ST-52 | ServiceTitan Release Notes Overview

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd coming at you today with something new, something fresh, something different. Just kidding. It's a release notes video. So first, under the new section of these notes we have payroll and timesheets. So we have timesheets and performance pay with some sub features here. Office timesheets, technician timesheets, payroll sign off, timesheet codes, payroll adjustment, earnings codes, and master pay file. Okay, let me explain because this might be a little confusing because all of this is under the new section of the notes, but you might be looking at this saying, uh huh, uh huh. Yeah, none of that's new. And you're right, all of those features are features that have been available for a while. But from some research that was done, digging into the numbers that we have over on the back end, it turns out payroll is a really underutilized feature within Servicetitan. And hey, sometimes that's for very legitimate reasons. Some companies have more complex pay structures that require more flexibility, and those features are being worked on and coming down the pipeline. But a lot of the times the problem was just that people really didn't know about the payroll features that Service Titan already has, particularly payroll sign off and office timesheets. So I did make a whole separate video about the basic Payroll process within ServiceTitan. Link to that video in the corner of the screen here, as well as in the description down below. All right, next, under improvements, we have some accounting notes. So first is fewer steps to resolve QuickBooks export errors. So basically, when you're exporting to QuickBooks and you run into an error within that error notification will be a link that takes you to an article in the knowledge base that tells you what that error is and how to resolve it. And if you're running an export error report, you can click the error code to go to that Knowledge base article as well. Next, the ServiceTitan account name has been added to the Payment Autobatch error email. So basically, if you have payment auto batching enabled in ServiceTitan, if there's any sort of error with that auto batching, Service Titan sends you an email to let you know. But some people who operate multiple companies choose to do so in separate Service Titan accounts. And before that error notification, email didn't specify which account that the error occurred in, but now it does. So if you're running multiple Service Titan accounts, you'll have clarity there. Next, Service Titan fields are now identified on the transaction reconciliation report. So on that transaction reconciliation report, there are some fields that are being pulled from Servicetitan and others that are being pulled from your accounting software. So now fields that are being pulled from ServiceTitan are appended with ST to help you differentiate them from fields that are coming from your accounting program. Alright, next, under CRM, jobs are now limited to 365 appointments each. And this is essentially to prevent Service Titan from catching fire. So if you do have a job that requires more than a full year of daily work, then you will have to break that up into at least two jobs. Look, even titans have their limits, you know. Atlas could only hold one Planet the little wuss. Next. Service Titan Mobile now automatically syncs when jobs are added to a project. So previously, if a job was added to a project from the office side, that change didn't trigger the mobile app to automatically sync. Now, the change would eventually sync once the technician collected a signature. But if that step was bypassed, then the app wouldn't sync and the new jobs wouldn't show up. But that issue is now resolved. The app will automatically sync if new jobs are added to a project. Next, the new version of the search screen is now the default version. Now, that new version of the search page has been around since ST44. It has a few additional fields and you can change how the results are sorted. But previously you had to click that link to try the new version of the search page. But now it's going to be the other way around. So you will land on the new version of the search page by default and you will have a link to go back to the old version. All right. Next, under dispatch, you can now choose what is going to trigger the Rescheduled Reasons survey. So Rescheduled reason surveys are basically something you can turn on in your settings that will ask somebody why they're rescheduling a job. Now, you were always able to change the frequency of how often these would pop up. So like if you set it to 100 out of 100, then it would always pop up every time somebody rescheduled a job or 50 out of 100 would mean that half of the time somebody rescheduled a job, that survey would pop up. But both changing the time of the appointment and reassigning the appointment to a different technician or would both count as rescheduling. So even if the appointment was for the exact same time and you were just changing the technician that was going out, that would still count as rescheduling in the eyes of the Rescheduled Reasons survey. But now you have a choice. So you can go into the settings and choose whether or not reassigning counts as rescheduling. Next, under estimates, the sold by now auto populates in office estimates. So on the office side, the sold by credit for a converted estimate or will now auto populate with the name of the person who created the estimate, which is probably what you want. But before that, sold by field just auto populated with the first name like alphabetically. And of course you can still change it to be whatever you want. It's just going to auto populate now with the person who created the estimate. Okay. Next, under finance, rules based financing is now added to service finance. Yeah, so rules based financing, that's a feature that's been available for a while with Greensky, and basically it allows you to set certain spending thresholds for certain financing plans. So if there are some financing plans that have higher merchant fees and you don't want your salespeople or techs to be using them for lower tickets, well, then you can set up tiers in your financing rules and let the software enforce that for you. It's a pretty cool feature. I've got a whole separate video on it, so link in the corner of the screen here as well as in the description down below. Next, under marketing, you can now filter marketing analytics by business unit. So when you're initially creating a marketing campaign, you are able to assign that marketing campaign to a business unit. And now on the marketing analytics page you have a business units filter so that you can filter your screen to only show campaigns