ST-54 | ServiceTitan Release Notes Overview

What's going on everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the bootclaw nerd. It is that time again. We have got some release notes to go over and this release has some pretty sweet things in it. Some pretty nice goodies. It's very high on the glycemic index. Diabetics beware. But before we jump into that, I do need to do a little bit of housekeeping. Stop pooping. Just stop it. But you never poop. You're perfect. He's fine. He's. He's just being dramatic. Alright, thanks for sticking with me there. Now that that's done, I need to make an announcement. So normally with Release Notes videos I cover everything. Every single note. If it's on the page, then it's in the video. But lately I've been noticing a couple of trends. So trend number one is that the length of Release Notes videos are going up. And that is simply due to the fact that over time Service Titan has become and will continue to become a more and more expansive piece of software. I mean, when I first started making these videos independently, there was no such thing as Marketing Pro, there was no such thing as Phones Pro, there was no such thing as PriceBook Pro, there was no such thing as PriceBook Connect. Inventory was not something that was included in the release notes. So longer Release notes have translated into longer release note videos. So that's trend number one. Trend number two I'm noticing is that viewership on these Release Notes videos is trending down. So starting with this Release Notes video, I'm going to try something a little bit different. Basically I'm going to be giving myself permission to skip stuff. So if it's a note that's really self explanatory and I don't really have anything to add and I don't feel like visuals would really help any, then I'm going to skip it. Now at the end of the video I am going to put a list of everything that I didn't cover, just in case. I didn't think it was important but. But you did. I at least won't be leaving you to guess. You'll see that list and if something catches your eye, you can go and research that in the release notes. Now these videos are still going to be in depth. I'm not trying to make these into like highlights only or anything. I'm just not necessarily going to cover every single granular little thing. And this is just something I'm trying because of those trends that I told you about earlier. But these Videos are for you. So if you hate it, just let me know and I'll go back to covering everything. All right, with that out of the way, let's jump in. So the first three notes on these release notes happen to also be three of my favorites, starting with the long requested feature, New custom Dashboards. So Service Titan for a long time now has had custom dashboards, but they weren't much, honestly. They were just replacing your dashboard with basically a report. But this, this is way better. So you're able to add modules to your custom dashboards. You can put 2.0 reports in those modules if you want, but you can also put individual KPIs and graphs and charts, visualizations year over year analyses, all kinds of cool stuff. So with this, you can have a totally separate dashboard for your CSRs versus your dispatchers versus your service manager versus you. Everybody can have a dashboard that contains only the information that is most pertinent to them. And along with this feature comes another highly requested feature around dashboards, which is dashboard permissions. So you can go in and edit who's able to see what. It's been a long running complaint that on the dashboard everybody has access to revenue numbers. Some companies are cool with that, some not so much. Now it's up to you. And it's beyond that. I mean, these permissions are pretty granular. So if you just want to hide one single module, maybe you just want to hide the total revenue, but all the other KPIs and stuff you're good with, you can do that. Or you can go far the other way and only show one or two modules. And anytime you create a new custom dashboard, you'll get sharing permissions similar to how reports work. So for example, if you make a new dispatch dashboard, you can choose to then share that with anybody who's in the dispatch role. Custom dashboards are really cool. They're really powerful. It's too much to get really in depth with this video, but I did make a totally separate video on custom dashboards. You can check that out in the corner of the screen here and I will also put a link in the description down below. And by the way, if you had any custom dashboards that were the old custom dashboards, which was basically just a report, you'll still have access to those. They will be automatically converted over to the new version, but you'll still have them. You'll just have even more flexibility on how you want to edit those and make them look going forward. I should also point out that what you get with the new custom dashboards is going to be different depending on what package of service titan you're on. So Servicetitan is sold in three packages. Starter, Essentials and the Works. If you're on Starter, you won't be able to create any of your own dashboards, but there will be some pre built ones for you to use. If you're on Essentials, you can create dashboards, but you won't be able to use the KPI or visualization type modules. And if you're on the works, then of course you have access to everything. If you're a legacy client, meaning