ST-53 | ServiceTitan Release Notes Overview

What's going on everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. It is Release notes time. This is a big one. We've got a lot of bangers. Let's jump right into it. So first on these notes we have Titan Center. And Titan center is a centralized hub for all sorts of Service Titan related resources and communications. You access it from the drop down menu that's under your profile icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen. In the main navigation bar there's an announcement section where you can see announcements about things like releases and big new features that are coming out and anything else that might be announcement worthy. Under that is an event calendar. So there you can see a calendar of upcoming live webinars and training sessions, as well as anticipated dates for upcoming releases. If you click on a past webinar or training session, you can also watch the recorded session from here as well. Or you can also access an entire library of recorded webinars and training sessions from the next section down, the Learning on Demand section. You'll also find a link to the very excellent Contractor Playbook in that section. Definitely check that out if you haven't already. Lots of nuggets. And there's a link to the Service Titan blog. Under there there's a section of Help related links links that'll get you to the Academy, to the Knowledge base, a quick link to Contact Support and a quick link to email your CSM with the name of your CSM right there. And finally under that there's a section for community resources. So the Service Titan MasterMinds group, the Torch Network, and a referrals link if you would like to refer anybody to Service Titan and go after those. Sweet, sweet prize. Also, if Service Titan happens to be experiencing any performance issues or outages, that information will show up in Titan center as well. So status.servicetitan.com that's not going anywhere. That still works. But you can also now see that information from Titan Center. So yeah, I like this a lot. It's a very clear and concise place to go and see all of this information that before was spread out and everything that I described to you as being part of Titan Center. That's just a snapshot as of the title time of me recording this video. More things will be added to Titan center as time goes forward. All right, next, under accounting we have some enhancements to the accounting screen. So on the accounting screen, when you select an existing batch, you'll now default to the batch list instead of unbatched and if you have multiple pages of invoices and payments, those totals at the top for revenue, balance, and taxes, those are going to be accurate because they're going to account for all of the different pages of invoices and payments. Whereas before, those totals only accounted for the payments and invoices that were visible on the page. Deposit reconciliation should now be a little bit easier because unapplied payments are now included in the XLS downloads on the batch screen. And you can now see a business unit column for bills, inventory adjustments, and inventory returns. Next, we have select batch assignment from the invoice screen. Okay, so before on the accounting screen, if you selected a batch and then got your list of invoices and then clicked into an invoice to review it before adding it to a batch inventory, you decided that you were going to add it to the batch. You would click that Add to batch button and it would add it automatically to the batch that you had previously selected. But on that confirmation window that asked you if you were sure you wanted to add it to the batch, it didn't say which batch, so you might have forgotten which batch it was, and there was no way to change it to a different batch. So now, in that same scenario, if you click on Add to batch from the invoice, you'll see this dropdown. That dropdown will default to the batch that you had previously selected. So you'll be able to see which batch that is. And if you decide that you actually want to add it to a different batch, you can click that dropdown and pick a different one. Next, and this is a big one. You can now edit and sync exported invoices to QuickBooks Desktop. So it is now possible to make changes to an invoice after it's already been exported and then sync those changes back to QuickBooks. And this is a feature that people have been asking about for forever. Now, a couple of things to note is that right now it does only work with QuickBooks Desktop. And this is currently a gated feature, meaning you'll have to ask your CSM to enable it for you. Once it's enabled by your csm, there will be a new available permission for all of your employees. That permission is called Allow Edit and Update of Previously Exported Invoices. Once that permission is enabled, when looking at an invoice, you'll notice this new field at the top that says Sync status. Now, before the invoice is actually exported, you would expect that sync status to be na. Now, when looking at an exported invoice, you'll notice that even though the invoice is exported, you still have your edit pencil and delete options. And if you click into Update Invoice details, you'll notice those fields are still editable. So if you make a change to that exported invoice and then hit Save, you're going to get this pop up. It's going to ask you if you'd like to save and sync, meaning save the changes to that invoice and sync it back to QuickBooks Desktop Save and Bypass, meaning save the changes in Service Titan, but do not yet sync to QuickBooks or Cancel. Now, one example of reason you might want to save and bypass and not sync that change back to QuickBooks is if you've just made a change, but you know you're going