The Basics Of Payroll In ServiceTitan

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. And in this video, I'm going to be going over the basics of what the payroll process is like in Servicetitan. So by watching this video, you're gonna learn how Servicetitan can automate the collecting of payroll data for both your technicians and your office employees. You're gonna learn about the different types of pay structures that can be set up within Servicetitan, and you're gonna learn about how both office employees and field technicians can view and approve or dispute their payroll before it actually gets finalized. So when you're first setting up your payroll settings, there are two basic ways to go about it. One way is time based. So using timesheets for both your technicians and your office employees, and in the payroll settings for both office employees and technicians who are paid this way based on time, you're able to set up their hourly rate as well as the overtime rules that apply for you and your state. And for technicians, you're also able to set up first drive rules, basically meaning whether or not we pay the technicians for their first drive of the day. So for example, if you allow your technicians to take their vans home every evening, then some companies might choose not to pay that first drive from the technician's house to their first job, because that's considered their commute to work. However, if technicians aren't taking their vans home and they're going to the office first, then that drive to the office is their commute to work and you would want to pay them for that first drive if you wanted to. You could also input commute times for technicians and then set it up so that they only get paid for their first drive when it exceeds that normal commute time. You can also set up non job events with timesheet codes that tell Service Titan how employees should be paid when they attend these non job events. So non job events, that's going to be things like meetings, calling in a tech to stock their van or wash their van, sending a tech to go get maintenance done on their vehicle, things like that. For technicians, you also have the option to either let Service Titan automatically track the time based on when technicians are arriving to jobs, finishing jobs, their idle time between jobs, or you can set it up so that technicians manually clock in and out, and for employees, your CS and everything like that, they will manually clock in and out, but you can set it up so that they get a reminder every time they sign into Servicetitan to clock in and every time they sign out of Servicetitan. If they're clocked in, they'll get a reminder to clock out. And office employees also have the option to clock into non job events just like technicians do, as well as mark their meal breaks. Now the other way that you can pay technicians within Servicetitan is performance based pay. So that's going to be things like commissions and spiffs. So you can set up a default commission rate for a technician, you can set up a sold buy rate if they sold an estimate but didn't perform the work. And you can put individual spiffs or bonuses on specific price book items. And another really cool feature is range bonuses so you can reward technicians with a bonus when they meet certain revenue goals. And by the way, you can combine those. You can pay technicians partially based on time and partially based on performance. And within the payroll settings for both technicians and office employees, there's now a field to input a manager and that is used for this really cool feature called Payroll sign off and approval. So when it comes time to run payroll, a payroll manager can access this payroll approval panel. I got that on the first take. Are you impressed? Payroll Approval Panel and from here managers can see a filterable overview of payroll for different pay periods. They can also run various payroll reports directly from this page and they can make any necessary payroll adjustments here as well. All payroll adjustments, by the way, are tracked in this audit trail so you can see exactly who did what and when. And once everything looks good to the payroll manager, they can push this information out to both office employees and technicians for them to review and sign off on or dispute. So once a payroll manager does that, both office employees and technicians will see a banner in the user interface that tells them that their payroll is ready for review and approval. So the payroll review page does look a little bit different for office employees over on the office side versus technicians who are using it in the mobile app, but it is available for both types of employees. From this page, employees and technicians can review their payroll. They can choose to approve it which will ask them for a signature and show the some legal terms. Or they can push this button that says Submit dispute. If they do choose to submit a dispute, they'll be given a text box where they can explain what their dispute is and then that dispute will be sent back to the payroll manager for review. And if the payroll manager approves that dispute, then they can make that adjustment and then send it back to the employee one more time for approval. And if you're the trusting type, you can allow your office employees to edit their own timesheets, but that is permission based and you don't have to allow that if you don't want. That feature is only available for office employees, though. Technicians out in the field, they will have to have somebody in the office edit their timesheets sheets for them, assuming something went wrong and those timesheets do need editing. And once an employee or technician has approved their payroll, then the payroll manager can finalize it and you're good to go. So what are the major benefits of using Servicetitan for payroll? Well, the first and most obvious benefit is if you are currently calculating your payroll manually, then having it calculated automatically in Servicetitan is going to save you a whole lot of time and effort. Another really big benefit is that you're going to get much more accurate job costing data because now Service Titan knows what you're paying for your labor. So you're going to get much more valuable reporting by having that information in Service Titan. Another major benefit is especially with that payroll sign off and approval feature that we just showed, it's going to make your employees feel much more comfortable because they're going to know ahead of time what their paycheck looks like and you're going to prevent that dreaded situation where an employee gets paid. And then they want to retroactively dispute that because now everybody is signing off on their payroll before payroll actually gets run. So not only is that going to save a lot of headache for your payroll manager, but it's also going to make all employees feel more comfortable. I know that technicians especially are very sensitive about their pay. I know at my dad's company before we had this feature, a lot of our technicians would manually track in like a notebook all of their pay for every single job. So that way when they got their paycheck, they could reconcile it with their notebook and make sure it matched. But with payroll sign off and approval, they don't have to do that anymore because they have visibility into their payroll from their side and they can approve it or dispute it. And if they do dispute it, any issues get worked out before the paycheck actually gets to their hands. Better for everybody. And another benefit is it's of course very convenient to have everything all in one place. So technician, payroll, office, employee payroll, it's all in one place within Servicetitan. So if you don't know where to start as far as setting this stuff up, or if some of these features are unfamiliar to you, then let me introduce you to my good friend, Titan. Advisor say hi Titan Advisor. What's up baby? So inside of Service Titan, you can access Titan Advisor by clicking that rocket icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen. Once you are in there, you'll see a navigation bar on the left hand side of the screen and at the bottom of the list there is a Payroll and Admin section. And once you're there you'll see all of the different payroll features grouped into different sections depending on how advanced they are. So they'll be either in the Launch Acceleration, Optimization or Mastery sections. From here you'll be able to see which features you are and are not utilizing, and drilling into any feature will give you more information and a walkthrough on how to set it up, as well as additional resources. So if you're looking for a good place to start with all this, Titan Advisor would be what I recommend. Now, if you are a current Service Titan user and you already know about all of those payroll features that I just showed you, but you still don't use Servicetitan for payroll because you have a more complex pay structure that Servicetitan does not yet accommodate for, well then I do have some good news for you. There is something coming down the pipeline that will make payroll and Servicetitan even more flexible and help accommodate for a lot more complex pay structures. So keep an eye out for that in the coming months. 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 surface Titan's YouTube channel. If you've not done that already, hit that bell icon so that YouTube notifies you anytime we upload a new video. Appreciate it. Peace. What's up baby?