you signed up before ServiceTitan offered different packages for this particular feature, that means you get everything. So it's as if you were on the works. All right, next, under payroll and timesheets, we have configurable payroll. And again, this is huge. So configurable payroll is a complete rework of service Titan's payroll features and it offers a ton more flexibility than the core payroll features. So to be clear, the core payroll stuff that's not going away to this is just something that's built on top of it. And like I said, this offers a ton more flexibility as far as what types of pay structures it can accommodate for. You can do, you can do tons of stuff, but for example, you can pay tax based on tech generated leads. So if a tech turns over a lead, you can maybe pay them a flat amount just for turning a lead over. Or you can say they don't get paid unless the lead actually gets sold and gets installed. And then you could pay them a percentage based on the eventual install invoice or a flat dollar amount. You can pay on sliding scales. You can differently depending on how much of a discount was given. You can pay differently depending on job type or business unit. I mean, it is extremely flexible. Again, way too much to go over everything in this video, but I did make another totally separate video on configurable payroll. You can check that out in the corner of the screen here or in the description down below. If it's something that you could see yourself using, I definitely recommend checking that video out because there is a bit of a learning curve to it. In that video, I really hold your hand and we walk through some examples of setting up some payroll profiles. It's. It's very nice. It's very romantic. Again, I should point out that what package you're on is a factor here. You do need to be on the works to utilize this feature. All right, next we have quick Navigation. Now, this one might not seem like much, especially compared to the last two behemoths we just went over, but this is low key. One of my favorite things that's ever been added to Service Titan. So if you're a Mac user, then you're probably familiar with Spotlight. From anywhere on a Mac, you can hit command space on your keyboard and, and you get this little text box. And from there you can quickly navigate around your computer. So you can, like, quickly open a program or quickly search for a file. It's extremely convenient and quick navigation. This is like Spotlight for Service Titan. So by hitting the forward slash key anywhere in ServiceTitan, you'll get this text box. And from here you can navigate somewhere else. So I'm on the dashboard right now, but let's say I wanted to go to the materials page of my price book. I would just start typing out materials mat, and there it is. I would hit enter and then there I am. Now let's say from here I wanted to go to my technician settings again, I would just start typing it out. So tech settings, technicians enter. And just like that, there I am. When you use ServiceTitan for several hours a day, at least five days a week, which, if you're watching this video, chances are you probably do, this is a huge convenience and a huge time saver. Now, a couple of things to know about this. First is that right now, just with this initial release, you can't get to every single page in ServiceTitan from QuickNav. For example, let's say I wanted to go to payroll here. You'll notice I don't get any results, but more and more pages will be added to QuickNav as time goes on. Another thing to note, I can already see your gears are turning. You're thinking, ah, yeah, but what about searching for jobs? What about searching for projects? Oh, what about searching for. For locations, though? Yes, not in this initial release. It can't do any of that yet. But yes, that's the direction. Also, if you're in a text box, be sure to click out of the text box before hitting forward slash to call up quick nav, because otherwise, obviously, it'll just type a forward slash. All right, next, under accounting, you can now add a blind carbon copy when emailing documents from ServiceTitan. So you can now add BCC recipients when emailing invoices, estimates, forms, project invoices, work orders, and, and statements from the office or from Servicetitan Mobile. Yes. So with this, if in addition to your customer, you want to Also BCC somebody on your team when you send an email out of ServiceTitan, you can now do that. Now, there's two places that you could potentially set this up. One is under the business unit settings, so settings, Operations, and then business units, you will see a BCC field there. Now, if you put something there in that field, that's just going to serve as a fallback in case you have nothing set up in the other email settings. By that I mean under Settings, Invoicing and email. So here Settings, Invoicing and Email, that is the main place where you would set up the BCC addresses. And you can set up different BCC addresses for different types of documents. So invoices, estimates, projects, statements, forms, you can make them different addresses or just put in the same one up to you. And whatever you have set up here, that's always going to take precedent over what is set up in the business unit settings. But if this is blank, then it will fall back to what's in the business unit settings. Next, we have automatically create payment terms in QuickBooks Desktop. So in Service Titan Settings, under