to be making more changes. So if you're not done working on my invoice, then the Save and bypass button is handy because you can keep making changes without having to wait for it to sync. So if you hit save and sync, then it's going to ask you which connection you want to sync to. That's in case you have multiple QuickBooks connections. You might not, you might just have one. Once that's done, you'll notice that the invoice did change in service heightened. But. But you might also notice that the sync status still says na. That is because right now, at the time of releasing this video, the page does need to be refreshed for the sync status to update. Another thing to note is that the sync could take anywhere from a single second up to two minutes. So if you refresh the page and it still says na, no need to worry unless it's been more than two minutes. Okay, now let's say that you chose Save and Bypass because you had more work to do on that invoice. If you do that, then after a refresh, the sync status will change to bypassed. And once you're done editing that invoice and you're ready to sync it over to QuickBooks, you can click on that bypassed status and there's an option to resync. So that way you can push multiple invoice changes over to QuickBooks all at once, versus having to sync them one by one. Now, another possible sync status is Action required, and that one shows up if there's like an export error. So if you click on that Action required status, you'll get a little modal, a little pop up telling you what the error is, why it failed, and from that modal, you'll have the two options to either bypass the update or resync and try again after you've fixed the problem. Also, from that modal, you'll have links to the export error report as well as a link to the Knowledge base article that will break down what your error means. But yes, definitely a very handy and much anticipated feature, so definitely let your CSM know if you're interested in having that enabled. You can find your CSM's name and email address in Titan Center. Alright. Next, under dispatching, you can now temporarily disable the Rescheduled Reasons survey. So under the settings for the Rescheduled Reasons survey, you now have an option to set a time threshold for disabling it. So for example, if you didn't want that Rescheduled reasons survey to pop up for 30 minutes after the job has just been booked or just been rescheduled, because maybe you have a lot of situations where a job moves around a lot in the beginning before it finally settles. Or if you have a lot of situations where you if you've rescheduled a job, you usually end up moving it around a few more times before it settles. Well then you can set the time threshold to 30 minutes and then that won't bother your dispatcher or CSR if they're trying to move things around for 30 minutes. All right. Next, under estimates, you can now attach forms and images to estimates from the office. So previously you were able to attach forms and images when you were emailing invoices from the office, but not estimates. But now that's no longer the case. You can attach images and forms whether you're sending an invoice or an estimate. Still no thumbnails for the images though. I know. Baby steps. Next, when converting a sold estimate to an invoice, equipment links are maintained. So there is a feature that allows you to attach certain tasks to certain pieces of equipment to indicate this work is being done on this equipment. But previously, if an estimate was built with those equipment links and then it was converted into an invoice, that those links weren't maintained. But now they are. And that applies for both services and materials, by the way. Next, you can now link materials and tasks to equipment on estimates from the office. This goes right along with what we were just talking about, that feature that lets you attach certain tasks or pieces of material to certain equipment pieces. Now when you're building an estimate from the office, you'll have this new equipment dropdown and that allows you to build those links from the office. Whereas before that was only a mobile feature Next under Integrated Financing and Payments EMV transactions Now send the invoice number to NMI rather than the invoice id Before I explain this, this note isn't going to make any sense to you unless you're using the new Bluetooth credit card readers. If you're not familiar with those, I made a whole separate video about them. I'll put a link in the corner of the screen here as well as in the description down below. But an EMV transaction that's a contactless transaction by tapping a credit card that's enabled or through something like Apple Pay or Google Pay. And before when one of those transactions happened, it would send over the invoice ID over to nmi, which is kind of the portal that goes with the credit card reader. But invoice ID isn't super helpful for identifying the invoice because it's kind of a back end service titan number. So now instead of that it sends over the invoice number, which is the number that you see in the user interface of ServiceTitan. Next we have an enhanced monthly payments calculator for Service Finance on online estimates. Customers applying for a Service Finance loan through online Estimates can now enter a loan amount to see their monthly payments for each plan available, and this amount is also used to determine which plans that a customer qualifies for. Next under Wait for it Inventory so this is Inventory's first appearance on public facing release notes. They previously weren't included because Inventory is technically a beta, but it's been a pretty long running beta and there are now enough people using it that it just made sense to include them in the public facing release