ST-51 Appointments, New Refund Workflow, & More! | ServiceTitan Release Notes Overview

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the blue collar nerd. So the time has come once again. We've got some release notes to go over. This is a big one. Let's jump right into it. So first we're just gonna kick the door right down with the biggest note on these release notes, which is Appointments. Now, hopefully by now you are already pretty familiar with appointments. I made a dedicated video about them, which of course you've already seen, right? And you should have received multiple emails about them, which of course you opened and read thoroughly. Right? But seriously though, Appointments is the new way to handle multi day jobs in Service Titan. It's a major update, something a lot of people have been asking for for a really long time. But if somehow this is your first time hearing about it, or if you've heard about it but you haven't really taken a deep dive, then I'm gonna need you to pump the brakes on this video. Pull a K turn, go watch this video right here. Seriously, if you haven't seen the appointments video yet and you're on a limited time budget today and it's either watch this release notes video or. Or watch that other video on appointments, watch the other video on appointments. All right, we kicked your door down with that big note. Now that you've got your door all nice and repaired, we're going to kick it down again with the second biggest note on these release notes and that is the new Refunds workflow. Now this is also a pretty big update. So I did make a dedicated video talking all about this new refunds workflow. You can check that out in the corner of the screen here. Or of course I'll put a link in the description down below as well. But the short version is that this workflow automates a lot of the work that needs to be done in Service Titan when issuing a refund in order to keep your books accurate. So before there was often a lot of manual work that needed to be done in order to keep accurate books, such as adding adjustment invoices and negative payments manually. But this new workflow automates that stuff, therefore making your financials even more reliable. Couple things to know is that this new refund workflow does require the Payment collections feature gate to be enabled, and we've talked about payment collections in the past. A lot of you should already have that enabled. If you do have that enabled already, then this new refund workflow will be something that you can toggle on and set up in your settings. So this is not something that is going to change immediately. This is something that you can toggle on once you're ready. Again, got a whole separate dedicated video on that. Check that one out. Only after you've watched the video on appointments, which of course I don't need to tell you because you've already seen that one. Right? All right, next on these notes we've got enhanced sales tax tracking with QuickBooks Desktop for customers in Canada. So you can now map tax zones in ServiceTitan to QuickBooks tax rates or codes to automate the sales tax tracking in QuickBooks when exporting invoices. This ensures that ServiceTitan and QuickBooks use the same tax rate to calculate sales tax. Yes, and setting this up is very similar to the way it's set up for US customers, with a couple small caveats. If you are a Canadian customer and would like to set this up, check out the link that's linked in the actual Release Notes document and that should walk you through it. All right, that's all the brand new features for this release. Let's move on to the improvement section. So first under dispatch you can now optimize routes that include multi technician jobs. So from the dispatch board, if you have a bunch of jobs assigned to a certain technician, from the right click menu you can choose Optimize Route and then that will rearrange the jobs in the most optimal order possible for drive time. And that feature itself is not new. We've had that for a while. But a caveat with that was that it couldn't rearrange jobs that had another technician assigned to it. But now that limitation has been removed. So from the dispatch board if you click that little settings cog in the upper right, that will take you into the dispatch configuration settings. And at the bottom of the list list you will see a menu item called OptimizeTechnician Route. And from there you can choose a setting to let the system know how you'd like to handle optimizing route. For multi technician jobs, you can have it ask you every time it runs into a multi technician job. You can have it optimize only single tech jobs the way it used to work, or you can have it optimize all jobs when you choose to optimize routes whether they're multi technician or not. Next, we now have the ability to mass reschedule confirmed jobs. So again, this is just removing a limitation from a feature that already existed. But but to refresh your memory in case you missed it, we do have the ability in Service Titan to reschedule jobs en masse. This is a gated feature, so if that's something you need and don't have on already, talk to your csm. This is really useful for certain trades where just entire days of work can get like rained out jobs that require digging, landscaping, pest control. In certain windy conditions you can't spray outside. And before using this feature, you could only mass reschedule jobs that had not already been confirmed. But now with this update, you can reschedule them in mass even if they're already in the confirmed state. All right, next, under estimates, sold by credit is assigned when changing the perform work status. So somewhat recently we got the ability for technicians in the mobile side to basically correct their own mistake if they chose to perform work now when they meant perform work later or vice versa. But there was one little snag, one little gotcha with that one, which was that if the technician chose to perform work later and then went back and changed it to perform work now, they didn't end up getting the sold by credit on that invoice. But with this update that is now no longer the case. They will get sold by credit in that situation. All right, next, under forms we can now hide prices on PDF mobile forms. So under business unit settings now there will be this new checkbox that says don't show technician item prices. And with that checked off, any jobs assigned to that business unit will not show any prices on price related smart fields on PDF forms. So fields like invoice, total, subtotal, those will not show to the technician. Technicians will also not be able to email the form to the customer with that enabled. So this is really intended for workflows where all of that is handled from the office. Next, for forms, the finish trigger has changed to the complete the job trigger. So forms triggered when a technician taps the finish button are now triggered by the complete the job button. Because now with appointments