associated with specific business units. Next, a year to date filter has been added to the date picker. So you know how in the date picker you can choose a custom date range or there's some presets. Year to date is now one of those available presets. Next, under Marketing Pro, email and direct mail, you can now go to the campaign details page from the main dashboard. So there's now a method to navigate to the campaign details page in analytics by clicking on a card in the marketing scorecard section of the modular dashboard. And when you do that, the date range and business unit filter that you selected on the main dashboard will be preserved on the campaign details page. Next, we have new email and direct mail campaign types. So when creating a campaign, you can now choose recurring service, newsletter, thank you or customer welcome as a campaign type. Next, we have an improved audience builder. Okay, so let's say you were building out a campaign, you had already selected your audience, you were on step like three or four, but then you were like, hold up, which audience did I select again? So you navigate back to step two, which is where you select your audience. Well, if you have a lot of audiences, then that list of audiences there is going to be paginated, meaning they're on multiple pages. And before it would always default back to page one. So if you were trying to remind yourself what you selected, you'd. You would have to flip through all of the pages until you found the one that was ticked off. But now if you navigate back to step two, it's going to default to the page where the audience that you selected is. It's the little things. Okay, Next, under Marketing Pro Reputation, we have an improved survey creation flow. So the workflow for creating either an SMS or email survey has been completely reworked and it should be a little bit more logical and user friendly now. Next, remove canceled or failed locations. So you can now remove the locations that ended up as failed or canceled in the SMS and email surveys to use the business units that are added to those locations for different locations. Next, customers can create different flows. For the landing page, you can now get only positive feedback on landing pages. If a customer has positive feedback, the landing page proceeds to the listing selection step. But if the customer gives poor feedback, the survey asks them to leave an internal review and that is sent directly to the emails you mentioned and they appear in your review list. Yeah. So this is review routing. You might be familiar with this type of feature. There are other review companies that do it. Basically, a customer gets a review request, they fill out that review request, and if it's a positive review, then the system offers links that will copy that review to popular review platforms. But if it's a critical review, then that review will only get sent to your internal team and the system will just say thank you for your feedback. Now, obviously that customer can still manually go onto review platforms and leave that negative review, but this makes it at least a little less convenient for them to do that. And a lot of people, after they've typed out their complaints, will feel like they've aired their grievance, they got it off their chest and they'll move on. And hopefully that gives you some time to resolve the issue privately with the customer before it hits public review platforms. Next, under Mobile we have a PDF plugin upgrade. So the PDF plugin used in service Titan Mobile has been upgraded. The latest version offers better performance and stability and contains other improvements like correctly saving annotations. I shouldn't laugh, I work here. And contains other improvements like correctly saving annotations Download the latest version of the Servicetitan mobile app from the App Store or Google Play. Yeah, and what we're talking about here is the backend plugin that powers the PDF forms feature in Servicetitan. And you will have to update the Servicetitan mobile app in order to utilize this upgrade. Next, we have mobile follow up improvements. We've made improvements to the mobile follow up experience. Email and text alerts can be added to reminders so technicians don't forget to follow up. These alerts can be set during closeout or in follow ups tab reminder confirmations will show if a text alert, email alert, or both have been set. Now, I'm gonna pause right there and just say thank you. This is great. That's been a complaint of mine for a long time that the mobile follow ups reminders, they were just an in app badge on the follow ups page. That's hardly a reminder in my eyes. I really need something that's gonna grab me by the shoulders and say, hey, hey, follow up. Okay, moving on. Under that same note, we moved the Log a follow up button and associated actions buttons to the top of the screen to make them more noticeable. Clicking Log a follow up now brings up a field at the bottom of the screen to type notes into. If an office user updates a follow up, it automatically updates on the mobile side and those edits show in both the office and mobile audit trail. And updating follow up dates cancels text or email alerts that have been set up. So when an office user attempts to change the date of a follow up that has an alert set up, they receive a warning that they are canceling an alert that a technician has set up. Next, another great note for all the technicians out there. Retain navigation location when searching and then adding or replacing items on an invoice or estimate in Service Titan Mobile. All right, let me paint you a picture. Let's say you're a technician and you're on a job and you're using lots of 3 quarter inch PVC materials and you need to add those materials onto your job. So in your materials, you search 3/4 inch PVC, pulls up a big list of PVC fittings. So far, so good. And then, ooh, you tap on some elbows, change the quantity to 10. We're using 10 elbows. Great. We hit back and oh, it cleared the search. So we're not looking at a list of PVC fittings anymore. So I have to type 3/4 inch PVC again. And then every time I tap into something else, it's going to clear my search again. Kind of tedious, right? Kind of annoying. Well, that is now a problem of the past because now when you hit back, it won't clear your search. It will maintain that Navigation Next Email required for applicants applying for a Service Finance loan in Servicetitan Mobile. So customers are now required to enter an email when submitting a service Finance loan. This ensures that all applicants are receiving the proper electronic communications regarding their loans. Alright, next, under payments, we have a change around mobile deposits on sold estimates. Okay, so this change affects the mobile experience