ST-55 | ServiceTitan Release Notes Overview

What's going on? Blue collar nerd. It's everybody here, the Richard Kohberger. And in this video, I'm going to be going over the Release notes for ST55. Now, just as a reminder, I am not going to be going over 100% of the release notes. If that's news to you, check out the last release notes video. I explained why in the beginning of that video, but nobody complained last time. In fact, nobody brought it up at all. So I'm gonna stick with it. So first on these release notes we have a release note about the release notes. Little self absorbed, but okay. So release notes will now start with a highlight section. So everything that Service Titan feels is going to be the most impactful is going to be front loaded right there in the highlight section. And no, I am not limiting these videos to just what's in the highlight section. I will go beyond that. But again, I am going to skip some things. All right, so first, in this highlight section under dispatch we have phase one of the dispatch board upgrade. So, so this initial phase isn't changing very much. There's some back end changes that should make the dispatch board a little bit faster and more responsive. The Maps 2.0 button has moved to the left side of the header. The business unit filter has moved next to the date picker and the date picker has been changed to be the date picker that is used throughout the rest of Service Titan like the same one that you find in reports. And the date picker is complete with day of the week. All right, it's there. Nobody panic. Next, we have dispatch technicians in bulk. So, so previously if you had a job with multiple technicians assigned to it, you had to dispatch and arrive them all individually, one by one, which was a, let's see, how do they phrase it in the release notes. Previously you had to advance them individually, which was a big dirty pain in the B hole. Well, we should update that. But yeah, it was tedious, it was annoying. But now you don't have to do that anymore. You can simply dispatch and arrive them all at once. And when the appointment is finished, marking the appointment done marks all the technicians done at the same time as well. Next, under Marketing Pro we have view audience potential reach breakdown. So when building email and direct mail campaigns, you can now view a breakdown of the campaign's potential reach in the audience selection step. Next, for reputation management we have a review request section. This is a new section under Reputation and it provides tracking and management of review requests that have been sent to customers. Next under mobile, we have arguably the biggest highlight on these release notes, and that is crew management. So when appointments first came out, we introduced this, this concept of a lead technician. And that's something that's available in the technician permissions. But previously, marking a technician as a lead only did one thing. It allowed that lead technician to mark an entire appointment as done, even if there were other technicians still working. So it would mark everybody as done. But with this update, lead technicians can now do a lot more to manage the other technicians that are working with them. So lead technicians can now dispatch, arrive, manage meal breaks, and close out appointments for all of the technicians on their crew for that appointment. So, so if you have lead technicians managing crews, then this allows you to offload more of those dispatcher duties to the lead technician if that's something you want to do. All right, next, under memberships, you can now mark materials as chargeable on invoice templates. So previously, if you had chargeable materials that were always associated with a recurring service, when you built out that invoice template, you didn't have any way to mark that material as chargeable. But now that's no longer the case. You can mark it chargeable from the invoice template itself, and then it will be chargeable by default out in the field or in the office. If you're billing it from the office, it doesn't have to be on the field. Next, under purchasing, we have a nice quality of life improvement Bulk update business units on purchase orders. So now when you update a job's business unit, that is going to automatically update the business unit for every PO that is attached to that job. And that's going to help you make sure that all costs stay associated with the correct business unit, which is going to help to give you more accurate reporting and ultimately more accurate books. All right, we are now leaving the highlight section and entering the new section. So. So under accounting, we have an update to the way that we view pending batches. Okay, so in a fairly recent update, the view pending batches dropdown was limited to 15 batches. If you had more than 15, you wouldn't get the dropdown at all. It would forward you to a search page that showed you all of your pending batches, and boy, did you guys hate it. So some changes have been made in that department. So the dropdown limit has been doubled from 15 to 30, and the dropdown will always show you your most recent 30 pending batches. But if you have more than 30, you will need to click this View more button to see the rest and it will take you back to that search screen. So there does still need to be some limit on that dropdown, only because letting that dropdown get too long causes problems for backend nerd reasons. But with this update, you'll now get that dropdown every time and it will always show you your most recent 30 batches. And ideally you really shouldn't have more than 30 pending batches very frequently anyways, so hopefully this makes things right. Next, we have Create list items in QuickBooks on export, so you can now export transactions without having to manually create shipping and tax