08/03/21 - Webinar - Best Practice for using Work Order Instructions
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”(0:08 - 0:21)
All right, and I can see on my other side that you can see my screen this time, so that’s a good thing. So, I wanted to thank everyone for attending tonight. This is a little bit of a different one.
(0:21 - 0:59)
The topic is actually quite simple in premise, but it just seems that I’ve noticed a few folks using this particular item in a way that it really isn’t intended, and I don’t know that you’re getting the best benefit out of it by using it that way, so I wanted to cover that. And it’s also going to take us into another topic that I think is going to be very beneficial to everyone that’s using the full business management system, so we’ll kind of go through that here. So, basically, what I’m going to talk about first, I’m going to talk about the new version that’s now fully released.
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Can you turn that down just a hair? Okay, and it’s fully released. Its installation will only be on request, though, due to some of the things that are involved in it, but I’m more than happy to put it in on request, and I will show you what that includes, and it’s up to you to let me know if it’s some things that you’re going to utilize sooner rather than later. The next version will be going out to everybody, so it won’t be an on-request version like this one.
(1:35 - 1:52)
Then we’ll talk about the work order instructions. We’ll look at a little bit about what it is and why you would use it. We’ll take a look at the demo on how to use it, and then I’m going to talk about some important thoughts that we should consider so that we don’t lose the work order instructions that have been done.
(1:53 - 2:25)
And then, lastly, we’ll do our typical Q&A session, and that’ll be wide open where everybody can ask whatever they want at that point. So just a quick note, upcoming webinars, the next one is scheduled for the beginning of October, and we’re going to talk about how to manage price updates. So this is using the system so that you can take advantage of automatically doing price increases, price updates, and at the same time, you know, it will happen on whatever date you say.
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So the nice thing is you can do them any time in the future, and the system will manage those for you automatically. Also going to look at a date in December. I haven’t really picked a date yet because between the conference and the holidays, I’m not sure what date’s going to make sense or if we even need to just push that off into the new year, but I want to go through how to get creative with creating your series entries.
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And so I’ve had a lot of questions lately about different ways to use series and do different things. And so I’m going to do kind of a little session on how we can use those creatively in order to get really the best benefit out of all of them. All right.
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And then I’ve got some other topics that people have requested that I’m going to schedule. And again, if there’s anything in particular that anyone would like to see, send those over to me and let’s get them on the list of topics and see if we can get them scheduled. So most of you are familiar with my slide here about the three components of the full business management system.
(3:30 - 3:50)
Today, again, we’re going to be talking primarily about the main business management app, the magenta colored circle. I realize that we don’t do a whole lot of calls on the iAuditor side. For the most part, it’s relatively simple, but again, I need some topics.
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We did the one webinar several months ago about how to update the report preferences and be able to turn things on and off in the report, and I think that one has been viewed many, many times on the recording, and I know it’s been very helpful to a lot of people. So I’d like to continue doing that and have some more iAuditor topics scheduled, but help me out. Let me know what areas of iAuditor you’d like for me to cover, and then we can get those on the books.
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Moving forward, the new version 4.2 that I mentioned, basically it’s complete as of yesterday, and I’m going to go through. I’ve got a little list here of some of the primary updates and, you know, what those impact. I mean, you can keep in mind that if you feel that you’re going to benefit from these, let me know, and we’ll get you upgraded to that version.
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So the Issues app, some of you have an early release of the Issues app, and this is an app that allows you to track the different open items that you have with your customers, be able to keep notes, find dates, communicate with the customer through the portal if necessary. But many enhancements have been made from that initial release, such as being able to include additional notes, being able to assign the issue to different people, being able to put in reminders that will then email you the day of a reminder that you have a particular item that needs to be addressed. So that app has really come a long way, and I appreciate the inputs that I’ve received from several of my clients to make that even better.
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Next is you now have the ability to text the work orders off to vendors and also the cleanings to housekeepers. So in the past, that was email only, and now we can also send it via text. iAuditor reports can now be edited directly from the admin list.
