ServiceTitan November 2019 Release Notes | Big Pricebook Changes!

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburg here, the blue collar nerd, coming at you for the first time from not my iPhone. Well, unless you count those on site Service Titan interviews. I did get to use their equipment for that, but just upgraded the camera. How do I look? How do I look? Pretty clean. Right now. It is that time of the month again. It is Service Titan release notes time. Before we get started, I do want to let everybody know that I am part of a team called Blue Collar Profits. And it's our mission to ensure that you are getting the most out of Service Titan and technology in general within your companies. So if you've got problems going on, be it you need a price book built or your price book settings aren't quite right, or your payroll settings aren't quite right, or you're having trouble getting the right data that you need, or you're having trouble trusting your data, or hey, whatever the heck it is, we'll be able to get in there, get hands on, really help you out. And if you want to, we also do on sites. Right now the core team consists of myself, we've also got Tom Howard who owns Lee's Air out in Fresno. We've got, we've got Tyson Freeman who used to be the general manager for le's Air before going full time with Blue Collar profits. And we've got Michael Carey who was the lead manager of enterprise implementations over at Service Titan before coming to Blue Collar Profits. So we've got a really strong team and we're just really passionate about helping you guys out. So if you're interested in any of that, send an email to infocollerprofits.com and I'm also gonna put a link in the description down below to follow the Facebook page. All right, enough about that. Let's dig into this thing. So under invoicing we've got enable your customers to pay their statement balance through email. With Service Titan payments, you can email statements with a link for your customers to pay their balance. The link takes the customers to all their unpaid invoices associated with that statement so they can review and make payments which then automatically reflect in service item. This makes the payment process for your customers quick, easy and seamless. Also, allowing your customers to make payments online via email gives you the flexibility to collect a payment when needed. Okay, so basically we can now put the online payments link in the emails with statements, which before we couldn't do for some reason. We just recently got the ability to email statements out of Service Titan in the first place, but it was missing that online payments function which it seems like now is going to be added in. Now keep in mind you are going to have to set this up for it to work once it's available. You'd have to go into the settings and then invoicing an email and put that tag, that online estimate link tag somewhere in your email. One thing I'm noticing that is a little bit concerning is that right now when I put that merge tag in there, it's not showing in the preview section as a link or like it does in the invoice section, it's just showing the actual literal text. So hopefully that's just a glitch with the preview and it's not actually going to send that way. I don't know, it's still in the sandbox, so we'll have to wait and see. Under accounting we've got a couple of improvements for intact users. I'm not an intact user, so I'm not going to get too in the weeds about this because I don't really have the data to show you the examples. But the quick and dirty of it is that you can now export transaction level information to top level in intact in addition to exporting customers, vendors and items. And you can disable the ability to export projects as parent projects to intact and roll jobs into a parent project. Alright Under Forms Use tags to trigger forms. You can now require your technicians to complete a certain form based on the tags associated with the customer location or job. This is great when it comes to things like triggers and alerts. Just as many options as possible. Just throw it all at me. We've also got mobile form duplication. Technicians can now duplicate entire forms in Servicetitan mobile app. This makes it easier for technicians who need to complete multiple copies of the same form on a job. Like when installing several H vac condensers as part of the same job where a copy of the same form is required for each condenser. Before, technicians could only copy sections within a form and would have to call the office to duplicate a form for them. That's great. It's been that way for way too long. It made no sense. The only thing is that now I kind of feel like I need to rebuild some of my forms because a lot of them were built specifically with this limitation in mind that you could only duplicate sections and not the entire form. But that kind of affected the way that I built the forms and now they're kind of built inefficiently in a way that isn't necessary anymore. So I'm glad it's there now. But ultimately it just makes me feel like I really need to redo my forms. And while we're on the topic of forms, Servicetitan, Sorry, I'm not gonna let you bring up forms without me pointing out that forms in Servicetitan are still pretty