Invoicing and payment terms, you can create a payment term there. But before you would have to manually recreate that in QuickBooks, but now that's no longer the case. So if you have payment terms set up in ServiceTitan, then when you export, it will automatically create those payment terms in QuickBooks, and then you can still edit those payment terms in QuickBooks if you need to. All right, next, under inventory, we have Download and import inventory spreadsheet for transfers. So when creating a transfer, you can now download an XLS spreadsheet template and enter all the items you want to transfer and import it back to ServiceTitan to send to your inventory locations. So basically, if you have a large complicated transfer that you need to do, you can now do that by exporting an Excel template, editing that, and then importing it back into ServiceTitan. Next we have update replenishment source for inventory locations. When replenishing inventory, you can now bulk edit your replenishment source. Instead of having to manually update each item, you can now quickly update multiple sources at the same time. Yes. So on the replenishment page, the replenishment source column is now inline editable, very similar to the price book. So you can just quickly click that little edit pencil and make a change right there without navigating to a different page. You also have filters on the left hand side of the screen to filter down your list. And you can make edits in bulk again. Similar to how you do bulk edits now in the price book. So you can check off multiple items and then change the replenishment source for all of those items all at once. Next, replenishment requests are now removed after an item is deactivated. When an item is deactivated, the replenishment request for that item is automatically removed. You no longer have to manually go back and deactivate items from your replenishment records. So basically, if you had an open replenishment request for an item, but you deactivated that item, it's going to automatically remove any open replenishment requests. Next, you can now bulk assign templates to inventory locations. So when you're settings under Inventory and templates, you will see a new field for assigned inventory locations. And using that field, you can assign a template to as many inventory locations as you need to. Next, items are now tagged as serialized or tracked. So when placing a purchase order or a return, you'll now be able to see if an item has been enabled for inventory or serial number tracking without having to leave the transaction. Next, we have items added to a PO are automatically added to an invoice. So when you add an item to a po, it will automatically add items to an invoice with a $0 cost. Additionally, if an invoice is in the pending status and you click Save when receiving the po, you can add the inventory items on the purchase order to the invoice. This saves you time by automatically adding items instead of having to manually add them to invoices. Right. So to enable this, you're going to go to Settings, and then under inventory and configuration, you should see a new setting that says option to add inventory items to invoices. You'll have to check that off in order to enable this feature. So with that enabled, let's say you've created a purchase order for a job. Once you go to receive that purchase order, you'll get this dialog box basically asking you if you want to copy those PO items over to the invoice for that job. And if you do, you would of course hit yes. Then if you jump back to the invoice and reload, you'll see those materials added to that invoice at a $0 cost. And this allows you to keep accurate track of what materials have been used on the job without double job costing. Because before, if you had those materials on the job and you created a purchase order for those materials, the cost would be both places and so you would double job cost. So somebody would have to go in and zero out all of the material costs on the invoice, but no longer. This solves that problem. Next, under purchasing, we have kind of the opposite of that, which is copy invoice items to purchase order. Looking at you, Adam Hamilton of the Facebook service Titan Masterminds Group, you had just requested this feature and now here it is. So let's say you convert an estimate and you are booking that into a job, and now you need to order all of the materials that are required for that job. Well, from the invoice of the upcoming job, you would hit add a purchase order as usual. Again, as it always does when you make a purchase order. This way, most of the order detail fields will be automatically filled out for you. But when you scroll down, ooh, hello stranger. We have this new button that says copy invoice items. If you click that, you'll get a confirmation box just confirming that you're sure you want to do that. And if you confirm, then it's going to copy all of the items over from that invoice to the purchase order in the quantity that was specified on the invoice. And that is extremely handy. Now something to note here is that this is just a one way copy that happens when you click the button, meaning they're not like kept in sync. If you then add something later to the invoice, it's not just going to appear on the purchase order by itself and vice versa. If you make a change to the purchase order, it's not going to change on the invoice. And if you click the button to copy invoice items