there isn't a finish button, but there is a complete the job button, which of course you already knew. Right? Next we have form based tags added only when form is completed. Yeah, so before if you had any forms that were set to automatically apply a tag when they were filled out, that tag would get applied as soon as the form was started. But just because a form was started doesn't necessarily mean it was completed. And so now that tag only gets applied once the form is completed. Next, under invoicing we have the ability to bulk charge statement balances. So in AR management you can now bulk charge statement balance for customers who have a Payment Method on File Use the Payment on File filter to bulk select and charge customers. Bulk charging helps you collect payments on your schedule without waiting for your customers to remember to make a payment. Yeah, so this feature actually lets you collect statement balances up to a certain date. So when you charge the balance, you can choose to collect the entire outstanding balance or only the statement balance up to whatever date you set in your date range. Alright. Next, under Jobs, the Cancel Job button has been renamed. When you click a job through the Job Actions menu on the job record, the final button you click to confirm the cancellation now reads Apply. Okay. Next, under marketing we have some new audience building filters. So you can now filter for opened previous emails. So you can target a set of engaged customers who has a history of opening emails and you can filter for have received emails. And that's useful for retargeting customers that were maybe part of a previous campaign. Next is easier campaign editing. When making last minute edits to a scheduled campaign, you will no longer have to click through the entire campaign building experience to make a simple change. When making edits to a draft campaign, you will now be taken to the first incomplete step. Yeah, so basically before if you were building out a campaign and then stopped midway through, when you wanted to go in and finish setting that up, you would start from page one and you'd have to manually click through to get to the part where you left off. But now with this update in that same situation, you will now be taken to the page where you left off. Next, we have a campaign confirmation pop up. You can now see a confirmation pop up with more thorough messaging when launching a campaign, it shows the date of the launch and audience for the email, SMS and direct mail campaigns. You can also see print, date and cost for direct mail campaigns. Next is static date range in analytics. So basically in the marketing analytics, the analytics default to the last 30 days and you could manually change that date range to say the last 90 days. But as you navigated around from page to page, it would keep defaulting back to 30 days and you would have to change it back again to 90 days if that was still the date range you wanted to see. But now that doesn't happen anymore. So as you're navigating through the marketing analytics, the date range will stay what you set it to. Next, you can now have up to 12 email templates in a single campaign. So before if you had an email drip campaign, the limit was four emails within that campaign. But now that limit has been tripled up to 12. So sometimes it takes more than four touch bases to get a customer to actually take action. And now you have the ability to create a campaign with up to 12 +. If you want to have a campaign that's like a monthly newsletter for the entire year, now you can do that. Okay, now these next five notes are still under marketing, but they are specific to reputation management. So if you're not using reputation management and you're not interested in hearing what's new with it, you can go ahead and skip to the next section. As always, timestamps are in the description down below. So we have multiple technician matches display for reviews. When matching a technician for a customer review, you can now see multiple technicians that can be a match. This helps you identify the correct technician who this review is for. Next, we have start date and job status added to technician details. When you are manually matching a technician to a customer review in technician details, you can now add the job start date and the job status. Next, technicians can now view and request customer reviews from a job. In Servicetitan mobile technicians can now view customer reviews on the job record. Additionally, they can send a review request to the customer directly from the job in the mobile app and if there is a manual trigger survey created from the office. Yeah, I like this one a lot. This is really great. As someone who has been a technician in the past, it would be really nice to know if a customer has maybe been upset in the past, had some issues, left a negative review. That way I can see that, know that ahead of time and really go out of my way to address whatever specific concerns they had before and try and win them back. So if I'm like pulling up to a driveway and then I can look on my iPad and see the last review this customer left was like 4 stars. Technician was good, but they smelled like a bag of raccoon corpses drenched in horseradish. Well then I know to bust out the emergency van deodorant. And it's also really nice to know when you're going out to a customer who's left you raving reviews and is a real advocate. You can tell them. Thank you. Next we have select survey type as you're creating a survey. So when creating a marketing survey and review generation, you can now select the survey type as you're creating the survey which helps you save time. Alright, Next, under memberships, arguably a reporting note, we now have a projected balance column in the customer memberships report template. So this is a good auditing tool for memberships with deferred revenue setup. Basically what you'd be looking for in this projected balance column is for it to be zero, because that would mean at the end of the membership term there's not going to be any money left over. And if that number is not zero, then that could be indicative that there's something wrong with your membership setup. This metric is going to be most useful if you're using fixed duration memberships with ongoing it can get a little wonkier. There are some times with an ongoing membership where that projected balance would not be zero, but everything's actually fine. But if you look at it right after an ongoing membership is sold, then that is still a useful metric. That number should be zero at that moment. So if you're a little concerned that maybe something's not quite right with your membership setup as far as the deferred revenue, then this metric can be a good pulse. Check for that. Next, under Servicetitan Mobile Wait a minute. Appointments, Is that you again? Yes, Appointments is showing up again here under the Service Titan Mobile section of these notes. Because Appointments does change