archaic. Service Titan forms don't have any if then logic, which would be super helpful. For example, you could say, if the answer to this question is yes, then show the to these other questions. Otherwise these questions aren't relevant. So don't even show them. You can make much shorter, less cluttered forms that way. Service Titan forms also can't do any sort of math calculating stuff, and we still can't use the data within forms in reporting. I've been on Service Titan since 2015 and forms have changed very little since then. They're really lagging behind the rest of the product and it's starting to get a little awkward. Okay, under invoicing, we've got several AR management enhancements. You can now filter the AR management table. So we've got kind of those filters that you can do in 2.0 reports. Seems like they're kind of using the same engine for this, so they've just brought that feature over. You can now filter the columns. You can now attach invoices when emailing a statement to a customer, enabling them to see which invoices are associated with the statement. There's a little checkbox for that. Enter your business email address when emailing statements to customers. Filter the AR management table by date to view sent statements in a specific date range. Now, you already told me I can filter the columns now. So I feel like you're trying to get a two for one. Trying to get a two for one out of this. That's the same thing. You're not going to fool me. Hover over the phone icon next to the customer name to view the customer phone number. So this is when you're sending bulk statements like you've got a lot of different customers checked off and you're sending them all. You'll see next to the customer name in the little email panel, there's a little phone that you can hover over to see the phone number. And my favorite change out of this section, add notes to customer outstanding invoices in the AR management table. So now on that table there's a new icon. Looks like a little piece of paper. You can click that to add in a note that will stay with that Record. That's great. Under Marketing Pro, Character limit on campaign Names to prevent display issues caused by long campaign names, the name of a newly created campaign in Marketing Pro now has the limit of 60 characters. Existing campaigns will not be affected. Okay, so this is no big deal. If you made a campaign that was ridiculously long in title, it would look funky. Like the title would just kind of go outside of the box where it's supposed to be. So they've now put a character limit on that of 60 characters, which I know it's kind of hard to conceptualize, but that's plenty. You shouldn't really have to make it any longer than that. Okay, this note. I think they've made a mistake or I'm misunderstanding somehow. I don't think I am. I'm pretty sure it's a mistake. The title of this bullet is Remove Customers from the Suppression List. To give you control over which customers receive your marketing content, you can now upload a list of customers to the suppression list using a CSV file. This will prevent those customers from receiving your email marketing content. So this is the literal opposite of removing customers from the suppression list. We're now able to add customers to the suppression list using a CSV file. So if you had a list from something else that you were mailchimp or Constant Contact or whatever, you have a list of people who want to subscribe. You can upload that now into Marketing Pro and it will just add those names in on top of the names that are already there. But you can't remove them. You're not supposed to be able to remove them. If they unsubscribe, then they're on the suppression list and they're there forever. That's what they chose to do. And you don't have any power over that. There are certain regulations in place that prevent you from being able to take them out of the suppression list once they're there. They're supposed to stay there. So I'm pretty sure that's just a mistake. And we've got a new status column for campaigns. To make it easier to understand the status of your campaigns, you now see the new status column on the Marketing Pro Dashboard. The status column shows draft, scheduled, live, finished, or stopped, depending on the status of each campaign. Simple enough. Alright. Under memberships, you can no longer sell a renewal without an expiring membership. Now, when you add a membership renewal task to an estimate or invoice, when the customer doesn't have any expiring memberships, the technician or office employee gets a notification and can't continue with the removal. This makes it impossible to sell customers a renewal if they don't need increasing the customer satisfaction. That's great. This is one of those notes where I really feel the need to check my attitude because it's really, it's a good change. It's fantastic that that is now the case. But it is a little infuriating that you were ever able to do that in the first place. But I'm glad that they're going this direction. I mean, I've been saying this for a while, but the product really needs to be impossible to use. Wrong. Especially for things like this. Very predictable. Obviously you're not going to renew a membership that isn't expired or doesn't exist. So why should