ServiceTitan October 2019 Release Notes

Foreign. What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the spooky blue collar nerd. It's that time of the month. Surface Titan has dropped some new release notes. Let's go over them. So first up, under payments membership renewal protection. To offer an additional layer of protection to your customers, Service Titan now checks monthly to see if credit cards used to pay for memberships have expired or changed. If they have changed, the system will attempt to automatically update them. Once the card information is updated, Service Titan will generate a report to show which accounts updated and which were not. Helping you take immediate action to update your customer information. That's going to be great. That's a big pain. Point of having recurring billing on a monthly basis, even an annual basis, you've got to chase down a bunch of cards that expire. So for it to make some sort of attempt to automatically update which I don't really know exactly what that process looks like, but it's great that it's at least going to try and do that and generate some sort of report to say which ones couldn't be updated. Now I'd like to see some more detail here. I don't really know at this point how we get that report. Is that going to be automatically generated and sent to somebody? Do we have to pull that report ourselves? I don't see enough information here about exactly where that report goes, so I'll be keeping a lookout for more details on that. Under reporting, we have a new AR transaction report. Run the new AR transaction report to see a detailed list of your outstanding invoices and varying aging buckets. You can view a summary of the invoices and filter the data for what you want to see in the report. You can now reconcile your outstanding invoices with your accounting software by comparing the data in the report with your accounting software. This helps you easily understand any discrepancies you might have. So we have a new AR related report. I'll put a screenshot up of kind of what that looks like. Hopefully that'll be helpful for some of you accounting people out there. Under security Security enhancements to prevent using commonly used and hacked passwords. To continue to increase security across servicetitan and protect your customer data, Service Titan now screens all new passwords against the list of commonly used or compromised passwords, increasing security and safety for you and your customers. Okay, so basically what this means is anybody out there who likes to use password 1, 2, 3 as their password, that's not going to fly anymore. So now when you Try to use a password like that. That's overly simplistic. It's just going really though, what's your password under Call Booking? Based on your feedback, we've made your call booking experience more convenient. If you have a default job summary that auto fills after you've selected the job type, the job summary field in Call booking now adapts to the length of that summary instead of resizing the box to see the information, making it easier and faster to book jobs. Okay, so basically what this means, if you have in your job type settings a pre populated job summary. For example, you have a list of questions that you want your CSRs to fill out and answer. You now get a much more reasonably sized box to see those questions in, so you don't have to manually drag the box and make it bigger, which is great. This is one of those little things that it's really nice to see little things like this get improved. It's only something that you deal with if you actually use the software every day in a company. So guys, when you come across little things like that, tell somebody about it. I mean like always, don't be a jerk, but tell somebody. Even though little things like this, they're not really a big deal. It's not hard to drag the box. But dragging the box bigger every single time you book a call forever, that adds up. It's a much better user experience when these little things get ironed out. Alright, under dispatching more defined lines between technician rows on the dispatch board. The lines that separate the rows for different technicians are now more defined, making the dispatch board easier to read important information. If you use Zeiss, I don't see any difference. I pixel peeped it pretty hard. Under follow ups, Location, name and unit added to upcoming appointments. We've heard your feedback. We've added two new columns to the upcoming appointments list in follow ups. These two new fields help you identify the upcoming appointment you're looking for and are included in the export feature to help you send mailers. Okay, so this is going to be helpful for follow ups for sure. I'll put a screenshot up. They've added new columns to help kind of distinguish what's going on there under invoicing AR management enhancements. Managing your statements just became easier in AR Management. In AR management of the invoice section. Weird, weird way to phrase that. You can now add, edit or delete the email addresses of recipients when emailing statements in bulk to customers and set permissions as a manager to manage which employees can take action from the AR management screen. Now that one's kind of important. So viewing that AR management screen is now a permission and it seems like it's going to be off by default. So if that's disappeared for you, go enable. The permission should be right there at the very bottom. Job confirmations. This is kind of a big one. Auto confirm jobs via text message. You can now configure job confirmations allowing your customers to confirm jobs over text. This modernizes your customer experience through automated text based confirmations for appointments, saving your office staff time. Reminder text to the customer include a keyword that if included in the text reply sent back to you by the customer automatically confirms the appointment. Now I'm not going to dig too deep into this because I actually have an entire video on it. It's my third on site interview that I was able to film while I was in Glendale a few weeks back. But basically that new job confirmations feature where you can turn a job darker blue. On the dispatch board mark it confirmed there's now going to be a process for be automated. The client can confirm their own job