ServiceTitan June 2019 Release Notes- I Have Several Questions (Pt. 1)

Hours and minimum labor time moved on pricebook. Okay, so previously you would go under the Commissions tab to find the hours assigned to a certain task, and they moved that to the Details tab, which is the main tab. When you first click in, that's where you are by default. So if you're looking for that, that's where it was. They moved it. Okay, now I'm gonna move into some stuff that I don't fully understand and I'll explain why. The entire membership section. Okay. Attach equipment to memberships from ServiceTitan Mobile. This confuses me because we could already do that. That was already a feature that was there when you added a membership. There was a big button that said select equipment at the bottom, and you would tap that and select the piece of equipment that you were tying the membership to. I noticed already. And that is the password and sign on changes. So to ensure the highest level of security for the Service Titan platform and to protect your data, we've implemented new password requirements for all Service Titan users. Additionally, a new forgot password workflow was added to enable your employees and technicians to retrieve their own password without having to contact an administrator. This is a pain in the butt. I mean, no way around it. This is a hassle, but it's a good thing. It really should have been done a while ago. ServiceTitan had a very kind of outdated password thing, password flow, and this is better. It's going to force you to have a strong password. I think it's going to force a capital letter and a number, things like that. And it's going to have a forgot password flow so that if your technician or somebody in your office forgets their password, they can retrieve their own password without having to have somebody in the office reset it. Service Titan houses a whole lot of our data, and it's important that it's secure. This is ultimately a good thing, even though it's kind of annoying. You'll also notice that when you go to sign in on Service Titan, there's kind of a redesigned interface as well. Okay, now for the rest of these notes. I kind of want to preface it, kind of put a little, little asterisk. These notes kind of seem like a draft, at least at the time, of me filming this video. I'm filming this. What is it? June 11th. And these notes just seem really vague and unclear and weirdly phrased. I'm thinking that they're not done. I mean, Service Titan has been known to kind of go back and revise the notes. It also seems like not all of them are live yet in the Sandbox account and I'll point that stuff out to you as we go. But these notes a little shaky and as always I'm not going to be going over 100% of these release notes. I'm just going to go over the things that stood out to me and the things that I think you'll find interesting and then I'm going to put a link to the entirety of the release notes down in the description below. I do always recommend that you check those out for yourself. So the first thing I noticed was that now we can receive MMS through the two way texting feature. Before it was SMS only, meaning only text could come and go, but now they have support for MMS so you can pictures and video. As long as you have that MMS number set up, you can receive video and pictures from your customers so that they can kind of help explain things. Now it does specify receive in these notes, so it sounds like we still can't send a photo or video custom to a customer, but you know, at least we can receive them now Dispatching we now have an option for only paid technician hours to show on the dispatch board, so under the technician's picture you can see how long the technician's been working. And if you use clock in clock out, you now have an option for only paid hours so that you know how many on the clock hours versus just hours in general. So something like an unpaid non job appointment is not going to affect those hours. Definitely useful. You can also now rank tag importance to customize visibility so you know how with a tag you can check off always make visible on dispatch board. That's great, but there's only so much room on that bar to fit tags, so now you can rank their importance to say which ones get priority to go first. On the mobile side we have easier to edit mode for PDF smart forms. When you edit PDF smart form, you can now change the form without losing all of its smart capabilities. I swear these were on last month's release notes. I think it was in the video and everything. There's also an easier to use edit Mode for smart PDFs where you can make a small edit without losing the smart capabilities on the rest of the form. I looked back at the release notes from last month and I didn't see it anymore. So I don't know, maybe something went wrong and they moved it to this month. I would like to see that notated because that's just kind of confusing and makes me feel like I'm going Crazy. I don't appreciate it. Membership Smart Field code so with these newly added membership related smart field codes, you can better customize your PDFs with key information so you stay organized and efficient. Okay. View jobs that are on hold from the mobile History tab. So this is going to be helpful for your technicians on mobile side. If a job is on hold, typically that would have not shown up at all in their history tab and now it will show there and on hold. There's also a new job filter option so your technicians can see the next two jobs that they're assigned to versus just the next one job. And that way they're able to reach out a couple people ahead to say hey, I've run into some difficulties or hey, can I come out early because the other person person's not home or whatever. Allow sales technicians to send emails to customers from their work email addresses. Finally. That's great. ServiceTitan has never really been super robust on the sales side of things for like consultants. And this is definitely a great feature for them to be able to send an email from their work email through Service Titan. That's great. Okay. Payroll and timesheets. Overlapping non job activities. Overlapping non job activities will not double pay. Okay, so I didn't even realize this was an issue, to be honest. But I guess previously if you booked two non job appointments on top of each other and both of them were paid, it would just double pay for that same amount of time. And that will no longer happen. And what I just read there, overlapping non job activities will not double pay. That kind of phrasing kind of goes throughout these whole release notes. I'll point some more out later, but they're kind of confusing their own nomenclature. I mean, non job appointments is what they call them. And so when they throw non job activities at me, I know what they mean in this case. But there's some points in these release notes where they call something something else and I don't know what they mean anymore. Okay, price book duplicate button now standard for all users. I'm kidding. They didn't do that. That too. In my Sandbox account that button is now gone. So it seems like we've lost the feature. I mean, I don't think that we actually have. I suspect that something is changing there and it just hasn't hit the sandbox account yet at the time of me filming this video. But it is definitely a little confusing. This is also another place where they got kind of weird with the way they phrased things. Technicians can now attach equipment to A recurring service at time of sale attach equipment to a