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So all of you are familiar with the open report link that’s on your work order list, which will allow you to open the iAuditor report and look at it before you send it to your clients if you’re sending from the admin. You now have an option so that when you click that link, it’ll actually take you straight into the iAuditor editor rather than just a viewer so that you’re able to make those changes directly on your laptop before emailing them out. There’s a new here away report, which will give you a report listing out every customer that you have on your system, showing who you have in as far as your schedule and when you have them booked next.
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It’ll show you here who’s away. So if they’re set up in in-residence, it’ll show you that. And then the nice thing is there’s a third column that says, here’s customers that are not accounted for.
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So this allows you to go through and just kind of do a quick audit and make sure that you have all of your customers accounted for one way or another. Either you’ve got them on the schedule or you’ve got them in residence. Or at least you know that they’re in either place due to the ability of the report.
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If you are not using the no end date on your series and you just extend them out based on a range of dates, you’re now able to do that for multiple series at a time instead of having to do it one at a time. And so that’s going to be another topic that we’ll cover in more detail in another session. But I think this will be very beneficial to those of you that have very seasonal businesses so that each year you can just restart those work orders without too much trouble and doing it all from a single screen.
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There’s now the ability to have master and sub work orders. So a sub work order is if you have maybe a large project and you want to assign it out in different tasks, perhaps to different people, you can create sub work orders to that first master. So this allows you maybe to schedule multiple vendors, maybe a different, you know, employee on your staff.
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If you have a handyman doing some tasks, then you’re doing some follow up work and you can have multiple work orders going on for one particular item. Let’s see some display improvements. So if you’re using your tablet in landscape mode, the work order screen has been modified quite a bit to make it a little easier to read.
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You know, we’re getting to be too many fields all over the place and you’ll actually see that today when we do the work order instructions. So you’ll have a good view for what the new screen looks like. We now have the ability to throw the weather on your iAuditor reports when you create them.
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So it will put the actual, you know, conditions, you know, partly cloudy, the high and low. And if you’re starting a report from the RouteTech, it’ll even put the actual current temp directly in the report. So it’s kind of a nice little feature.
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A couple of people have asked me for that. And lastly, there’s now a calendar view available in the RouteTech app as well as the list. And more to come on that.
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So the full release notes are available out in the Help Center if you want to go out and take a look at those in detail. But, you know, this will be a good overview that there’s a lot of, you know, nice things here. And again, if you feel that you can benefit from these, just let me know and we’ll get you upgraded.
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So let’s move on to the topic for today, which is the work order instructions field. So most of you are familiar with the work order instructions field itself right on the work order screen. And, you know, I’ll bring that up here in a moment when we do the demo.
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But what I want to point out is the real purpose for that is a way to add a special note for a task you want to perform at the future date whenever that work order is scheduled. It’s important that it’s not used for a place to just put general information about the property. Use the note fields that are in the property screen for those tasks.
(9:46 - 10:25)
And really, the primary reason is you want to be able to put those notes in there and you want to call attention to them so that whoever is doing the home visit will see that there is a particular special instruction, special task that needs to be accomplished on a date that’s on the screen in front of them. The whole idea here is to make sure that you don’t have to keep extra lists of these additional tasks. You know, if you’re putting general notes on there about the property and where to set thermostats and how to unlock doors and you have all these different things out in the work order instructions, it’s going to be just mundane and routine.
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And it’s not going to call your attention to it. And you typically can miss that you have a special task assigned for that particular work order occurrence. And so that’s the reason that you really need to use it and keep it as a special place.
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And when we get to the demo, I’ll show you exactly what I mean by putting in a special note and how it appears when you’re out on the screen. So particular topics that you could put into that field would be such things as a reminder that the customer is coming in. So that maybe you need to prepare for his arrival, turn the water heater up, restart the ice maker, take the trickle charger off the car, set the thermostat, whatever you do when the client comes in.
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Maybe it’s a reminder to do a task that the client has asked you to do. So perhaps, you know, your last report, you told him there was a letter there from his insurance carrier. And he replied back and said, would you pick it up on the next visit and forward it to him? So at that point, put that note in there on the next visit to remind you to pick up the insurance letter and forward it.