notes. So first you can now email a purchase order with an XLS and PDF file attachment with one click. So on a purchase order you can now click Send as XLS and PDF to send one email with both an XLS attachment and a PDF attachment of the PO. Next, you can now set all quantities to 0. On a partially received PO, you can now click Set quantity to 0 to 0 out the Quantity received column on a partially received PO. If you only received a few items out of a larger purchase order, you can set the Quantity Received column to zero for the items you did not receive. And that means you won't have to go through and manually set the Quantity Received column to zero for all of the items that you didn't receive. Next the Business unit field is now required when creating an adjustment when creating an adjustment po, the Business unit field is now required, basically saving the poor accounting person from having to go Back, figure out what business unit is supposed to be tied to and filling it in later. Next, deactivated items are no longer listed in the inventory template. So before, if you deactivated an item that existed on templates or replenishment requests, those items would stay on those templates or replenishment requests even though you deactivated them. But now that's no longer the case. If you deactivate an item, it removes it from any templates that it exists in and removes it from any open replenishment requests. Next, inventory location and reference number are now required on returns. So when you're creating a return, you'll have to fill in that inventory location and reference number field, similar to making the business unit field required, just trying to help out those accounting people. Next, you can now review transactions for items when enabling inventory tracking. So if you are enabling inventory tracking for a specific item, when you do that, you'll now get this table that shows you any open transactions that that item is included on. So any unreceived purchase orders, non exported purchase orders, non exported job invoices, and it allows you to review them and lets you know that those transactions, they are not going to impact the inventory count for the item that you're enabling track for, because those transactions were created before that was a tracked piece of inventory. Next, in stock items can no longer be deactivated. So if an item in your inventory is in stock or on order at an inventory location, that item cannot be deactivated. This prevents unintentionally removing an in stock item from your price book. Okay. Next, under invoicing, it's now easier to edit pending invoices when a managed tech is not assigned. So before, if a managed tech wasn't assigned to a completed job and the invoice was still in the pending status, then that invoice invoice couldn't be edited. But now that's no longer the case. So office employees can now edit invoices on completed jobs even when a managed tech is not assigned or that managed tech is inactive. Next, we can now see recall, no charge or warranty job information on the invoice page. So before we were able to see indicating tags if a job was for example, no charge or a recall on the job page. So that's that little gray NC tag or R tag. But if you clicked into the invoice, you didn't see that anymore. But now you can see that information from both places. So it's still on the job page, but it's also on the invoice page. Next, when you're bulk sending emails from the invoice screen, you can now see if an invoice was already sent and when. So before, if you were bulk emailing from the invoice screen, let's say you checked off some but left some others off because you were going to come back and email those later. Well, when you came back you didn't have any indication of which ones were already sent, so it was really easy to double send. But now there's this new column that not only indicates if it was sent already, but when exactly it was sent. Next, the totals on printed estimates are now easier to understand when a payment has not been made on an estimate, subtotal and total display on the estimate Print View Balance Due will also display if a payment has already been made. Next, we have some enhancements to invoice bulk print. So when editing or creating a customer record, there's this field called Statement and invoice delivery where you can specify whether that customer prefers their invoices and statements to be sent via mail or email. So now from the accounting tab, if I wanted to bulk print invoices and or statements by clicking that print all button, you will now have this delivery preference option in the upper right. And from there you can filter this list to only customers that have mail set as their delivery preference. That way you don't have to print them off for customers who just want them emailed anyways. Next Under Market, this is Isaac. Not right now buddy, I'm busy. Next under Marketing Pro. So under Reputation we have Quickly Verify reviews. With the enhanced Quickly Verify screen, you can now save time by verifying multiple reviews all in one step. The Quick Verify screen also now helps you quickly identify the reviews that need to be verified and matched to ensure that they're accurate. Next, Customer satisfaction rating has been added to the technician's scorecard. So on the dashboard there's a satisfaction rating next to any technician as well as on the technician's scorecard when you drill in. And now that satisfaction rating can take into account verified reviews from all over the Internet versus just from the native service Titan surveys. Next under email and direct mail, you can now add merge tags to the subject line of an email. So merge tags. They're those nifty little things that pre populate certain pieces of information like