from a template to an already active agreement and remove a location from an active agreement without canceling and rebuilding the whole thing. In the customer portal, equipment now has its own details tab. You can pick which custom fields show and you can customize the wording and sender on your portal invite emails. And with Marketing Pro Autopilot, your campaigns now auto-detect your template colors so you can match your brand with a live preview. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit like if you like this video and found it valuable. Be sure to subscribe to Surfer Science 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 leave me a comment down below. Let me know what you think, what your favorite update is, or whether you prefer beaches or pools. Appreciate it. Peace.