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You know, double check the Wi-Fi, look for the Amazon box. Whatever tasks your client is telling you to do, that’s the place to put them in here is in the work order instructions. The items in red are things you’re not going to want to put in there, such as, you know, turn off the water each visit, settings for your thermostat, check the car in the garage.
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These are all the things that, again, should be part of the property notes. Because if they’re on there each and every week, it’s not going to draw your attention to them. And you’re going to miss them.
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And you’re not going to do the tasks that are important that you want to remind yourself to do. I do want to talk about some important thoughts on this. But before we do this, before we get to the slide and this particular thought, let’s just kind of take a look at the work order instructions themselves and put some in and, you know, show you how that will appear when you’re out in the field.
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I’m going to flip over real quick here to my screen. And I’m logged into my, you know, HomeWatch list. I have all of the work orders that I have on my plate for today.
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And what we’ll do is we’ll take a look at one of these. I’m going to use Paul Johnson here as my example. And we’ll, you know, see how that appears.
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So if I click on Paul Johnson, this will open up the work order for what I have scheduled for him for today. Over here, you have your field that says work order instructions. And you see it even says there, enter any special specific instructions in this box.
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So as I mentioned, this could be something like look for the insurance letter, okay? So let’s use that one for our example. Pick up letter from insurance and forward. Okay.
That’s a special instruction. Okay. Putting items in here like check the car, what’s the thermostat, turn the water off, those are not considered special instructions.
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And what I mean by that is, let’s save this one. When we get out to the house, we want to make sure that we are calling attention to the fact that we need to pick up that letter. I’ve now saved this.
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I’m going to pull up my phone screen, and I’m going to go into my RouteTech app for today. For those of you that don’t use the Business Management app, this is the application that you would use on your phone when you’re out in the field so that you know what you have to do today. So I’m going to open up that application.
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This will bring up a list of all of the different homes that I need to visit today. And here’s what I want to point out. The one we just put in now has this instruction on it in red.
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So it’s going to call your attention to the fact that we have something special. We don’t have that on any of the others. Okay.
But we do have the details of the property when we go into the work order screen. And what I mean by that is, let’s click on Paul Johnson here to open up the actual work order itself. And you’ll see again, we’ve got that instruction here with a red box around it so we don’t miss it.
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But that’s totally different than down here where you have the property notes, like leaving the courtyard open, door open, you know, checking the mailbox, you know, what are the Wi-Fi settings, what are the temperature settings, anything like that. Those are the notes that belong here under the property notes. These are the special notes that you would see, you know, right here when you’re in the field.
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So again, if you put regular routine things in here, it’s not going to call your attention to them because you’re used to seeing them week in and week out and you’re going to miss them. And I have a client where that happened. And, you know, they were asking, well, how do I fix that? This is how you fix it.
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You don’t use it unless for a particular task that you want to call attention to. So you can see right here how that works. Now, the nice thing about this is you can put these notes out there anytime in the future.
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When you’re doing your in-residence entry and somebody tells you they’re going to be coming in for, you know, the holidays out in December, you can put that note out there on the work order for December and it’s going to be there reminding you to do that particular task, that particular item. So that’s the nice thing is you can put these out there. You don’t have to worry about them.
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It will remind you on the date you go out there that you have these items. Now, that takes me to my next point. If you’re putting something out there way out in the future, you do need to be a little bit careful that you don’t recreate your occurrences or delete them because you are going to delete the instruction you entered on that future work order.
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So this is just a little heads up. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you, A, what I mean by this, and then I’m going to show you a different way to handle changing those work order occurrences so that you don’t have that problem with deleting an item you put in in the future. So let’s go back out here.
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And the first part is the deleting of the series. What do I mean by that? I’m going to pick on a particular item here, down here, this lettered Blanco account because he’s in there biweekly. And we’re supposed to do him, you know, the third, which, again, that means we’ll do him the next time on, you know, the 17th and the 31st and then so on every other week.
