09/07/23 - Webinar - Different ways to start and send reports

(0:00 - 1:35)

All right, great. So I want to say happy afternoon to everybody that's on the call. I appreciate everybody attending.

It's a nice big crowd today. The topic for today, different ways to create and send reports, is really a redo of a webinar that I originally did about three and a half years ago. It's early on in COVID.

I still remember it. And things have changed a lot, three and a half years. I think there's a lot of different ways to look at how to create the reports.

It's actually easier now, I think, than it ever has been. And especially taking into account that we now have two different reporting systems that integrate with HomeWatch IT, I thought it was definitely time to redo this webinar, clean it up a little bit, make it real simple for everybody, because I think everybody can benefit from the different ways to create and send. So having said that, introduction, I see almost everybody is on mute.

If you're in a little bit of a noisy area, please do put it on mute. You can always unmute if you would like to ask a question. And definitely, we will always have our Q&A at the end.

The different ways to create and send reports are what we're going to talk about. And then we're going to talk about the auto-creation. I said I audit in here, and I should not have copied and pasted that like I did, but auto-creation of reports and how it can help.

(1:35 - 2:06)

So we're going to talk about a whole bunch of different areas. Just a little bit of information here. This is about the Pro package, the full business management system.

So I've got it up on the screen. And we're going to be talking about primarily the Magenta, the HomeWatch business management app. But we're going to be visiting the iAuditor and Monitor QA apps a little bit, because that's essentially what we're going to be talking about with respect to reporting today.

(2:08 - 4:33)

So most of you have seen, there have been a couple updates, beginning of August, and one just earlier this week. Just to highlight a couple of the key features that were part of this. Push notifications.

I know that several of you have taken advantage of that. If you're not familiar with what a push notification is, think about on your phone, whenever your bank or some other app sends you a message that shows up at the top and gives you an alert that something's going on, whether that be CNN, your bank, or any credit card. Same thing now.

And that would be used for a couple areas. If you assign a work order to an employee of yours, they can get a push notification on their phone that they have a new work order. If you assign an issue that just came out this week, it will also be pushed that they get the issue.

And if a customer uses the portal and sends you a notification or a communication through the portal, you can also get a push notification to your phone letting you know that that's there. So the requirement to use that is pretty simple. You just have to have the method application loaded on your phone and logged into your account.

And as long as it's on the phone and logged in, you will receive push notifications automatically. Custom invoice numbering, I think is an important one. I really tried to reiterate that one earlier this week with a follow-up email.

QuickBooks, as I stated, created a nice big bug and really destroyed the way that that's working. If you never go into QuickBooks and touch the invoice program, you'll be fine. But the second you go into their invoice edit program and do something, it will turn off the custom transaction numbers, in which case you're not going to get any numbers on your invoices.

So for that, I'd recommend either using the custom numbering within HomeWatch IT, or if you have to do any edits and invoices, do it within your HomeWatch IT as well. The nice thing about the custom invoice numbering is it will allow you different formats. So if you like to have an invoice number that is something like AUG-Smith for their Smith's August bill, this will allow you to use that type of invoice numbering system.

(4:33 - 6:16)

So take a look at that. The details were sent earlier this week. Automatic creation of reports, we're going to talk about a little bit later today, which is, I know, used by several of you already.

And we've also added the integration of corrective actions in Monitor QA to HomeWatch IT issues, similar to we have the actions in iAuditor updating issues. Really what this means is when you're doing a report, you can enter in a follow-up item as an action right there on the report, whether it be iAuditor or Monitor QA, and it will automatically create that issue in your business management system so that you can follow up there. Any changes you make in one will update the other going forward.

So if you change descriptions or notes, that will update the other. And once you close it off, it will complete the other one as well. So I think all of these are really there to improve your overall communications, not only with your staff, but also with your customers.

The report creation and flexibility now will make it even easier for you to generate your reports and even automate them so you don't have to spend the time doing those steps. And of course, the QuickBooks bug that I spoke of. So let's start right in with the different ways to start reports.

And when I say start reports, I mean creating a report pre-filled in with the customer's name, assigned to the work order, and ready to go so that you can do the actual home visit documentation. So there's three ways to start the reports. And the first, which I think everybody has done at least once, is from the RouteTech app.

