ServiceTitan January 2020 Release Notes| Multi-day Jobs Just Got Easier!

I meant to shave first. What's going on everybody? It's Richard Cobra here, the Blue Claw nerd. Happy New Year. I hold in my hands here the first release notes of 2020, so let's jump into it up first, under chat we have access closed threads. So previously in the chat under the job booking, you could close a thread to get it out of your way and then the only way to reopen that thread would be for the client to reinitiate. But but now you'll be able to manually reopen that thread. Next, under dispatch we have Technician shifts launch. So this feature this was previously known as Technician availability and it's been in beta for a little while. This feature, as the name would imply, allows you to set up technician shifts even if you don't use shifts. Though I really think this is a great feature if you use a third party answering service especially, and that is because it allows you to mark who the on call technician or technicians are, and it makes it very obvious who that on call technician person is. If a technician is marked as on call, their entire horizontal bar on the dispatch board turns yellow. You can't miss it. It's very obvious who's on call. That's really helpful in general, but it's especially helpful if you use a third party answering service after hours because it really reduces the likelihood that they'll accidentally put a call on the wrong person. Next, under Jobs we have duplicate jobs. So when you're booking a job that's similar to an existing one, instead of having to start a new job from scratch, you can now duplicate the existing job. Duplicating a job copies the information from the existing job to the job booking on the call screen. This feature is especially useful if your office workflow involves booking a separate job for every day of work on multi day projects, saving you about 20 clicks. Please note that to use this feature you will have to purchase Job Booking Pro. Aw what? I'm kidding about that part. This is a default feature for everybody, as all duplicate buttons should be. We also have add unbooked items from a sold estimate to an existing job. You can now book items from sold estimates into an existing job. This feature is helpful if you booked items from a sold estimate into a new job but forgot to add an item or two from the sold estimate to the new job. Instead of having to create a new job that overlaps, you can book the items into the existing job. Before, you could only add unbooked items from sold estimates to a new job. This is great. This feature has also been in beta for a while and it looks like it's finally coming into the main core products. So that's awesome. And honestly, I think they're underselling it a little bit with their description here. The use case they gave was like a mistake, like you just accidentally didn't check off everything that you meant to. But it's better than that. I mean, it happens all the time where a client wants to combine different estimates or they sign up for something and then they call you back later and they're like, actually, can we also add that other stuff? And the only way to handle those situations was to stack jobs on top of each other, even though they were really the same job. Or do a pretty miserable on selling and rebuilding of estimates thing on the back end. But now when you go to sell, convert an estimate right there next to the book job button. You also have a new button that says select existing job and then you can bring any items from that estimate into that existing job. Okay. Under mobile, we have allow technicians to add notes on customers and locations. So previously on the mobile side, a technician could only add a note to the job, but now they can have a dropdown and they can choose whether they want to leave a note on the job, on the location or on the customer. Now, note that this is a new permission and it's off by default. So if you want your technicians to have it, you'll have to go in and enable that permission. Once this release drops under dispatch, we have faster dispatch board. We've heard your request for a more responsive dispatch board. Your dispatch board now loads faster. Cool. I mean, that's, that's great if that's true. Honestly, in my tests I haven't really noticed any difference, but I wasn't doing anything super scientific and I didn't really have any bad latency problems with the dispatch board in the first place. But, you know, if it's faster, that's great. Okay. Under invoicing, customers can pay their statement balance on a mobile device. When you email a statement to your customer, they can now pay their outstanding balance on the go anytime they want. With Service Titan payments. They can click a link in the email to review all their unpaid estimates associated with the statement and make a payment directly on their mobile device. The payment is then automatically reflected in Service Titan. Okay, I'm shooting from the hip a little bit on this one. It sounds like there was some incompatibility with the online payment link for specifically statements and mobile devices, and that's been worked out. Although I don't know for sure. I'm not super clear on that one. Under financing, the finance letter of completion now includes French support, so your technicians cannot present that in French. This is obviously geared towards clients that are in French speaking parts of Canada, but that's great. I'd say that that feature is moi baguette. I am not very well cultured. Okay, under Follow up, kind of a lot going on. Follow up refresh, the Follow up screen has been enhanced, making it easier to navigate and use. For one, we've gotten easier to use Checkbox for recurring service events. So here's what they mean by that. When you pulled up a list of recurring services in the Follow up screen, there was a column of checkboxes where you could just individually check them off, but you had to precisely hit that checkbox. So like, if you know this is the main area that the checkbox looks inside of and the checkbox isn't here, you had to click precisely on that checkbox because if you clicked a little bit outside of it, then it would open up the whole recurring service window. So it would just take you off into a new page. Kind of frustrating. So trying to check off multiple recurring services without checking them off all off could sound a little something like this. God damn it crap. Are you serious? But now that doesn't happen anymore. If you miss the checkbox a little bit, nothing happens. No big deal. We've also got improved navigation. So in Surface Titan's ongoing crusade to murder all horizontal menus, the Follow up screen now also has that vertical menu on the left side. See ya. Another cool thing now is that all of the sub pages under Follow up. So Opportunities, sold estimates, surveys, all of that, they all have their own URLs. So you can bookmark specifically one of those. You can bookmark specifically sold estimates and go straight there. And that also allows Service Titan to remember where you were. So if you were on Sold Estimates and then you clicked away, when you go back to Follow Ups, it'll still be on Sold estimates, whereas before it would always default back to Opportunities because. Because the sub pages didn't have their own URLs. So the follow ups URL just always took you to Opportunities. Okay, Under Forms, we've got some mobile form duplication enhancements. So technicians can now duplicate