the system let you do that? It shouldn't. We can prevent a lot of headaches and messy data by just making the system a little bit smarter. Okay. Renewal Tracking in Customer Membership Report Template I'm not going to get too in the weeds on this one, but the customer report template for customer memberships now has some new columns. Some of them are optional, some of them are there by default. So there's activation method which basically just says if it was a new sale or a renewal, there's renewed into, which basically shows, I believe, which membership was renewed, got sold by from sold it and sold on for when it was sold. Okay, Membership durations are more precise now. New fixed duration memberships and renewals end on the calendar date they were purchased minus one day. For example, if you purchased an annual membership on November 8, 2019, it will now expire on November 7, 2020 before the membership would have expired on November 8, 2020. Adding a day if the membership was renewed, the expiration date would shift a day, potentially disrupting recurring services included with the membership. Okay, so I think I get it. So the way it was before, it would gradually shift it forward a day. So over time it could be like up to like a month out. So now it's going to do it minus a day so that it stays in the same place. I don't know why this is bending my brain a little bit, but it is Preferred technician for recurring services included in upcoming appointments. In follow ups, you can now assign the preferred technician for a recurring service when booking an upcoming appointment into a job. Previously, the preferred technician field only included the service location's preferred technician. If an upcoming appointment has preferred technicians for the service location and the recurring service, the recurring service technician takes precedence. For example, Bill is the preferred H Vac Technician for a customer's house. But Joe is their preferred annual H Vac filter replacement technician for upcoming H Vac filter replacement appointments, Joe's name appears as the preferred technician. Okay, it took me a minute to figure out what exactly they meant here. See, I thought that they meant that we could now assign the preferred technician. Like we could tell the system which technician is the preferred technician from Follow Ups. That's not the case. In a recent release Notes, we saw that we could add preferred technicians specifically for recurring services. And you still have to assign that preferred technician by going into the recurring service section of the location page. But before, when you scheduled an appointment for an upcoming appointment from Follow ups, it would just put the service location's preferred technician pre populated in the technician field. So if you had a technician assigned as the preferred technician for a specific recurring service, say for example H Vac heating maintenance, and that wasn't the same preferred technician as the overall location's preferred technician, it would still put the location's preferred technician and ignore the one on the recurring service. Now that's no longer the case. If they're different, it will take the one from the recurring service, not from the location. And if they're the same, then they're the same. Hopefully that made sense. That was a little harder to explain than I thought it would be. Alright, under payments we've got updated mobile checking Capture SDK to make it easier for your technicians to capture checks while on the field. We've updated the latest version of MyTek SDK enabling technicians to see faster performance and better device compatibility. Okay, so SDK stands for Software Development Kit and it's kind of what softwares are built with. My tech is the third party kind of plugin that Service Titan is using for mobile check capture. So them updating this is good. Will it actually result in any noticeable difference? I mean hopefully, but it's going to kind of depend on your device. The main thing is compatibility. It's just going to make sure that everything still remains compatible as devices get newer. Okay, Price book. Some very interesting things going on in here. Pricebook has moved to the navigation bar. Adding services and materials, editing items or configuring building blocks of your business is now just a click away. We dug the price book out from the settings menu and moved it to the navigation bar for easier access. So price book is now one of the main buttons up in the main navigation bar of service item. I find that pretty interesting. Assuming you had PriceBook bookmarked, then PriceBook was only two clicks away. Click Settings and then click on Price Book, your bookmark. So pulling it out really only saves one click. I don't know. I feel like there's bigger implications here than just saving us a click. The next bullet is Simplify PriceBook updates with PriceBook Connect. The PriceBook Provider tab has been upgraded to PriceBook Connect. PriceBook Connect lets you import items from catalogs from PriceBook Pro, OEMs, distributors and other integrated providers. The new UPD screen lets you stay on top of catalog changes. Some sub bullets here, newly added and updated items are tagged so you can instantly see when they're added to a provider