recurring service. So to the membership itself or to the actual recurring service? I didn't see a way to actually do that either. They're separate things. Saving customer service representatives time when setting up the membership and extra features. What extra features? Improved automatic calculation for deferred revenue. I desperately wish I understood this one because this is a big pain point for me. The membership deferred revenue whole situation, it's way too easy to mess up. I mean, service titan's been doing this whole operation guardrails where they're kind of making sure that everybody uses the product correctly. This is a huge opportunity for that. The membership workflow is convoluted. It's complicated and it's really, really easy for a technician to do it wrong. And the system just lets you. You have to do everything exactly correct in the exactly correct order or else everything breaks. It just lets you delete deferred revenue tasks. Deferred revenue tasks are client facing, which is confusing. They'll see this negative number that says deferred task on it and they'll ask questions about that. It's just not good. It needs some work. So what I'm seeing in these notes seem to imply that they're working on that. I mean, I know they're working on a total rebuild of memberships and making it more modular and less like you have to create separate memberships for every little different thing you want to do. Hopefully all that gets sorted out, but for now I don't really understand what they mean by this. The improved calculation lets you automatically calculate deferred revenue when adding new deferred revenue items to a recurring service when it is attached to a membership. This benefits accountants by enabling them to divide deferred revenue by the percentage they want rather than recognizing deferred revenue evenly. I don't really know what they mean. Serviceitan already has an automatic deferred revenue calculation, so I feel like they're just telling me that they improved it and I don't really know how. Okay. Improved workflow for applying an add on to a membership. This is one of those areas where the nomenclature really matters because I don't know what they mean. Add on in service Titan typically refers to an add on price book item. You can mark it an add on and you can have a separate price for an add on task. But I don't think that's what they mean here. That doesn't make any sense. I think what they're referring to is a sub item. So if you have a membership and you want to do it for, say it's an H Vac situation and you have two systems and you're going to charge less for the second system than the first, you can add the membership and then you can say add sub item to pick the secondary membership for the second system. And that will kind of bundle those two things together. It's a sub item. I think that's what they mean. The note says a new button attaches membership add on tasks to estimates and invoices more efficiently. The functionality of this button reduces the number of taps it previously took to do this in Servicetitan Mobile. If I'm understanding this correctly, and they mean subitems, then I guess this isn't live yet in the sandbox account because the process is exactly the same. Gotta tap it, add it, tap it again on the invoice, go add subitem, find it again, find the subitem in the price book, add that one separately. It's exactly the same and it is a lot of taps. I hope they cut it down. Redesigned Membership Billing Experience so membership billing now offers more convenience when billing your customers through a newly redesigned process. You can charge members at the end of the month or whenever your business typically charges customers for their membership fees. What are you talking about? I don't know what that means. There's no screenshot, there's no example. I can't find it in the in the Sandbox account. I can't find an example of what this redesigned process is or looks like. I don't really know exactly what they're referring to. Is it the template? Is it. Like I said, these notes this month in particular, are just not very clear. I don't know what's up. Okay, little mini update. I did a little bit more digging into this while I was editing the video, and I did come across a Knowledge Base article about creating automated billing rules that I believe is fairly recent. And I think this is what they're referring to. So I'm going to put a link to this Knowledge Base article. I'm sure that inevitably this will get linked in the release notes themselves, but if you're catching this early and it's not linked yet, I'll put that there. There's also a little animated GIF of what the workflow looks like to set up these rules. I'll put that on the screen as well. Maybe I'm entirely wrong. Maybe this isn't even what they're talking about. But just in case there is, here's another One, I wasn't super clear on visual improvements on the dispatch board when enabled. This added feature changes the way in which technician availability appears on the dispatch board. So you better see and scan different shift types when dispatching your team. Look, I understand that there's real people behind all this stuff. I don't mean to insult anybody, but this sounds like it was written by a bot or like maybe someone who doesn't speak English as their first language, which is fine, but maybe writing the release notes is not the correct job for them. I mean, what does that mean? The way that it's phrased changes the way in which technician availability appears on the dispatch board. So you better, I mean, so you can better not like, so you better see and scan different shift types. Bastard. I think what they're getting at is they're doing something different visually with how shifts look on the dispatch board. So right now and in the past it's had this little faint gray carrot bracket thing where the shift ends, which is not great. It's way too subtle. Nobody really understands what it means. It's not very clear. And it does need some sort of visual change. And I think that's what they mean. But it's not live in the Sandbox account yet, if that is what they mean. That's all I got for today. I do plan on making a follow up to this video if things change. More stuff comes live in the Sandbox account or they update these notes to be a little bit more clear. I don't feel super satisfied right now that I've provided the value. I mean, I make these release note videos to give everybody a more digestible version of the release notes, but these in particular are so undigestible that I'm having trouble digesting them. To then give you something a little bit more visual and valuable. I really wish that the release notes included maybe some screenshots of before and after. I know eventually they usually link to updated versions of the knowledge base documentation and that's good, but it's not good enough. I really want to see. Before it was this and here's a picture of how it was and now it is this and here's a picture of how it is now. That's going to be a lot more helpful to people. I would still make these videos because I still think a video is just more of a digestible way of consuming this. But the release notes have been getting better recently. But this one just feels like a little bit of a regression. I don't know, Like I said, maybe it's just a draft, who knows. But I will make a follow up video if things change. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel if you do enjoy this content. Make sure you don't miss anything and it really helps me out. Appreciate it. Bye. It.