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I’m going to go into his series and we’ll take a look at exactly that. Okay. So the series, for those of you that aren’t familiar with that term, that is where you set up the recurring part of it.
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In other words, you say we’re going to go out to Mr. Blanco’s property every other week and we’re going to do this. So if you look here, that’s where you will see that item. And I’ve got a lot of work orders for him all the way back into 2018.
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So let’s just go to the current ones. Sorry, I’ve got a long way to go here, I think. Let’s just skip that and do 50 on page.
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Yeah. They write you, they should come up in reverse order. I could do that, yes.
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That’s another way to do that. It’s probably going to be easier since it looks like we are all the way down here at the bottom. So let’s just go up to our current date of August 3rd.
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So here you can see August 3rd, 2021, August 18th, 1st. So we have it set up, you know, every other week. We did move this one up, you know, by a day out.
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But you can see that it’s every other week going forward. So let’s just say, as an example, that the Blanco family was in town and they just left on Sunday. So we probably don’t want to go out to their property today on the 3rd.
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But instead, we want to go out next week on Tuesday, the 10th, and then do every other week from then. So I know that some of you, and this is the way it, you know, was done way back when, would come in here and say, yes, let’s just change this. And we’re going to just change this date and say, you know, August 10th would be my start date, end date, and delete the existing ones when we create the new occurrences.
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This is what I’m cautioning about right here, is if you do that, if you delete the existing and you put a note out there, let’s say, at holiday time for the Blancos, you did delete that note. And you created new work orders. So that is a little bit of a heads up on that.
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There is a much better way to make the adjustment and shift everything out by that week. If we go back to our work order list screen, we have the Blanco work order for today right here. And like I said, we want to do it next week.
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We want to do it on the 10th, and then every other week going forward from then. So rather than going in and changing all of those individually, we will check the box on that particular one. We will use the actions on selected work orders dropdown and say change date.
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When we do that, we’re going to change the date to the 10th. So that’s going to change this work order from the 3rd to the 10th. But what about all the future ones? Right below our button, we have this little checkbox that says slide all future occurrences forward.
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Since we’re moving this one out one week, it will then take all of the future occurrences and also move them out one week. So effectively now, we’ve taken our every other week visits that were going on, you know, from the 3rd and so on to now the 10th and so on. So we’ve shifted everything out by one week.
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So this is all we have to do is the 3rd. I’m sorry, change it to the 10th, check the box, click update. It’s going to give us a little warning about what it’s doing.
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It’s sliding everything. We can say OK, and when that comes back, it’s done. Now, you’ll notice that it’s nowhere here on the 3rd because it’s out on the 10th.
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We can prove that by, let’s say, I’m just going to change my date here. I’m going to change it to next year, and I’m going to search on Blanca. And now we can see here’s the 10th, and then everything else got shifted out by one week from what we looked at a minute ago.
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Remember that one was the 1st, now it’s the 8th, and so on every other week. So we did it all with one, basically one click of the mouse by using the slide checkbox that was there. Now, this also works in reverse.
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Even though the check itself says slide forward, don’t let that fool you. It’s just, it will also slide backwards. If we changed it from the 3rd to the 2nd, for example, it would have slid everything back one day.
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So it’s smart enough to know that you’re going forward or backward just based on whatever you’re changing on the primary work order that you have highlighted. All right, does that make sense? OK, silence is good. That is actually the total extent of what I had on the agenda for today.
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I thought we’d spend a little extra time here in Q&A because I know I threw a lot of things at you with respect to upcoming versions. I know that, you know, last time we didn’t have a whole lot of Q&A, so I wanted to have a little extra time this time. So let’s just open it up, and, you know, if anybody has any questions either on the topics that we just covered or anything about the software in general, please feel free to ask, and let’s just, you know, work through those.
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Gary? Yes. This is Wendy from Florida. And I have a question.
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Hi, Wendy. Hi. We have a question about something on iAuditor related to actions.