items in QuickBooks Desktop. Before, you would have to manually create these and then assign them to a General Ledger account. But with this update that is no longer the case. Next, under Dashboard and Scorecards we have visualization module examples in custom dashboards. So now when you're creating a visualization module for a custom dashboard, once you select the visualization type, you will get an example that changes depending on what settings you choose, and that just makes it easier to see and understand what exactly you're doing. Speaking of custom dashboards, that's a really cool feature. You should look into it if you haven't already. I made a video explaining how to use it and I'll put a link to that in the corner of the screen here as well as in the description down below. All right, next, under dispatch we have adjustable capacity planning by skill. So now in the setup for adjustable capacity planning, you have the ability to choose between manual adjustments and Skills Match. And this is an either or situation. They cannot work together. But if you do choose Skills match, then that is going to close the arrival window as soon as there are no available technicians with the required skills available, even if there is some capacity technically left over. And this just helps you avoid a scenario where you have jobs booked. But actually the technicians that were available don't have the skills necessary to perform that job. Next, under Mobile you can now view customer invoice and statement Mail preferences from the mobile app. So customers are able to have their delivery preferences either set to email, mail, or both mail and email. But previously that information was not viewable from the mobile side, but now it is. So on any screen where a technician is about to send out an invoice or statement, they will be able to see that customer's delivery preferences. All right, next, under Payroll and Timesheets, you can now exclude certain accounts from payroll. So when editing either an employee or technician account under the Payroll tab, you should see a new checkbox that says Include in payroll role and having that box unchecked will prevent that technician or employee from appearing in any time sheets or performance pay features, including relevant reports and the payroll approval dashboard. This is useful if you have certain employees who have multiple accounts, like maybe you have a service manager who has both a technician account and an office site account. And it's also useful if you're making dummy accounts for whatever reason. Now, very important note here, any new technicians or new employees that you create, they are going to have this box unchecked by default. Meaning when you make a new account by default, they are not going to be included in payroll features. So when you're going through and setting them up for payroll, make sure you do go in and check that box off once you're ready to have them go live in payroll. Okay, Next, under price book we have a new brand field. So equipment items in the price book now include a field for brand. Now, there was already a field for manufacturer, but but this new field for brand is useful if perhaps a single manufacturer offers multiple brands. So that just helps you get more granular with how you're organizing your price book. Next, we have a pretty long requested feature which is round prices to the nearest dollar when bulk editing. So in the price book inline editor, let's say you check off a bunch of services and you say, I want to increase all of those by 5%. Well, chances are increasing a bunch of prices by exactly 5% is not going to land you on all perfectly round numbers. So if you're all out of your OCD medication, you can simply check off this new option that says round to the nearest dollar. And there you go. All right. Next, under purchasing, you can now change the inventory location on replenishment purchase orders. So previously when you were editing a replenishment po, the inventory location was not a field that you were able to change. So let's say, for example, a vendor messed up and delivered inventory to the wrong location. Let's say they sent it to Tim's house when it was supposed to go over to Jake's house. You couldn't change the inventory location on the PO to reflect what actually happened. But now you can. Next, you can now roll over partially received POS to a new po. So you can now close partially received pos and add the unreceived items into a new po. This makes it easier for you to account for backordered shipments and track how often a vendor doesn't send you your requested items. Next, under reporting, we have new appointments related drill downs in the jobs report template. So in the jobs report template, the drill down into the requests for additional appointments. KPI now includes two new KPIs. We have the name of the technician who requested the additional appointment and we have the request reason. And finally under telecom we have the campaign Registry integration. Hopefully you already know all about this and are on it. But just in case I am going to mention it here. This is that whole A2P10 DLC situation. I made a whole separate video about that and if you haven't seen it, please please please check that out. I'm going to put a link in the corner of the screen here as well as in the description down below. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Here is a list of everything I skipped. Feel free to pause the video here and if any of this sounds interesting to you, check out the full release notes. I'll put a link to those in the description box down below. 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 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 engagement through likes, comments and subscriber numbers are the ways in which my success is measured. Appreciate it. Peace.