customer name, customer address, whatever. Before you were only able to use those in the body of the email, but now you're able to utilize them in the subject line as well. Next, undo and redo Options have been added to the Audience Builder. So in the Audience Builder, in the upper right hand corner, you'll see these two new arrow icons that allow you to undo or redo actions. It's helpful for, you know, other people, people who make mistakes. Not you though. Never you. That might have been too weird. I don't know if I can leave that in there. Next, you can now reorder the sequence of emails in the Campaign Builder. So when looking at your sequence of emails in the Campaign Builder, if you hover over any email's tile, in the upper right hand corner of that tile, you'll see these two new arrows that allow you to move that email up or down in the email sequence. Very handy for people who make mistakes, I guess. But not you. No, never you. Alright, next. Under core marketing features, the email marketing section of the Marketing Pro settings has been renamed. So instead of Email Marketing, now it just says Marketing. So that way it can also include direct mail related settings without being a filthy, stinky liar. Alright, next. Under memberships from the Office, you can now renew a membership from the customer membership record. So before, if you wanted to renew a membership, you had to click into that Edit customer membership screen. But now the renew button is right there on the membership record so you don't have to drill in and it saves you a click. It's a little bit clearer and more concise. Next, the permission to sell memberships now also includes renewals. So yeah, now if you enable an employee with the permission to sell a membership that also allows them to renew memberships. Next, we have some enhancements to the invoice template screen. So the invoice template builder has been completely redesigned. If you've used the new estimate template builder, then this new invoice template builder will look very familiar to you. They match. Now for better consistency across the product. Next. Under mobile, another highlight for me, technicians can now add attachments to jobs that have already been completed or are on hold. This was a pretty common problem for me in my company, especially with salespeople. I would see on the dispatch board a job that was still open, that was many, many hours old, or maybe even from yesterday or last week or something. And when I would contact that person to say, hey, there's no way you're still on that job, please close it out, their reasoning would be, well, I'm still not done with it, I still need to attach some images or whatever. But now, invalid, invalid, invalid. That excuse is invalid. Even if the job is completed or on hold, they can still attach photos and images. This functionality is permissions based. It is going to be enabled for all technicians by default fault. So if you want to disable it, go into the technician permissions. The permission you're looking for is called Allow uploading attachments after the job is completed or put on hold. Next, Technicians who manage their own schedules can now reschedule upcoming appointments. Technicians can now reschedule upcoming appointments by clicking the new Reschedule link on an appointment they want to reschedule. Previously, if a technician wanted to reschedule an appointment, they had to dispatch and arrive themselves, then schedule a new appointment. An important caveat to note with this one, technicians who are already at a given appointment and want to reschedule, they'll still have to close that one out and schedule a new appointment. So this functionality is of course permission based and it's disabled by default. The permission is called reschedule an appointment. Next There are now price book category descriptions. So when viewing categories in ServiceTitan Mobile, an icon displays if the category has a description. When you tap the icon, the category description displays in a pop up. Now if you're wondering where you go to write those descriptions, hold that thought. It's coming up in the price book section and it's part of a note that I think you're really going to like. Next is mobile Estimate screen support for BBROZ card readers. Again, this note will only be relevant to you if you are using the new Bluetooth card readers. So technicians can now use the BBROZ card reader to take credit card payments on the estimate screen. In Service Titan Mobile, this is important because with payment collections, that's the proper workflow to collect a deposit is from the estimate screen. So support for the card readers has been added to that screen in addition to of course, the invoice screen. Next, you can now add equipment to a purchase order in mobile. Before, text and mobile were limited to services and materials. Next, under payments, you can now edit the refund amount with automated refunds. Automated refunds, by the way, is a pretty awesome feature and pretty recent. I made a separate video about it. You can check that out in the corner of the screen here or in the description down below. But before, with that new workflow, if a refunded amount needed to be changed, you had to delete the refund and create a new one. But now you can edit the refund amount. Next, the project number has been added to payment collections. So in the Apply to Invoice section of the Collect and Apply payment screen, project numbers are now displayed for invoices with a positive balance that are part of a project. That way you don't have to open the invoice to see the project number. Next, you can now see all refund invoices attached to any invoice. So at the bottom of an invoice screen, if an invoice has any adjustment invoices, you would