via an automated text message that they receive. Marketing Pro More enhancements for service titan Marketing Pro if you thought the last release was it, we've got more for you. What? What's that? Oh, you thought the last release was it? Oh, you thought that was it, huh? Well, it's not. We got more. We got more for you. We got more for ya. Oh God. All right, all right, calm down. She's getting carried away with these release notes. Guys. Just, just relax. Relax. I didn't think it was it. All them. Them getting carried away. They are. They're getting carried away. It's them. Remove an email template from the build email sequence when creating a campaign enabling you to eliminate unwanted content from this step in the workflow with just one click. So basically it's a new X. We've got a new X so we can delete just the template without deleting the whole section there. So you can clear the template out but keep your subject line, the year, send time and all that stuff and just pop in a new template. Pretty minor change. I don't know why they took their shirt off over that. There's a little more View and download a suppression list with customer names, reasons you're suppressing emails to those customers and dates to know when items were added to the list. This helps you see why emails aren't delivered to specific addresses so you can identify those customers who need their email addresses updated. Definitely helpful. Insert customer first Name and last name merge tags. So before as far as merge tags, we had just customer name and it would put their full name. But now it's able to separate out first name, last name, or full name. A little bit more flexibility there. In Campaigns Edit, send a test email and fix errors from the details screen. In Campaigns Edit, send a test email and fix errors from the details screen for any campaign that's free. It's kind of weird, okay, but I get it. So if you go to your list of campaigns, you can click on the actual name of the campaign and you get kind of this overview screen. And from there you're now able to send a test email of any email in the sequence and I guess fix errors. I mean, I don't know if I just didn't have errors to show or what. I didn't see anything about errors on there, but we'll see. All right. Under Memberships, we've kind of got a lot going on. Select all filtered option for membership billing searches. When you filter a membership search with one click, you can select all the memberships within the filtered search. Previously, clicking select all would ignore any filters and select all memberships. Now, if you apply filters to your search, you can choose select all filtered. This action selects only the memberships that match your filters, giving you additional control for bulk membership billing. Okay, so this is affecting when you search in the membership billing area, there's that master checkbox at the top that will check everything. Now, previously, if you did filters within your search, that master checkbox would say, screw your filters, I don't see those. And just check off everything that match the search. Now you get a button that allows you to select only the things that are matching your current filter and ignore everything else. Definitely helpful. Okay, so these next two kind of go together. And let me start with tie equipment to memberships at point of sale. Now, I'm not gonna lie, they've been confusing the crap out of me with this. I feel like I've seen some version of this exact note on like the past eight release notes, but this time it seems to actually mean something. And there was kind of a way to do this before that I guess they decided against or there was some sort of problem with it happening that way. I don't know. But this update here seems to kind of put it back the way it was, but with some minor changes. So in the mobile app, you can now select particular equipment pieces that are tied to a membership when you're selling a membership, which is great. That really helps clarify things. When a technician goes out, especially to a property with a lot of units, you know, a bigger house or maybe a commercial property, perhaps not all of the units are under the membership and we need to know which ones we're working on. Now, while this update is directionally correct, I still take some major issue with it because there's just still way too much room for user error. So for this to work, you can't just hit the plus to add it to the invoice. You have to tap on the item itself to dig into it and then you get the button. Now you have to select every recurring service that you want to apply. I can't really think of a scenario where I'd want to apply one recurring service and not the other. So, for example, my membership has a heating maintenance and a cooling maintenance, right? I have to check both of those off. If I only check one off, it will just let me do that. No warning message, no anything. So now I've already thrown my data. Also, if you make your selections in there and then you open it back up for any reason and then back out, it clears it. Even if you don't hit save, it will just revert back to zero. So with these combined factors, you have to drill into it the right way, you have to check them off the right way, and if you tap the button the wrong way, it clears everything off. There's a damn near 0% chance this gets used properly, at least in my company. I mean, that's just the fact of the matter. This stuff has to be foolproof. It really has to be impossible to use wrong. And that's very much not the case here. It seems like a feature built by somebody who's never managed technicians. Nothing against my technicians. I've been a technician and they're the lifeblood of the industry. But you're not that great at using software to a T. I mean, let's be honest with each other here. Now, along the lines of that feature, there's also enhanced equipment information table for memberships in Servicetitan Mobile. So equipment details tied to memberships have moved from the job screen to the invoice screen. In Servicetitan Mobile, this makes equipment information more easily accessible when working on a job. This is especially useful for commercial maintenance jobs where technicians are servicing many pieces of equipment on the same job. Now, I don't know if maybe my testing