twice, then you're going to get duplicates. So it's pretty simple in that way. When you hit copy invoice items, it's just going to go yoink, plop. Next, you can now exclude items from replenishment. So when editing a material in the price book, you'll see this new checkbox that says automatically replenish this item if used on invoices. And you can uncheck that for particular materials if, say, it's a special order material that you don't normally keep in stock and you don't want it to be automatically replenished. Next, you can now search for office employees or technicians in the internal recipient field. So when sending a PO under the send as dropdown, there is a select recipients button. And now when you go to add internal recipients, there you'll have this search box. You'll also see that it's separating out the office users from the technicians Next, we have group replenishment items on po. So if items have the same ship to location, inventory, location, item code, vendor part number and item description, they are now combined into one line item. This makes it easier when a vendor sends an invoice to keep track of receipts. Next, we have the option to skip weekends for the required date on a po. So under settings, inventory and purchase order types, when editing a purchase order type, you'll see this new checkbox that says skip weekends. So for example, let's say your required date is set to one day out, so it's always due the next day with that box checked. If you make the purchase order on a Friday, it will make the required date that Monday, not Saturday. Next we have the option to hide vendors in Service Titan Mobile. So if you go to Settings, Inventory and then vendors and select a vendor, if you click Edit, you'll now see this new checkbox that says restrict PO creation in mobile. So if you check that off, that vendor will no longer show up in mobile. Next, add items to a receipt that are not on the po. You can now add an item to a receipt when receiving a po. This helps you to accurately record what you received, even if you were sent the wrong items. Alright. Next, under memberships, you can now view edits on a customer's membership and recurring services. On a customer's membership record, there is now an option to click View Audit trail. This lets you quickly view an audit trail of all the edits to the membership and the membership's recurring services. Definitely handy. I'll take an audit trail anywhere I can get one. Next under mobile and I'm also going to roll in price book here. Smart recommendations are available for PriceBook Pro services added to an estimate or an invoice. Yeah, this is really cool. So recommendations in the price book, you know about those, you set them up back in the office side so that when a tech sells something out in the field, it can pop up with recommendations of other things that are likely to sell to the customer who just bought that thing, which is a great feature. But what sucks about it is that you have to manually make those recommendations. So somebody has to sit there on the office side and say, okay, I think when somebody buys this they might also be interested in that. So maybe every time somebody buys a contactor I want to also recommend them a capacitor and a hard start kit, whatever. Well now with this new feature, and this is a PriceBook Pro exclusive, those types of manual recommendations will still be there, but you'll also get these Smart recommendations. So smart recommendations come from data being analyzed across all Service Titan estimates and invoices that use services from PriceBook Pro. And it's going to surface the most common services that are sold together. And this is really cool. I remember being sold Service Titan back in 2015, I believe, and they were telling me about the recommendations feature and they described it as. It's just like when you're buying something on Amazon and Amazon says people who bought this item also bought and then they show you all of these other items. And I remember thinking to myself, no, it's not like I get where you're coming from, but Amazon is using a complex algorithm and, and those items, those are actually things that other people bought, whereas I'm having to do this manually. But this feature does that. This one is truly like that Amazon section that says other people who bought this item also bought. So it takes the guesswork out of it, it takes the legwork out of it, and it's based on actual people's buying patterns. So it's probably going to do a much better job at making recommendations than a human ever could. Alright, next we have enhancements added to the media viewing experience for the price book. So two main things to point out here. One is that you can now upload videos to price book items. Now you've always been able to add a video URL, so you could like put in a YouTube URL, but now you're able to upload the actual video. The other thing is that when you're looking at the files, the images and the videos that are uploaded to a price book item, if you hover over one of the thumbnails, you now have this set as default button and clicking that will make it the main default image for that price book item. And that is really great. That's been a complaint of mine for a long time. Before, the default image was always just the first one you uploaded, meaning that if you wanted to change what the default image was, you had to delete all of the images and then just upload them in a different