(6:17 - 9:58)

And I will demo all these as we go. The second is from the HomeWatch Admin app. And this is used commonly, especially if you're in an area that has bad internet connectivity, and you'd like to generate all the reports while you're still at home, have them synced to your phone, and then you can work offline.

And then the last way is automatically, where you don't even have to think about it. The reports will be created for you before you get out of bed in the morning, and be synced to your device so that you can go out and do the reports. So we'll look at each of those.

I just want to compare that and contrast that to the different ways to send the reports. And you'll notice it's exactly the same list. So the program has been really streamlined so that everything works the same, whether you're starting a report to begin the HomeWatch or sending out the report at the end.

And you can use any combination of these three items, whatever works best for your business. So we'll talk about each of those separately and demo them, and I think you'll be able to see how each one could benefit you and make a decision as to which one works best in your case. So we'll start with doing the RouteTech app for both starting and sending, and then we'll go to the Admin app, and then we'll go and look at how to set up the automated program.

So I'm going to flip over here to the app itself, and let me bring down for you my phone on the screen, because we're going to start with the RouteTech app, and we're going to do it right from the phone. So I'm going to go to my RouteTech, and you've got your list for today. And this is really pretty simple.

We're going to go out to a particular customer. So let's say we're going to the Peterson's property. We will click on Peterson.

It will bring up the work order details, everything you need to know to do the visit, and in the top left is the button to start the report. You hit that button, it will bring up for you whatever you have set as your default template. If you need to change it here, you can.

Normally you won't have to, and you can just hit the button to start the report with that template. So I'm using Monitor QA, so it's going to automatically create the report. It's brought up for me a notification.

We were talking about notifications earlier, that the report has been created. So I can pull that down and click on the new audit assignment. The ability to automatically, and here it is, Peterson, the ability to automatically go to the report is coming in the near future.

Those of you running safety culture, iAuditor already have that, where you create the report and it automatically opens up the app to iAuditor and directly to that particular inspection. So that's coming in Monitor QA soon, but you'll see right here now, I've got the Peterson residence, I can do the report as normal. Once the report is done, and I'm going to go to, rather than doing a whole report here with everybody on the phone, I'm going to go to one that I've already completed, which is my block of residence.

You'll see it's marked completed. So once the report is done, it'll take the report, sync it back into the system, mark the work order complete, and you can click on that particular item. And up here in the upper right, this button that before this said complete work order, knows that the work order is completed and has changed itself to email the report.

(10:00 - 11:33)

If you just finish the report and come right back to the screen and see that it doesn't say email report yet, that could be okay, because depending on how many photos you have and the complexity of the report and how long it takes to sync, it could take it perhaps up to 60 seconds to fully synchronize and generate the report and put that in here. Normally much less than that, but could be up to 60. So if you come into here and it still says complete work order and doesn't say email, use this button says screen update.

And what that will do is basically just reload everything. And if it has, if it knows that the report is out there, then it will change to email report. To email the report, it's easy.

Click the button. It'll ask if you want to display the report or not. So I could say yes, and it would open up the report.

If I know everything's good, I can say no, and I'll do now. And this will then open up for me my email template already pre-addressed to my client, all filled in with the URL. I can now edit this email if I want to.

So I can come in here and add additional comments or whatever the case may be if I want to personalize it to the customer. And when that's all said and done, just hit the send button and off it goes. Now you're done and you can go back to the next house on your route.

(11:34 - 12:24)

So creating the report, starting the report, and then emailing the report from their OutTek app, relatively simple. You just have to hit the buttons at the top of the screen. So the second manner that I mentioned is from the admin.

So I'm logged into my system here. Let me just kind of remove this from so I can see what I'm doing. You've got the HomeWatch admin app, which we'll go to.

Now this is very flexible. Here is all my work orders for today. As long as each of the work orders or the customers has a default template set up on either the customer or the work order, you can create them automatically here in the admin.

(12:25 - 12:42)

This can be advantageous, like I mentioned, if you don't have really good connectivity out in some of the areas that you work in. You can generate all the reports ahead of time instead of doing them one by one when you're at the customer site. Doing them all ahead of time will then allow that to sync over to the app.

(12:43 - 13:03)

What I'm going to do is you can click on one or all. Let's say I go ahead and click on all of them. I could just select three or four.