forms from the Forms tab within the Opportunities under Follow Ups in the mobile Follow ups they can also duplicate PDF forms now as well as native Service Titan forms. And there's a new permission to allow or disallow technicians from Duplicating forms. Now, I couldn't find this permission in my next account, and I think that's because, and I didn't realize this until very recently, the ability to duplicate entire forms, not just sections of the form that came out a few release notes back. But it's gated. It's not on by default yet. You have to ask for it. So I'm assuming I'm not seeing the permission because I don't have the feature gate open, I don't have it enabled. I'm not really sure why gate that one. That seems pretty safe. So if you want to save your technician some headache, I recommend going ahead and asking for that to be enabled. Also, under forms, we've got a little tweak on alerts with duplication. So when you're notified about form completions, if the form is a copy, you'll see the name of the copy in the alert. Previously, I'm guessing you would have seen the name of the original form all right, Marketing Pro, Lots of stuff going on here. So they saved the best for first. You can now filter audiences by last email or scheduled job date. To avoid sending customers too many marketing messages, you can now filter audiences by the last time they received marketing content from you. And if they have an upcoming job, that's awesome. Those are very useful data points. So when you're building an audience now, you can filter out people who have received a marketing email from you in the past, however much you set up. So if somebody happens to be following in like five different audiences, they're not just getting blasted every day with emails from you. And you can filter by scheduled jobs. So right now you could have like a campaign, let's say it's for tune ups, people that you haven't been to in a while and you want to reach out to them and say, hey, I haven't seen you in a while. Time for a tune up. Theoretically, they could receive that email even though they have a tune up scheduled tomorrow. Now you can prevent that from happening. We also have continue sending customers marketing messages after they leave an audience. You can now choose whether or not to filter out customers from receiving marketing content from you if they are no longer part of a campaign's audience. Previously, if you originally included a customer in an audience but subsequently removed them from that audience, service titan would automatically stop sending them marketing content as part of that campaign. So this comes in the form of just a little checkbox in the campaign setup. I can't personally think of a use case off the top of my head where I'd want somebody to keep getting emails even though they aren't in the audience anymore. But hey, options are good, so I'm not complaining. Also, you can now archive audiences, campaigns and email templates. And that's great because previously there was no way to get rid of stuff. So if you were making stuff that was just a test, or you got in there and it didn't really work out and you bailed on it, it would just kind of sit there and collect virtual dust forever. But now you can lock them away in a shed so you don't have to see them anymore. Revert scheduled campaigns to drafts from the dashboard. You can now cancel your scheduled marketing campaigns to draft status from the campaign screen, allowing you to make changes to your campaign or archive it without needing to access it details. Okay, let's see. So I'm on campaigns scheduled and then I just want to bring it to a draft, so. So I would. Okay. Clearly you would just. All right. Okay. Obviously where this would be would be. Yeah, I don't think this one's real. I couldn't figure it out. Remove individual customers from receiving marketing content. For more control over which customers receive your marketing content, you can now stop specific customers from receiving your marketing content on the customer record. Okay, so to do this, you'll go to the edit pencil on the customer record or the Bill to page, and then you'll have a checkbox there where you can stop them from receiving any marketing content, whether or not they fall into an audience. Next, sandbox environments can no longer send marketing content to audiences. Thank goodness. Yeah, I don't know if you were aware, but previously you could actually send Marketing Pro content out of the next account. Pretty dangerous. I'm glad it's not like that anymore. They've also added a prompt for you to go in and fill in some of the new information in the Marketing Pro settings. So the first time you open up Marketing Pro, after this release drops, you'll get a prompt to go fill some of that stuff out. All right? Under payments, New pending payment transaction status. Now, if ServiceTitan can't confirm whether an integrated credit card or check payment was successful, the payment is assigned the pending status. Service Titan will automatically attempt to verify the payment every 15 minutes. Under price book Set pricing permissions for technicians. You can limit how technicians can edit prices on invoices and estimates by assigning separate permissions for service material and equipment items. For example, you might want to give equipment sales technician the flexibility to change equipment prices, but not membership and other service prices. Yeah, that's great. That's pretty cool. Again, more options. Always better. So when you go into the technician settings, you'll now see separate checkboxes for editing each type of price. Under Reporting Reports on Online Estimates, you can now include online estimate details as columns in the Estimates Jobs, Technician Performance, and Business Unit Performance. Custom Report Templates. These options give you the tools to analyze the performance of emailed online estimates separately from estimates presented in the field. You can now Open reports in ServiceTitan from emailed simple Scheduled Reports. So recipients of simple schedule reports can now click a link in an emailed report to open it. In ServiceTitanit. This gives them quick access to in app features such as sorting filters. It also lets recipients view data changes since when they received the report. So that's cool. The drawback of scheduling a 2.0 report has always been that you lose the 2.0 features because you're emailing it as either a PDF or an Excel file. So with this you can get a link so that you can just click it and go into the report. In Surfacetitan, Build advanced Custom reports with primary Keys Custom reporting templates now include primary keys. Primary keys allow you to connect multiple exported reports in one spreadsheet, giving you the flexibility to build advanced reports outside of ServiceTitan. Okay, so what they're talking about here is like the ID numbers that you would see, for example, in a price book export. So like job id, invoice id, customer id, location id, they're just unique ID numbers assigned to a specific piece of data. And I'm actually already able to see these in the live account, which is interesting. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Pretty good set of release notes. Please subscribe to this YouTube channel if you haven't done that already, and hit that little bell so that YouTube notifies you anytime I upload a new video. If you like this video, please hit like and leave me a comment down below. Appreciate it. Peace.