order. But now that's no longer necessary. You can simply just choose which image you want to be the default. And next we have add recommendations to categories. So in the last release, the price book category screen was redesigned. Now on the old category screen, before the redesign, you used to be able to set recommendations on a category level. So on the category level you could put in a recommendation and then that would pop up for everything that exists inside of that category. But that feature didn't get carried over to the new version. I'm not on the pricebook team so I can't speak for them, but I would think that the logic probably was that now that we have inline bulk editing, it's not really necessary to set recommendations from the category level because you could pretty much just as easily check off everything inside of that category and set a recommendation in bulk that way. But a problem was uncovered and big shout out to Bradley Chittenden in the Facebook Masterminds Group for pointing this out. If you still had recommendations that were set up from the category level on the old category screen, there was no way to remove them now that we are on the new version. So when you went to edit the items inside of that category, the recommendation didn't show up there and yet on the mobile side the recommendation would still show up. So there was just like this ghost recommendation that you couldn't find anywhere and that's no good. And so for that reason they are adding back the ability to add recommendations on the category level to the new version of the category screen. Now that is happening off cycle, meaning it's not actually part of this release per se. It's going to happen a little bit later. And that's basically because it wasn't really planned. It's kind of an emergency patch type of situation. So if the release is live in your account already, but you're not seeing that, don't worry, it's coming. Next, we have some new built in Pricebook Pro PDF assets. So explainer PDFs for 16H vac services have been added to the Pricebook Pro assets. You can access them by selecting the Pricebook Pro service in ServiceTitan mobile and tapping the attachment explainer to open the PDF viewer. You can show the PDF to customers so they learn more about the service and understand its value. Next, under payments we have enhanced Auto apply payment rules. So under settings and payment collections that screen has been redesigned. It's more consistent with the rest of the product and hopefully makes a little bit more sense. Next, under reporting we have a new built in Opportunity and Estimate follow ups report. The new Opportunity and Estimate follow up report includes filters and KPIs that give you additional insights into estimates than just the follow up screen. Use the report to see how well your office employees closed on sold estimates. All right, that's all I got for today. Nope, never mind. There's actually one more thing. So this isn't actually in the release notes. I'm not sure if they're going to add it or not. But this is actually a change that's being made at my request. So, back in, I believe, the last Hackathon update, which was a while ago now, I think over a year, we've had this feature that allows you to book recalls, warranties, and leads directly from the call booking screen versus having to do it from the originating job page. Now, I thought that this feature was on by default for everybody, because when it first came out, it was a gated feature, and I knew that it wasn't a gated feature anymore. But as it turns out, while it's not gated anymore, you would still have to go into your settings and toggle it. I either didn't realize that or forgot that it worked that way. But after seeing a recent thread on the Facebook Masterminds group that clearly demonstrated that there's still a non zero amount of Service Titan users who don't know how to properly book leads and warranties and recalls in Service Titan for them to be tracked, it made me revisit this and realize that it's truly not on by default. You have to find it and toggle it on. And I thought that it should really just be on, like on by default for everybody. So I asked for that to happen. And they were like, richard, are you sure about this? Because we're gonna mess with the call screen, and people don't always like that. So are you sure this isn't gonna rustle any jimmies? And I was like, let me think about it. So I thought long and hard, and I just. I couldn't think of any reason why anybody wouldn't want this on. And I especially couldn't think of a reason why if we turned it on and somebody didn't want it on, that it would be such a big deal that they would get mad versus just turning it off. So I ran it by some of my other colleagues from the trades, and none of them could think of a downside either. So we're now turning it on by default for everybody. If we've missed something and for some reason that does mess up your workflows, then you know who to blame. That's right, Tom Howard. All right, back to you past Richard. All right, that's all I got for today. Here's a list of everything I skipped. Feel free to pause the video here. Give that a quick skim. If any of that stands out to you, check out the full release notes document. I'll put a link to it in the description down below. Be sure to hit, like, if you liked the 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 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.