catalog. And you can pick which providers and items you want to update so you have full control over your price book. So just to make sure we're all on the same page here, the Providers tab was something that was typically gated where certain manufacturers had pre populated equipment items that you could import into your price book. I know Goodman had it, I know Lenox had it, I know Rheem had it. There's more, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. And the concept behind this was always great, but the execution never quite got there. Coming at it from an H vac perspective. The main problem was that nothing was tied together to create actual packages. So you just had a ton of equipment, but you would still have to manually dig through and add the exact matchups to kind of create the package. Also, your manufacturer didn't really have any way to put your pricing in there for you, so you would still have to go in and manually put in all your costs and all your prices. And the biggest problem of all was that these things vary in quality. Some problems I can remember off the top of my head, I know Lennox in particular didn't put in full model numbers. So you would have like 16 seer air conditioner, but that's where the model number cut off. So you didn't know if it was, you know, a two ton, a three ton. Like you didn't know what size it was. And I know a lot of the images had transparent backgrounds. They were PNG files for transparent backgrounds, which ServiceTitan renders as black. Meaning basically that it looks like absolute trash. It'd be like a black background with the piece of equipment, like really crudely cut out. I mean, you could see every little flaw in the photoshopping out of the actual like furnace or condenser or whatever it was. Because you were on a black background. You would see like little white pixels kind of artifacting around it, it looked really bad. Price put connect what they're talking about here. It doesn't solve any of those problems. It doesn't effectively change much of anything right now. But I do believe it has big implications for the people. This seems to be a step towards Price Book Utopia. Price Book Utopia is when all the manufacturers, all the OEMs, all the supply houses can upload your pricing into service titan. You have rules set up so that when your pricing changes, your prices to your clients automatically changes. That would all happen live and without your involvement. All the services, the materials, the equipment pieces, the manufacturers and the OEMs and supply houses, they all handle putting that in for service type. Then you just check off a box. I want this, this, this, this. I want those things in my price book done. And equipment pieces that need to be tied together like H VAC systems. Those ties are built for you already. That's Price Book Utopia. That's the gold standard. That's where I want to get. This doesn't get us there. This doesn't really change anything except for structure. It puts a structure in place that we could potentially have Price Book Utopia in the future. Now, to be clear, I don't want to get anybody's hopes up. I think Price Book Utopia is still several years out into the future. But it's good to see that we' in the right direction at least. Did you see that duplicate? There it goes again. And finally, under reports, customer membership report template now tracks membership profitability. Adding services and materials, editing items, or configuring. The building blocks of your business is now just a click away. We've dug the price book. This is just. This is just the price book note again, guys. It's just. You just put the price book note again. Well, I don't know if that bullet's even supposed to be there at all. I'm just gonna wa on that one. Come on, guys. You know I make these videos. You're proofread. What are you doing? I'm just kidding. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has those days. Okay, finally, the last thing under fixes, the potential membership renewal tag no longer appears on a customer record after they renew an expiring membership. Previously, after a membership was renewed, the customer was still tagged as potential membership renewal. Oh, I didn't even know that. So that tag was just useless before. Huh? Huh? I'm glad it's fixed. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Thank you so much for checking out the video. Please be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't done that already. And please hit that like button if you like the video and you want to keep seeing more. Just FYI, I do sell some merch. So if you're interested picking up some merchandise, shirts, hoodies, whatever with this cool little blue collar nerd fella on there. Come on, focus. There he is. Check out the description down below for the links to the merch store. I'm gonna have a coupon code going from now through the end of Thanksgiving weekend. Just use coupon code gobble for 10% off through Thanksgiving weekend. And just as a reminder, I am also going to have the link in the description below for the Facebook page for blue collar profits. And I'd really appreciate it if you gave that a like as well. Thank you again and all my American viewers, which is most, but not all of you. Happy Thanksgiving. Peace. It.