How to Use SmartSuite's Mobile App (Tutorial & Review)

Our lives are constantly moving and so our work management software, it needs to be able to keep up. That's why in this video I want to give a tutorial of how to use the mobile version of the SmartSuite app. Hint hint. If you haven't gathered, you are going to need a mobile app on your phone or to follow along with us today. Before we get started, quick thank you to SmartSuite for sponsoring this video. And if you guys haven't already, be sure to download the link to the app relevant to your device so so you can follow along with this tutorial. All the links are in the description below. Now to spice up this tutorial with a little bit of real life use cases, let's go undercover as my spouse and pretend I am a contractor today. All right, figured this would be a little fun. The first thing I'm going to do is follow my own advice here and go install the app onto my phone while I'm on the job site. I will need an Internet connection for this step, so if you are someone managing a road crew of some sort, make sure you let them know and have them do this during onboarding or before they go out into the field. Once you're inside the app, you'll see something that looks like this. You'll have the all tab to view all of your different spaces, recent for where you've been and favorites. If I was a contractor in this case, I'd make sure I favorited the solutions that I'd be in most often to make sure I can quickly jump into them without having to scroll through a bunch of options right below that navigation bar. You also have the option to switch between different workspaces you have available to you. So if you are a member of multiple companies, maybe you're a subcontractor working under multiple businesses, you could swap between them using that quick switch option. Beyond the switcher right there in the middle, we also have the search option to allow us to search all of the solutions available and the plus to create a new solution from the app itself. Now while this gives us most of the features that you could see when you're actually creating things on the computer, maybe I'm a Luddite, but I find it a little bit harder to just get everything set up when I'm working on such a small screen versus when I'm on a computer. So while you can do it, I would say for anyone who's creating a lot of things in SmartSuite, it may be convenient or a time saver to just have that iPad or just a larger screen available so you're not doing everything with your thumbs. Personal preference though below the top navigation bar we have some navigation on the bottom as well. Starting off with Home, which is where we're currently at My Work, where we can see the tasks we have for a given day or overdue. In this case we can also view closed things, things we've worked on previously and within My work. We're able to change our grouping so we group by whatever categories matter most to us, and we can easily create new records from the plus button inside My work. Clicking Cancel here to go back to the Overview area. We have a few more navigation buttons to explore, including starred where we can see our favorited apps, views, records that we might have added earlier on that are either pinned or just showing up in this list. We also have notifications where we can see what has been happening inside our account with the normal filterable areas just like we're used to seeing on the web version and using the three dots we have an option to clear these out very quickly or using our fingers to clear them off one by one. Under the More tab we have the options that we're used to seeing inside of the settings on the web version, where we can control things like our theme color. I'll go to Light mode for the sake of this tutorial and other options there, as well as our member directory to see who's online and when. This is especially good if you're remote and you're wondering who can I call up to help me, you can get a quick check based on this here. From this member directory you can find out people's contact information, get their real time status and availability, find out their time zone, and even get their contact information in case for some reason they're not in your contacts. Overall though, you probably won't be spending much time in settings. When you're out on the road, you'll probably be focused on getting work done. So let's go through a use case of what that might look like. If I was starting my day, I'd probably start off in notifications just to see if there's anything happening related to the jobs I'm out in the field to work on. In this case, if I go about and clear the ones that I don't need to see anymore, I have the option to drag and make things red or to clear them out from this notifications area. But in this case I'm not seeing anything here that's telling me something different about the job I need to work on so I'm going to move over to my work. If I was working as a tradesman in the field, I'd be living in this my work area more than any other tab because I just want to get a clear sense of what do I need to work on today. So I'd be grouping by things like due date and look at whatever tasks are showing up up at the top. In this case, when I go inside the my work area and I actually get things arranged in this demo account, it looks like I've got quite a few overdues and two things I need to take care of today. Looking at them here, I can see that both of them are related to this leak problem I have to do on a certain properties. If this was me, I'd want to start off by figuring out what the heck this is and figuring out which one I need to handle first. Giving them a click, I can open up the record just like I would see on the web version and scroll around the relevant information. Up at the very top I can see which unit is being impacted by this leak and if I want more information about this I can give that a click and open up the extra details. Notice that this does open a new window on top of the window. If we ever want to go backwards and retrace our steps, rather than freaking out and closing the app and going through it all again, the easiest thing we can do is either click the arrow in the top left corner or swipe down. Either one will do the same thing. Swiping down to open the modal that was before it, basically taking us back one page in our app journey. However, in this case I don't want to go backwards. I want to see everything that there is to see about Uptown Newport. Clicking on this here I can see OP maintenance is needed. The property is this. The unit details is that I can see what amenities are involved, what tenants are currently there. I can see that Alice is living there now and I can see attachments to any photos of what is going on currently. If I expand the requests and activities area, I can see that there are actually two different issues with this property. One of them complete which is the broken water heater and then the leak which is what I'm assigned. So that's good to know. If I'm heading to this job. It's great to know that I'm going to be able to take care of everything that's there and not have to make multiple trips because I wasn't aware of the Context, giving this information and making sure that I know Alice's contact information. I can then take this and put this into my GPS to start driving to the job. Once I'm there, I'm going to go back up one layer and look at the leak, the actual work request that came in and that's assigned to me. Scrolling through this, I have the actual request name up at the top, the unit it's associated with, and I can see the date it was reported. Continuing to scroll, I can find more information and voila, the actual