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What is that? What all can we do with the actions? What does that allow us to do on iAuditor when you have that option? Okay. So if you’re using the business management system, my advice is don’t use actions. For my clients that have iAuditor only, yeah, you can use actions.
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The whole idea is the actions give you like a little list of to-do items to follow up. When you have the full system, Wendy, you should use the rep tech notes. And the reason for that is because then those, yeah, exactly, because then the admin gets them.
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You can create a work order automatically from them. The actions do the same thing, but they’re within iAuditor. So for you then to create work orders and so on.
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One of the things that I discovered on the route tech notes, and we use that quite a bit, and so I really love this function, when I mark them as complete and they kind of go away at that moment, you know, they come back. It doesn’t seem like I can ever get rid of some of these. So I don’t know why, it’s like when we log back in or when I come back onto that screen, like what I just marked as complete and it went away, it just seems to like pop back up again.
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So I don’t know if it’s. Okay. So I’ve got one just, I’ve got a little dummy one here.
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So if I mark that complete, it goes away. Yeah, it goes away. You’re saying it comes back? It comes back, yeah, time and time again.
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Like I, all of these here, I was showing Megan all of these here on the bottom of my screen. Have been here for quite a while. July 30th.
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Yeah, you don’t have, you don’t have, you don’t have this view set to all notes, do you? I’m sorry? This is incomplete notes. It does say incomplete? It does say incomplete, yeah. So when I hit the complete button, it goes away, but then it comes back.
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He was just saying if you have it on all notes, then you’ll see all of them. Yeah, no, it says, yeah, it says incomplete up here on the left, upper left there. Do me a favor and send me a couple of the work order numbers of the ones that you see reappearing.
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Okay. Kate, Kate, I know I saw you on the call. I don’t know if you’re still on.
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I know you use this very heavily. Have you ever run into that issue? Maybe Kate’s not on the call. Okay.
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Do you want one now? I can give you one now. Or I can just, you want me to email them to you? Yeah, please just throw in an email and then I can follow up on that. Okay.
(26:47 - 26:53)
Thank you. No problem. Yeah, we use, this is a great function.
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I like it. So we have these different options with these RAPTEC notes. You have activity, work order, and picture.
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So I mean, I guess the work order thing. Yeah, that will actually go away. If the activity one goes away, it gets replaced by issue, because now you’ll be able to create the issues and track them right out of there.
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And I know that’s one that you don’t have yet, but you’ll be getting it with this new version. Okay. But yeah, I appreciate the feedback that it’s working well for you.
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I do think that I have quite a few people that use it heavily, because it’s a great way to put in those reminders. And especially, you know, when you have multiple people in the field, it allows everybody to keep everything straight. So it’s kind of quite great.
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Yeah, thank you. That’s good. I’ll send you some of those work order numbers that keep reappearing.
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Okay. I’m going to pop back in to the new work order screen, because I know we’ve just briefly touched on it. But just so that everybody knows what has been changed.
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So there were a lot of extra fields on the screen. There were a lot of, you know, messy buttons down here on the bottom. So basically, this has been reformatted into like a template.
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So you have the work order info, which is, you know, who it’s assigned to in the work order instructions. You then have your report information on this tab. So this will be your default template when it got emailed and the URL to the report.
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If you’re using any of the vendor features, this would allow you to assign the vendor and put in their bills. And you also have the ability now to put in any kind of attachments on a work order. So if you’re, you know, need to attach a estimate from, you know, provider or any kind of special pictures that need to be attached to that work order itself, you can do that now by attaching it right into here.
(28:51 - 29:04)
So the nice thing is with this tab to view right here, it keeps everything clean in one place. And you’ll be able to get to all of those different fields quite easily. And it frees up a lot of that, you know, mess that we had on the bottom.
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All right, who else has questions? Terri, I know you have to have one. Terri Sweeney You think? I just started using the issues feature now. In fact, just today.
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So I’m interested to see how that works. Now, will that create a new work order right from that issue? It can, yes. In fact, if you go into the issues, and let me just bring up one here, like replacing the garbage disposal of this one account.