see those at the bottom there. And you'll now see any refund invoices down there as well. Next, you can now view unapplied credits that have been offset by refunds. Unapplied payments that are fully refunded now appear in the unapplied payment section of the customer page. Refunds display as negative payments below the original payment. You can now edit the refund or original payment even when it's fully refunded. Next, under Price Book, we have another big highlight for me on these notes and that is the redesigned category screen. This is a major upgrade to the category screen of the Price book. So you can now drag and drop categories and subcategories. That means not only can you reorder them, but you can drag a category under another category to nest it and make it a subcategory. Or you could go the other way and drag a subcategory out to make it its own parent category. You've also got this move button over here if you wanted to quickly move something to the top or the bottom. That's useful if you have a super long list of categories. You can also say choose category from that button if you just wanted to send it to a specific category. So like if I wanted this under Plumbing Services, I would just select it there. The way that you add new categories and subcategories has been redesigned and is much faster now. And you can make all of your edits from the screen very similar to the new Price book. Inline editing. This is also where you can put in those category descriptions that we talked about earlier. So on a category, if you click this three dot kebab menu here, you'll see options to add a subcategory duplicate. Love to see it. We love duplicate buttons here. Edit Additional details and deactivate. So if we click Edit additional Details, that is where we can put in that category description that text can see from the mobile side. This is also where you would go to add those default images and videos for anything under that category. This new category screen also offers filtering, so you can filter by categories that have or don't have an image, filter by specific business units, filter by whether they're hidden in mobile and of course filter by status whether they're active or inactive. I really love this a lot. This simplifies a lot of the workflow of editing categories. Pretty much everything is on one single page. There's no more navigating between different pages. The lack of ability to drag and drop categories has always been a frustration to me, and this gives me that and a whole lot more. And I swear I'm this close to just uninstalling Excel. I'm this close. Next on the notes is Display Category Descriptions in Mobile View. I'm kind of going to glaze over this one. We've essentially already talked about it in the mobile section. But yes, that box that I just showed you with the redesigned category screen, you can enter something there and then text can see it as the description of the category on the mobile side. Next we have Price Book Connect enhancements. So improvements in PriceBook Connect now allow you to search for items that you want to update in your price book, as well as filter the updates by specific fields. There's a new Auto Dismiss feature that lets you select the type of updates that automatically appear in the new Dismissed view, so you'll no longer see those updates in the Services, Materials and Equipment screens. When viewing Dismissed updates, you can either recover and apply the updates to your Price book or remove the updates completely. Next, we have enhanced provider catalog mapping in pricebook Connect for vendor content management, so the mapping workflow has been significantly enhanced to provide more search, filter and selection options when mapping your pricebook items with matches found in your provider's catalog. Next, we've got new inline bulk editing for the General Ledger Account Income Account intactitemgl Account Group field. So when using the Inline pricebook editor, you can now make bulk edits to multiple Items General Ledger Accountsincome accounts all @ once. Next, under purchasing, when you email a po, the PO number is now in the subject line. That one's pretty straightforward. You can also now bulk update inventory items, so you can now click Bulk Item Update from an invoice to update inventory items. Also on the Bulk Item update screen, you can now partially save your bulk item update without populating all the fields. Next, replenishment for items now only occurs after the job start date. So previously how the logic worked was let's say you converted an estimate into a job, so now that job is scheduled in the future, but all of the items are already on that invoice before. All of those items would get added to replenishment as soon as that job was booked because it considered those materials accounted for, but that did cause some confusion. So now the items on the invoice are not added to replenishment until after the job has actually started. That way, if, let's say for example, that job that you booked gets canceled, you didn't replenish items that never ended up actually getting used. Okay, Next, under reporting we have some general usability improvements. So the report screen now includes a report description. The column spacing in reports is more efficient now. By default, the report screen information section includes additional report details. There's a new option to export aggregated report data for added flexibility. You can now share reports directly from the report screen and grouped data and reports now include aggregate totals. Next, there's been an update to how the new or existing KPI for customers works so that KPI now classifies customers with profiles created on a date after the report date filter range. So existing would mean that