In fact, maybe I'll just do that just for the sake of taking time. I'll pick the first five. I'll come down here where it says Create Reports.

(13:05 - 17:11)

Click on that. This will now open up a section where it's just going to tell me that it's going to create the reports for me. I have one option, which is to create the reports even if they've been previously created.

If for some reason you just want to recreate them, start fresh, you can use this button and it will recreate the reports. It will delete the ones that were previously created and update them with a fresh copy. I'm not going to check that.

I'm going to just hit the button to say Create the Reports. This will just give you a heads up. I have one chance here to cancel it if I don't want to create them.

I'm going to say Go. Now, I told it I want to create those five reports and you see it came back and it told me it created three of them successfully. Why didn't it create five? Well, number one, I didn't check the box and you'll notice it's telling me that these two were not created.

Peterson's because it was previously created and Williams it didn't create for some reason. So, we can come in here to Williams and just double check. Did it have a template? It did not have a template, so that's why it did not get created.

Keep that in mind that if it doesn't get created, first thing to look for is was a template available. In this case, it was not, so that's why the Williams report was not created, but these three were. Now, in this case, I can go back to my phone.

So, if I were to go back to my Monitor QA app, so if I put that Refresh, you'll see now I've got Russell, I've got Schwartz, I've got Johnson. So, all of these are created so that you can see that what I just generated here in the admin is now synced to my phone and it's ready to go so that I can go out and do the reports when I am off-site, no matter whether I have connectivity or not. The nice thing about Monitor QA is it will tell you if it's available offline and that means the report has fully synced.

If you give this a few minutes, it will do the same here. It will have all of them available offline. You know, you can kind of force the issue by going into one if you need to, like we'll go into the Schwartz one and you can say download the report and that'll now it's already on the phone and I can go do my report because it's now available offline and it will work anywhere whether I have connectivity or not.

So, very simple. I think you get the idea that you can generate those reports quite quickly. Once your day is done and you're ready to email the reports, you can come in here and look at the day's finished reports.

Let's go in here. I've only got one that's completed for today, but you can email the reports from the admin in two different ways. You can say open report, which will again allow you to display the report if you want, so I can look at it.

I'll open it up. I can scroll down here and look at the report and it looks good. Once I close that report, the system will assume I want to email it and this is identical in format to what we just did a minute ago on the phone.

Same template, same capability to go in here and type over the email and make changes, come to the bottom, hit send email and you'd be done. Another way that you can email from here is to check the boxes of the completed reports. Now granted, I only have the top one complete, so I'm only going to check it and come down here and say send reports.

(17:12 - 19:08)

This will allow you to send a whole batch in one button push. So that's all you've got to do. Click the button and send reports.

So that allows you to send out 40 reports with two clicks. So those are the two manners to do it in the admin. The last way to do the send and the creation of the reports, the starting reports that I mentioned is automatically.

To do that, you go into your preferences screen and for those of you that are new or are not familiar with the preference screen, when you click the three dots here on the admin tile, you'll see you have the word preferences. Click on that and if you're not familiar with this screen, it's probably a good way to get familiar because there's all your options for your system here that you can configure. Under the reporting options link, if I open that, there's two settings that you need to look at.

So the first one is for starting the reports and you'll see here it says auto-create reports each night. All I have to do is say yes and save that and what the system will do is every night, I think it's somewhere around four to five a.m., it will go out and automatically create all the reports for you, similar to what we did on the admin, but you don't have to do it. It'll do it in your sleep and then you can wake up in the morning, the reports are done, they're ready to be synced to your phone, you can do whatever you need to do.

You also have the option to create days ahead. So if you wanted to create two or three days ahead or even five days ahead to put the whole week out there, you can put this setting to five and it will create that number of days ahead for you as well. So on Monday, it would create everything Monday to Friday.

(19:09 - 22:53)

The following Friday, it'll create everything from Friday to the following Tuesday and so on. It's going to be a rolling five days ahead that it will always create. So five days could be a little much but maybe you want to create and make sure you always have reports for today and tomorrow.

So you put the one on there and then that will create. So auto-creation, very easy to set up. Then conversely to send the reports, you have the option here to auto-send reports at the end of the day.