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And basically, you have a little box here that says, you know, work orders for this issue. So if you’ve already created work orders, if you open this section, you have a list of them. Otherwise, if you’re going to create a new one, you can just hit the plus create right here.
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And when you do that, that will draw. This is also taking new purchases. So before I hit OK, let me just explain this.
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You also have the ability to create a shopping list from your issues. So in this case, we were replacing the garbage disposal. So I said, when we go to Home Depot, we need to buy the garbage disposal.
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We need to buy a new power connector for it. Maybe a new key trap. We can put in these part lists.
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Then we go to Home Depot. We can put in, buy everything that’s on our shopping list, put in the prices. And in this case, it knows that we’ve done that.
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And if I say yes, when it creates the work order, it will move all of those items over that we bought so that the customer will get bills for it. And you can see right here, we bought an incinerator and the price. And now we can just add our lines for our labor charges or whatever we’re going to do.
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But you’ll see that from the issue, we created the work order with one touch. All filled in, ready to go. Is there, I put them in though without the original work order number in there.
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Is there a reason why we should put those work orders in there? Is that just ties it to the first incidents or something? Exactly. It just ties it back so that, one of the reasons for that, I have this replaced garbage and I want to know, well, what date did I originally report that to the customer? By referring back to that original work order, you’ll know exactly which, and I’m going to pull that up here. You’ll know exactly which order that it was reported on.
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And you go to the report, the iAuditor report on that work order. So you can see exactly what it was reported, how it was reported, what the picture was, and so on. So it gives you a way now to kind of close that loop.
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So you’re not going back and searching through, you know, potentially a dozen reports looking for when you reported that issue. Excellent. And I think you told us there was a way that we could get these so that they actually would appear on our, each of the reports for the client too? Yes.
(32:35 - 32:54)
In the template? Yeah, I have that actually documented in the health center. But basically, what you need to do is create a field on your template that says issues list. And then in the screen where we link the reports, you just have to tell it to use that.
(32:55 - 33:05)
OK. It’s quite a simple process, but I’ve got it documented with screenshots in the health center. If you can’t find it by searching, let me know and I can send you the link to it.
(33:07 - 33:18)
Pretty soon, you’re not going to need anybody to do these reports. It’s just going to do everything for us. Well, somebody’s still got to go out and observe the house.
(33:18 - 33:34)
I guess so. Darn. Yeah, I honestly, when you say that, the one thing I’m waiting, I’m waiting on method to add one additional feature for me so that when you complete the report, you also have the option to just let it email automatically.
(33:35 - 33:56)
So if you’re not going in and changing the email template when you send the email to your customer, if you just use the stock one, then there’s really no reason why the system can’t automatically email it upon completion. Just as I can’t do that yet, I have to wait for them to add a little feature I need. But I do hope that that’ll be something I can have in the system by the end of the year.
(33:58 - 34:01)
Cool. So then it will be more automatic. You’re right.
(34:09 - 34:28)
All right. Who else has questions? Y’all are being really quiet again tonight. I don’t know what to add.
(34:32 - 34:38)
All right. Well, I guess that’s a good thing. That just means everything’s running smooth and nobody has any issues.
(34:41 - 35:02)
Any questions on any of the new features we have? I can explain those a little bit better. Would you like to see the hear away report? Yeah. Or how the multiple series works? Yeah, that would be good.
(35:02 - 35:08)
Hearing away is good. Okay. So I’ll go out here to my dashboard.
(35:09 - 35:24)
Now, both of those reports I’ve tucked away under these three dots where you have your preferences. But basically, it just keeps it a little cleaner so that they’re very easy for you to get to. And I don’t have a whole bunch of junk on the list screen, for example.
(35:25 - 35:31)
So I’m going to click on the hear away report. All right. It asks you what dates we want to use for our calculations.
(35:31 - 35:40)
So you can pick a date in the future if you want to. Well, in October, do I have everyone accounted for? I’ll just leave it for today. And I’ll just hit the button here.