tasks I'm supposed to do today. So, imagining I'm at this imaginary property, now it's time to change the status. So I'm going to give this field a click, change it to in process, and scroll on down to find more information about what needs to happen. First up, we need to confirm the work request. Well, I've received it, I'm on it. So I'm going to go ahead and check off that checkbox item of confirm work request and click Done. You'll notice that automatically moves the checklist progress thingy to 1 out of 3 or 33% done. Clearly I need to complete the work request and that would be, you know, putting my phone in my pocket, getting to work, figuring out how to fix the leak. I'm sure I'm super qualified to do that and then I can mark this one done as well. But for many contractors, just checking this box isn't really enough oversight for what they want to see relative to a problem that is solved. So what I might do is have either an attachment field on this given record or use the commenting feature over here to the right to leave a comment about what I have done today. For example, we could just post a conversation a comment just like this so that it's just saved forever on the record of this work request to track what was or wasn't needing to be fixed. Do know that you could also use the same feature to avoid having to use text messages at work if you wanted to keep things all centralized. So all communication in this case around the job at hand was centralized, this could be a great way to do that. However, if you are someone that wants to make this a standard practice and you always want to have not only a note of what was fixed, but maybe some photos, which is pretty common. We might want to add an extra feature into this overview record, which right now has no it has text, it has details, it has statuses, and so on, but it doesn't have a great place for us to put images so I'm going to go up here to the top corner, under the three dots, click Modify Fields, and I'm going to add a new field. In this case, I'm going to choose a File and Images field. I'm going to call it up here at the top by renaming it. I'm going to call it Work Images and I'm going to click Save. Once I add this field onto the record. I can then add photos into this so I have this historical record for the future. I'm going to go ahead and click Cancel to go back to the main record and locate my brand new field. We'll have a field that looks like this called Work Images, because that's what we named it on every single record in this app. If you were setting this up, you'd only need to do it once and it would apply to all of the records in a given app. You can do this on the desktop or like you just saw on the phone, but once you have it here, you can click plus, use your camera, locate whatever it is you want to take a picture of. In this case, sure. My desk. Why not? And we can then use that photo and upload it into the record itself. This information will then sync up with SmartSuite. So anyone anywhere, whether they're on mobile or web or something else, can view this information, whether they're checking it today or checking it in the future. But so far, let's just say we've wrapped up this job. We finished all the pieces. We're going to check all of these pieces off. If we haven't already, go ahead and mark. Done. Scroll on up, locate the overall status of this request and mark it complete. We're going to click Save to save our work, and then we'll wrap up that assignment of the day. If we head back over to the open area, we see that we have no more tasks or checklists or things due today. So if we're out in the field, we might want to do some proactive searching. We could head back into our home area, locate our favorites, and check our property management area or wherever we have our properties or jobs listed inside this area. What it's going to do is open up the solution for property management. And rather than just focusing in on one record or one task, it's showing me all of the stuff I would normally be seeing on the web version across the bottom. Unlike in the web version where it's the top across the bottom, we have the different apps in play. We've got properties, units, tenants, documents, and Most importantly, requests. Assuming we are the property manager in some way, requests is probably where we want to pay attention to. Scrolling into requests I could use this area to just browse what else is going on in the field. If there's anyone I should help out if I have some extra time or just to see what's happening. I can also use this area to log new information. Let's say I was on the property and I was talking with the tenant whose name was Alice. I think. Let's just check real quick. Uptown Newport Unit 2 what was her name? I think it was Alice. Tenant Alice. Yes, I was talking to Alice and let's just say Alice told me. Ah, they have an issue with their water heater too. Well, if I wanted to be a proactive amazing property manager while I am talking with Alice, I could open up my phone here, go into this request area, click the little plus to add in this request on Alice's behalf. I could add the name such as Broken water heater. I could change the status to to do. I could give the type of issues such as maintenance and I can specify the unit. Now I already know I'm in Newport Unit 2, so I'm going to go ahead and click Done. I could add any notes about the request here, so use long form text to write out anything she tells me. And scrolling on down I can also add the date reported, which would be today. From here I can click save and I have now added a new request into our system that's going to show up in the web version and on other apps in almost real time. Now I could go on and on about the other use cases you could have here on the mobile app, such as using this view here to swap between the different views you have in place, such as Recent activities versus Request specific by status. I don't want to spend too much time focusing on these features because as great as it is to add new views and add new details, most folks actually aren't going to be doing this when they're on their mobile app. Instead, they're going to be browsing information that's already there, clicking on the Property Views dropdown, and viewing different information based on the views that we've already had set up. For example, they could click on Skyloft Apartments here from this map view and click Get Directions to navigate right there. All from SmartSuite. So that is how you can go about using SmartSuite on your mobile device. If this was interesting to you and you don't yet have a SmartSuite account, affiliate link below for you to fix that and also support this channel at the same time at no cost to you. And if you are someone that could use a little bit of extra Support along your SmartSuite journey, we also have a link below for how you can work with us on your SmartSuite learning curve path thing words. You know what I mean. Oh, and before we go, a quick pro tip. If you are someone that is frequently adding information on the go from your mobile device, or if you have a field crew or people who are working out in the field who commonly need to go about adding information into SmartSuite, use a SmartSuite form. All right? Even though the mobile app is super easy to use, that form will make it even faster for folks to add structured data on the go. Now, if you have no idea what I'm talking about when I'm using the word form view in SmartSuite, or if you'd just like to learn more about this strategy, check out the video somewhere around here for more information on our tutorial on forms. Thanks so much for watching guys, and until next time, enjoy the process.