that customer was created before the report filter range. New means that they were created within the report date filter range and future would mean that that customer was created after the report date filter range. Next we have some new built in customer reports. So we've got the customer list report that includes contact information plus lifetime job revenue and invoice details. We've got the new customer report that one lists newly added customers including member status, contact information, original campaign source and more. And a new Reports 2.0 version of the we miss you report. That's a really handy one. That one finds customers that you haven't serviced in a while based on their last job, complete completed date and under telecom. This is the last note on these release notes and it's a big one going out with a bang. We have the Power Dialer. So Power Dialer is a new Phones Pro feature and it allows you to automate outbound calls for CSRs to maximize call volume. So with Power Dialer you can create campaigns similar to how you can create campaigns in Marketing Pro. So just like with Marketing Pro you can do an unsold estimates campaign, expiring memberships, aging equipment, idle account or other. For this example, we'll just choose other and do a test campaign. Then you would select or create your audience. If you're already using Marketing Pro, then all of your Marketing Pro audiences will carry over so they'll be here for you to select. Then you can assign users so you decide who's going to be doing the calling. So we'll assign this campaign to this csr. Then you can choose which page you want to show up for your CSR while they're making these calls. We'll use the job details page for this example. You also have a box to input instructions if you want to give your CSR some specific instructions or more insight as to why they're making these calls. Once that's done, you'll see that campaign added to our activecampaign section. And then we would toggle the switch at the top to actually turn the power dialer on. So once that is toggled on, the assigned CSR will be able to enter Power dialer mode. You can also see here we have a frequency setting so we can choose how many days we want to wait before contacting the same customer. You can also drag in additional campaigns. So if there's something sitting down there in inactive campaigns that you want to drag up and make active, then you can do that. Simply drag them up. If the same CSRs are assigned to multiple campaigns, then they will be queued up for them based on how they're ordered in this list. So once the campaigns are added and the power dialer switch has been turned on in the phones pro modal for the CSRs, they'll see this new power dialer mode section where they can click Start dialing. They can also click that same button to exit power dialer mode. So basically what this does is it automatically dials out to customers for your CSRs based on those campaigns. So if you have an expiring memberships campaign, then that is going to be a big old list of customers whose memberships are about to expire. The CSR can click Start dialing, pick up the phone and it's going to start dialing out to one of those customers. CSR takes care of business. And then once the customer hangs up, it's going to dial out to the next customer. Now there is a setting called the Power Dialer Post Wrap Up Time that's found in the dial pad settings. And that setting adjusts how long the power dialer waits before it starts dialing out to the next customer. So you probably do want to put in some padding there to just give the CSR time to do some quick wrap up work and just gather their thoughts before it starts dialing out. The CSR can also click that blue call bar and that's what's going to take them to whatever page you specified in that campaign setting. So in this example, clicking that blue bar will take them to that specific customer's job page. So once either the custom or the CSR hangs up, they'll see this wrap up window and that'll have a countdown to when it's going to dial out to the next customer. The CSR can cut that short if they are ready to go before the timer runs out. So this is a really cool feature that's going to make outbound calling a whole lot more efficient. So if you've got Phones Pro and you need to drum up some work, try the power dialer out. I think it's going to be a very powerful tool for you if you really don't need to drum up some work. H Vac people I know I'm posting this video in the summertime. I know you're busy, but don't forget fall always comes back. Better be ready for it. And finally, under fixes we have a fix related to job costing. So until now when View job costing was enabled and show cost details disabled job costing displayed internally on invoices. Now job costing is viewable only to office employees with both View job costing and show cost details permissions enabled. Next, a fix related to the modular dashboard. A few headings, descriptions and tooltips have been updated there reporting the AR transaction report used to incorrectly exclude invoices with incomplete jobs and invoices with blank dates when exclude incomplete jobs was selected. So now that report data accurately reflects the excluded incomplete job setting and export unapplied refunds to intact. The automated refunds workflow now exports refund payments not applied to an invoice to intact. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit like if you like this video and found it valuable, be sure to subscribe to surface Titan's YouTube channel. If you haven't 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 of the new update? Your engagement through Likes, comments and subscriber numbers are the ways in which my success is measured. Appreciate it. Peace it.