(35:40 - 35:50)
It’s going to tell me what it’s going to do. It’s going to look for work orders within a two-week span based on your calendar week. So it goes back to Sunday to Saturday.
(35:51 - 35:59)
And it’s giving you a little bit of background here what it’s going to do. That if there’s any orders during that period, you’ll be classified as here. If there’s in-residence, they’re away.
(35:59 - 36:09)
And if they’re neither, it’ll be in a neither. I’m going to hit OK. This will take it a little bit to calculate, depending on how many clients you have.
(36:09 - 36:18)
You know, Wendy, for you, it’ll take a lot longer than it just did for me. But you can see that here’s the way it brought this up. Here’s all my clients.
(36:18 - 36:27)
Here’s everybody that’s on schedule and the date that they’re scheduled. Next. Here’s who’s in residence and the dates that they’re in residence.
(36:28 - 36:39)
And here’s all the customers that I have that are not accounted for in each column. So I can take a quick look down here. And, you know, most of these, not a problem.
(36:39 - 36:51)
But if I spot one here like Dennis Meyer, why is he not on the schedule? Maybe I need to go and investigate that. And I can also see the last time I did do his property, which was in June. Yes? Gary, I don’t see.
(36:51 - 36:54)
I don’t see. I want to. I’m in home watch admin.
(36:54 - 37:02)
And I’m, you know, going in that dropdown view to look at. I don’t see a here away report option. Yeah, Wendy.
(37:02 - 37:15)
Yeah, you have not been updated on that one yet. That’s the same one that has the issues and everything. So if you would, you know, if you want me to put you on the list to, you know, get the upgrade to you sooner rather than later, I can definitely do that.
(37:17 - 37:27)
Yeah, that would be a very valuable report. I think you could benefit from this based on some of the conversations we’ve had. And it was some of the conversations that you and I had that really spurred me to do this.
(37:29 - 37:33)
Oh, good. Also keep in mind that the report goes two ways. One is by type.
(37:33 - 37:43)
So we have the here column, the away column. But you can also do it by customer. You can just hit that and this will resort everything in customer sequence.
(37:43 - 38:00)
And I can see, you know, the customers with the different series. And when we did the last, when they’re scheduled in that last, who’s on the away. And let me just, you know, in customer sequence, see exactly who is out there and when and why and how.
(38:00 - 38:09)
So it gives you a little different view over the by type. That’s great. All right.
(38:09 - 38:16)
Then I think you said you wanted to see multi-series extend. So I will click on that one. That’s in the same place there.
(38:16 - 38:31)
So basically, let’s say I want to. The edit actually works, huh? Hit the, you know, insert a parenthesis from. Sorry? I’m sorry.
(38:31 - 38:54)
I just, I guess I, the edit series, when that, when you, when we have like a, you know, a list of work orders for the week and we have edit series, that button works now. Okay. Did you change the columns like I suggested? Because I know there is an issue with method where if you add too many columns, it doesn’t quite figure out where you’re clicking, especially if you have the screen zoomed in.
(38:55 - 39:03)
So maybe that you don’t have the extra column there and or you’re not zoomed in. Oh, it does work. Oh.
(39:04 - 39:11)
Okay. This is a good day to say this is nice to see that the edit button actually works. Okay.
(39:11 - 39:13)
Very good. Good. Okay.
(39:13 - 39:24)
So let’s say you have a very seasonal clientele. So you can say I’m going to schedule people from, you know, August 1st. Actually, we want to pick the date we want to visit them.
(39:24 - 39:38)
So let’s say the 4th. And we want to schedule them, you know, through, you know, the end of the season, which is, you know, the end of September. By hitting the find, this will now look for any series that is not scheduled during that period of time.
(39:40 - 40:05)
And you can see here the last date it was scheduled was, you know, a while back. Actually, that’s it, isn’t it? Assuming anybody is not, does not have a next, yeah, because these are not, sorry, these are the ones that are set up with no end date. But it’s showing that I do have them already scheduled in October.
(40:05 - 40:12)
So this is going to do nothing for me. That’s why that column is not broken up. Sorry, I got things a little messed up there.