a lot about the mobile app, specifically about the closeout screen in the mobile app. But of course you already know all about that, right? Next, under Support, you can now request a call back. So if you're unable to find the answers to the questions in the knowledge base or academy, you can now request a call back. Simply provide a brief description of your issue and a number where you can be reached and one of our customer support representatives will call to assist you when someone becomes available. Yeah, so basically this just keeps you from having to wait on hold. A representative on Service Titan side will just give you a call once they're available versus you having to sit there and wait on hold until they become available. Next, under Payroll and Timesheets, some timesheet related permissions have been renamed. So the Add Appointment and Edit appointment permissions for office employees have been renamed ADD Non Job Event and Edit Non Job Event respectively. Yeah, this is to prevent confusion since the word appointment within Service Titan means something completely different. Now these permissions relate to non job events, which are those gray bars that you can put on the dispatch board to block somebody off or for like a meeting, van washing, things like that. Those used to be called non job appointments. Back in the day they were renamed to Non job events, but these permissions still refer to them as appointments. But that naming does not work anymore. That would be super confusing now with the new appointments feature coming out. You know that new appointments feature that you already know all about, right? Next, under Payments Better Experience when viewing invoices on collect and apply payments. Selecting invoices on collect and apply payments has an option to show only selected invoices. If the option is not selected, then all invoices will display. Next, under price book, we have enhanced inline editing of the primary vendor field. So in the inline editing before the primary vendor field was just a dropdown where you could change only the primary vendor. But now when you go to edit the primary vendor in the inline editor, it will open up this little modal, this little window, and there you can change not only who the primary vendor is, but you can also edit which primary vendors are active, what the different costs are for the different primary vendors, the memo field and the part number field. Next we have bulk activate and deactivate price book items. So in the inline price book editor, if you check off multiple price book items, down at the bottom of the screen you'll see a bar tells you how many items you have checked off. Then towards the left there's a button to clear all of your selections and on the right you'll have a button to deactivate if everything you've checked off is active, or activate if everything you've checked off is inactive. So using that button you can activate and deactivate multiple items all at once. Next is enlarge price book photos. When inline editing price book items or reviewing Price Book Connect catalog updates, you can now enlarge images attached to an item in a popup viewer. This allows you to see them more bigger. Yeah. So when editing images in the inline editor, if you hover over the image, you'll get this little eyeball icon and clicking that will expand the image out into this pop up viewer. And by clicking that, you can take the image size from the size of Tom Howard's attention span to the size of Tom Howard's ego. Next arrow keys. Now change drop down selections. So certain fields in the inline editor, such as conversion tags that function as dropdowns, you can now use the up and down arrow keys to change your selection if you want to keep your hands on the keyboard. Keep in mind though like, especially if there's a search bar, you might have to use the tab key to get into that list first and then you can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate. Next we have filter Price book items by business unit. So if your account is enabled to assign business units to price book items, which is a feature gate that you may or may not have enabled. But if you do, then you can now filter price book items by business unit in the inline editor. Alright, next, under reporting New in Progress Revenue report column. The business unit performance report template now includes the in progress revenue column. This is the sum of invoice item prices on an in progress job where at least one appointment is not yet complete. This allows you to estimate projected revenue from multiple day jobs that are not yet complete. Yeah, so since we have true multi day jobs now, this data set lets you see the projected revenue for jobs that are in progress but not yet complete. Next, report on business unit lead generation. The estimate report template now includes a new column option Lead generated from Business Unit. This column lists the business unit of the job that generated the lead that an estimate was sold on and this helps you measure how well specific business units are generating leads. Next, we have the new reporting filter Date Picker. A new, more intuitive date picker is available when setting report filters. The date Picker includes shortcuts for common date ranges and a calendar interface that's easier to navigate. This one doesn't really sound like a big deal, but this one makes me very happy. That old date picker used to drive me crazy. It just like it never did what I wanted it to do. This new one is a lot easier to use in my opinion. And finally, under reports we have filter for fractional amounts in reports. You can now apply fractional filters to columns with numerical values in reports. This lets you search for or filter out whole numbers. This can be useful for filtering for inventory items with partial amounts. And finally, under fixes we have a fix related to invoicing. Updates made in the office to an invoice after signatures are collected does not change to the authorized invoice amount that appears next to the signature. So that is basically closing a loophole that existed before. Like if a technician was working on a job and then collected a signature for an invoice for a certain amount and then somebody back in the office edited that invoice back on the technician side, it would appear as though the customer signed off on that new amount and not the original original amount that they actually signed off on. Pretty rare situation. But that loophole did exist and it has now been closed. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit like if you liked the video and found it valuable, be sure to subscribe to service Titan's YouTube channel. If you've not 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. What do you guys think your engagement with these videos in terms of likes, comments and subscriber numbers are the ways in which my success is measured. So help me out and hit that like button. It's easy and it's for free. Appreciate it. Peace.