when techs are collecting deposits using the recent payment collections feature. So to collect a deposit or a down payment, a technician would hit pay on top of an estimate and there they could collect the entire balance or a partial amount. But there was a lot of confusion as to whether payments were actually going through because when a technician took a payment here, that banner at the top of the screen wouldn't change. So for example, you can see here we took a payment of 100 bucks, but at the top of the screen it still says paid $0. It says the balance is still 1450, which was the original full balance. And at the bottom of the screen there in red, it also says balance 1450 as if we didn't collect the hundred bucks. Well, that's just not true. So now going forward, those numbers will properly update to reflect the payment. Also, once the payment has been collected on an estimate, you'll see this new banner on the mobile estimate page. And tapping on that banner will open this flyout that gives you details about the payment and all of that makes things much more clear. Next, we have an improved flow when editing payment amounts with payment collections. So you're now able to edit the payment amount as well as the payment business unit from the edit pencil screen directly on the payment. That sounds pretty straightforward, but there's actually a lot of nuance with that one. Changing the amount on a payment just has a lot of accounting implications, especially considering that with payment collections, those payment amounts can be applied to multiple different invoices. It's a bit too in the weeds to get into for this video, but I highly recommend checking out the knowledge base for more information on that feature. All right, next, under price book, alphabetically order a material item added to an existing list of materials used with a service. Okay, so previously when you were attaching materials to a service, when you were first adding the materials to the service, it would seem to be adding them chronologically by when you were adding the item. So every material you added would just get added to the bottom of the list. But then if you navigated away from that page and came back to the materials list. Ah, the old Titan switcheroo. The materials would be all jumbled up in random order. So now that doesn't happen anymore. The materials go in alphabetical order and they stay in alphabetical order. Next, we have new inline bulk editing of the primary vendor field. So now when inline editing material and equipment items, you can now quickly make bulk updates to the primary vendor without going to another screen. So when a PDF attachment is added to a service in a provider catalog, it shows up as an attachment field update on the Update screen of PriceBook Connect. You can accept the field update to add the PDF to the service in your pricebook. Next, under projects, we have enhanced project searches, so you can now search with project related filters such as project name and start and completion dates within global search. So it's easier to find the project that you're looking for. Okay. Next, under reporting, you can now identify adjustment invoices on the AR transaction report. So now on that AR transaction report, you can see adjustment invoices separately from regular invoices. We also have some new KPIs in the built in revenue reports. So the business unit dashboard revenue report adds the following KPIs, non job revenue, adjustment revenue and total revenue. And the technician dashboard revenue report adds these KPIs, adjustment revenue and completed revenue with adjustments. Next, we have new KPIs available for visual reporting. So you can now build year over year and month over month graphs for total revenue, total sales and opportunity job average. Also, the income KPI has been changed to completed revenue, but the calculation is still the same. Yes. Great. More visual reports please. Charts, Graphs. Tasty. It's what nerds crave. Next, we have some new gross margin KPIs. So the technician performance report template now includes two new KPIs. There's gross margin per hour, which is the gross margin divided by hours a technician worked on jobs. And gross margin per paid hour, which is the gross margin divided by a technician's total paid hours. Next, there's a new KPI that tracks where job leads come from. Papa, where do job leads come from? Ha ha. Yes. It's time we had the talk. The jobs report template now includes the lead generated from source KPI. If a job or a sold estimate that a job was booked from was generated through a technician lead, KPI shows the division of the job where the lead was generated. Otherwise the job is considered a marketed lead. And finally, under Fixes we have a few fixes related to payment collection. There are now correctly reported invoice balances on the payment page. When an invoice has a negative balance and the adjustment invoice has a positive balance. The system now displays payments collected on blank or zero dollar invoices in Service Titan Mobile so the technician can verify that the the payment was processed. So this is just like that note we talked about earlier where those numbers weren't updating when taking a deposit on top of an estimate. Except this is when taking a payment on top of a zero dollar invoice. Now with payment collections, it's no longer best practice to collect money on top of $0 invoices. Deposit should be collected from estimates. But if for whatever reason you do collect money on top of a $0 invoice, that payment will reflect properly. And when a payment is created and applied at the same time, the business unit of the payment is populated to match the business unit of the invoice when the payment applies to one invoice. Next, there are some media related fixes. So we fixed an issue that some technicians were experiencing when using phone capture that blocked them from receiving a text message with the link to upload the job related media files. And we fixed an issue that was causing some videos that were uploaded to customer or location records to not play. Unfortunately, that fix only applies to videos uploaded going forward. So if you have videos that aren't playing, you'd have to download that video, delete it from the customer or location record, and then re upload it to the customer or location record to get it to play within Service Titan. I know. Sorry about that. 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 haven't done that already and click that bell icon so that YouTube notifies you anytime we upload a new video. And if you would leave me a comment down below and let me know what you think of the new update. Your engagement through Likes, comments and subscriber numbers are the ways in which my success is measured. Appreciate it. Peace.