(40:12 - 40:21)
Let’s say we want to extend everybody out till December. And I know I have some clients that actually do that every year. They go to December.
(40:25 - 40:35)
And that’s not going to work because I already created it. I’m sorry, this is brand new. So I need to do the video on it and get that set up.
(40:42 - 41:01)
December 31st, client series. All right. So in this case, because it ended in October, and these were the ones that don’t have no end dates, you know, the ones that are set to end, the system knows that it would then need to continue to extend it out to the end of December.
(41:01 - 41:10)
And so it’s picking the next date in sequence. So if this was the 30th and it’s every week, November 6th would be the next date. And the same thing here, the 29th for the 5th.
(41:11 - 41:25)
So this allows you now to extend the ones that have no, that are not set for no end date out to the end of the year. Automatically by doing it all right here in this screen. I would just check the box or boxes and say insert.
(41:25 - 41:51)
Sorry, I got a little convoluted there because of the dates. But hopefully you see that the whole idea is that this will look at the ones that are not set up with no end date, the ones that have an end date, and allow you then to just extend them out based on, you know, whatever your starting and ending dates are here. In this case, you know, because these both ended on October 30th, let me do it one more time.
(41:52 - 42:11)
Let’s say that I’m going to put in next season. So I’m going to come out here and I’m just going to pick from, you know, January 5th through the end of February. And I’ll say find series.
(42:12 - 42:25)
It’ll find the same two that I have because these have end dates on them of these days. Okay. And it’s calculating the, I think I screwed it up initially when I did this.
(42:25 - 42:28)
All right. I apologize. Never mind.
(42:28 - 42:57)
Let me do one last debug on this one before it goes out to anybody. The whole idea is that would have then allowed you to then extend in January and it would automatically calculate the date that needs to be based on the last occurrence date and then allow you to extend it for those two months. I will clean that up and do a proper training video on it because I do think that one needs a training video in order to fully grasp exactly what it’s doing and how you can make it do it.
(43:07 - 43:19)
All right. Any last questions? All right. Well, can you hear me? Yes, I can.
(43:20 - 43:23)
Hi. Sorry. I think it’s technical difficulty before.
(43:25 - 43:39)
What is the reference to the calendars? Some changes to your input to me implementing with the calendars. I thought that was on one of the things coming soon. One of the last points.
(43:40 - 43:48)
Exactly. So on the route technician, in fact, let me just go back to I’ll just go into my phone. You’ll now see up on top.
(43:49 - 43:58)
There’s a link for calendar view. And your text can hit that. And that will bring it up calendar view rather than a list view.
(43:59 - 44:15)
So they can look at what they have assigned today. They can click on that and say, I want to look at a different date, see what’s on my calendar. So now they can see exactly what’s out there for them on that date as well.
(44:16 - 44:35)
They can hit up on top here where it has the W. So they can look at a full view of the week. Now they can scroll through the week. It’s just more of a graphical calendar view instead of just a list view that’s out there.
(44:36 - 44:43)
OK. So they can look at it this way and or also have it tied to their saved calendar. Exactly.
(44:44 - 44:48)
Yes. OK. If they’re hooked up to sync to Google Calendar, it will still do that.
(44:49 - 44:51)
Right. OK. Thank you.
(45:00 - 45:04)
All right. Well, I thank all of you for attending tonight. I hope it was beneficial.
(45:05 - 45:13)
I hope you got something out of it. If there’s any follow-up topics, please email those to me. We’ll get those on the list.
(45:14 - 45:26)
And I’m happy to respond if you have any additional questions that come up after we hang up. I’ll put this recording out on the Help Center probably tomorrow. So it’ll be available for everyone on the call or everybody that missed the call.
(45:27 - 45:38)
And again, thank you all. I appreciate the patronage. And I hope all of you have a good week, the rest of the week.
(45:40 - 45:43)
Thanks, Gary. Thank you. Thank you.
(45:46 - 45:48)
Thanks, Gary. Thanks.