conditions just weren't correct. Maybe this only populates when you book a job off of a recurring service. And that's not how my test was set up. I don't know. I couldn't get this table to show up. So I don't have a screenshot for you on that one. Sorry. But it does sound better from the way they're describing it here. Especially for, you know, like those big commercial jobs they're talking about. Okay, under price book. Alright, Richard, this is it. This is the one. This is the one where they're gonna make the duplicate button available to all users. And it's all because of you. You convinced them. You did it, Richard. You did it. They're gonna throw a parade in your honor. They're gonna build a statue. Thank you, Richard. They'll say thank you for giving us this gift of the duplicate button. Equipment name included in searches. You can now search by equipment name when using the price book search bar to find equipment. Previously only equipment, code, model and description were used in searches. This new functionality makes it easier to find equipment more commonly known by the name than the model number. Okay, of course, of course you should be able to search by the name. Sorry. No, it's a good change. I had something else in mind under reporting. New permission for reporting permissions. Access to manage reporting permissions is now its own permission, which means you can assign reporting access duties to other office employees. Set up user permissions, go to settings Employees permissions allow editing of reporting permissions. Yo dog, I heard you like permissions. Okay, so there's now a permission for allowing access to the reporting permissions. Permissionception Reporting permission enhancements. Reporting permissions are now organized by tabs. I'll throw a screenshot up of that. Pretty straightforward new sharing settings for service type and report. Our built in reports. Reports published by Service Titan that are included with all accounts now offer editable sharing settings and categories. Okay, so basically now you have those editable sharing settings and the categories that were previously only available for customer reports. For some reason, those now show up for the default reports as well. I'll put a screenshot up of the before and after administrator access to all custom reports. Administrators can now view, run and edit custom reports regardless of sharing permissions. By default in Service Item, users have control over who can access certain custom reports they create. I think that's the right move. It's getting a little bit finicky with all these permissions. And you make a report and you're like, hey, go check that report out. I mean, she'll look at that every week. And they're like, I don't see that report. You're like, freaking permissions. It's getting a bit much. So I think it's the right move to just allow admins to see all of those reports. They are administered after all. Payment Template and Custom reporting renamed to Applied Payment Pretty sure if it were just a name change, I'll put a screenshot up. So if you're looking for that particular reporting template, it's the same thing, it's just a different name now. And you can now group adjustment invoices with original invoices in the Invoice report template. So for custom reports based on the invoices template, you can group an invoice with any related adjustment invoices by the original invoice number by selecting the base invoice column option. This allows you to view accurate invoice totals. Definitely helpful Adjustment invoices would definitely throw off some reports before, so having this column to help keep everything together will definitely help. Under Settings People Filters are now sticky. No, no, wait, I misunderstood. To make managing your team easier, any filters applied in the People section of Settings People, employees or technicians will be kept until you manually clear the filter. So if you set a filter, it's going to stay there until you take the filter away. That's. That's great. I think that should work that way. Anyways, that's it for these notes. Biggest takeaways for me. Those auto job confirmations are going to be a big step forward. Look out for a video on that in November. And I also do like the memberships thing where you can apply the equipment. But again, I just need it to be a little bit more foolproof. Well, a lot more foolproof. By the way, Service Titan Coaching Club got some big updates for you there. So that Coaching Club is happening. We are moving forward with it. Actually partnered with a company for this. That company is Blue Collar Profits. It's owned by Tom Howard and you might recognize that name because he gave a keynote at the 2019 Pantheon event. Tom is an owner of Le's Air out of Fresno, California. Very impressive shop he's got down there. And of course it runs on Service Titan. Also on the team we've got Tyson Freeman. He's the longtime GM of Lee's Air, now working full time for blue collar profits. And we've got Michael Carey, who used to be the lead enterprise Implementations Project Manager for Service Titan. That's right. We've got an ex Service Titan employee. All that to say the group just got buffed. You're not only going to have me as a resource, but you're also going to have that team also, of course, if I get sick or I'm on vacation or whatever, there's other people to do the meeting and you've just got more brilliant minds to pull from. I'm really excited about this. I think this group is going to be super valuable, especially with this new partnership. If you are interested in the Service Titan Coaching Club, we're getting close, so link in the description below to join the wait list. You're not obligated to anything, but I am just going to send you out some more information once we have everything ready to go. So check out the link in the description below if you're interested. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Hey, please do me a huge favor. Hit like if you like the video, subscribe to the channel. If you've not done that already, hit that little bell so that YouTube notifies you anytime I upload a new video. Appreciate it. Happy Halloween. Peace. Spooky, scary skeletons speak with such a screech you'll shake and shudder in surprise when you hear these zombies shriek. We're so sorry, skeleton Just.