All you've got to do is flip that setting to yes. What that will do is every day at approximately 6 to 6 30, the system will go out and email any reports that have not yet been emailed to your clients. So it's important to note it will email only the ones that have not yet been emailed.

What does that mean? That means that if you are here on the admin or even from your phone and let's say you had one or two or three clients that maybe had a little bit of an issue so you wanted to customize the email message to them a little bit, you can send it from the phone like I showed you in example one. Updating the email, customizing that, hit send. Same thing from the admin.

You can customize it, hit send. The auto-send will not include those that you've previously sent. So it's a nice way to personalize it for the folks that you need to personalize the message to and the rest can get the standard template with their email report automatically done.

So it makes it very easy and automated. So we've talked about the different ways to start the reports, the different ways to send the reports. We talked about doing it from the route tech app.

So this is easy if you want to do it from the customer's site. This is how you would do it. Generating the reports from the HomeWatch admin app, you can do one or all.

And same thing from the send. You can send one or all from the admin app and then automatically either first thing in the morning or last thing in the day as far as creating and sending. So think about the different ways, different combinations that make sense to you.

If you have multiple reporters out in the field, you can either have them all create their own report one by one as they go, or you can generate all the reports for your whole staff yourself through admin or automatically. And they would then appear in their reporting app, whether it be monitor QA or safety culture. Conversely, on sending reports, you might allow some of your techs to send their own reports.

So you can turn that on in their user features. You might want all the reports to always be sent centrally from your admin. So therefore, you may always want to use the admin app to send reports or have the automation do it for you.

So you might have them create the reports and you might have the admin send the reports. These are different combinations and flexibility that you have built into the system. So you can use whatever combo makes the most sense for you.

Personally, I think automatic automatic is what I would do in my business just because it would create everything automatically and it would email everything automatically. If I needed to personalize an email, I can send it individually, but that way everything would be taken care of for me and I don't have to remember to send reports. Did I send that one? Did I not? Did I create it? It's all done for me.

(22:54 - 23:16)

So I hope that that was helpful. I hope that kind of explains some of the flexibility. I already covered the notes that were on here as part of the discussion I gave.

Remember, default templates are necessary for the admin and for the automatic. You've got to have those set up. The only one that will allow you to pick a template on the fly is the route tick.

(23:18 - 24:41)

So that's all I have as far as that goes. Let's open it up for questions, whether it be about this topic, anything I may have missed that you'd like for me to drill into a little deeper, and I'm more than happy to talk about any of your questions that you might have as usual. Hi, Gary.

Yes. It's Ron Cook. Hi there, Ron.

So my question is, when I do my reports and I do everything on my iPhone, I set everything up, do the report, email it. So when I get to a property and I take a picture of the house, it's in my photos on my phone. As I go through the whole house and take whatever pictures I do, at the end of the inspection, I go back on my phone and I have to delete all the pictures.

It's usually like eight to 12 pictures I take. Then I have to sit there one by one and delete them off my phone. I don't know if you know if there's a way so that they're not saved on my phone.

Ron, you're on safety culture, correct? No, I'm on method. Yeah, but I mean for your reporting. Safety culture, right? Not monitor QA.

(24:44 - 28:02)

Yes. Okay. So let me... My other part of that question is, when I take a picture of the front of a house and then my report is completed, before I email my reports, I have to open up the report and manually change last week's picture to this week's picture for the front, you know, like the front cover page.

Okay. Is there a way in my report that it's automatically there when I'm doing the report? I can't automate pictures. I can only automate text.

So I'm afraid I can't help you with that part. But to answer your first question, if you're in your safety culture app and you go to more, there's an area here that says settings. If you click on settings, you've got different options here.

One of them is media, which would be your photos. And you'll see right here, you can say save to gallery. You probably have that turned on.

And that's why it's saving them on your phone as well in the report. Turn this off and the photos will only be in the report and not saved to your gallery. So this will save you that.

One little word of caution on that. I know I've heard from a few of my users and probably somebody even on this call that if the app bombed out on them, for some reason, they luckily had the photos in their gallery to pull back in and recreate the report. If they hadn't have done that, then they could have potentially lost those photos forever or had to go back and retake them.

So this is beneficial. If you don't have problems with the app and it seems to be pretty good in your area, which means you have good internet connectivity, then you can turn this off safely and not worry about the photos being thrown into your gallery as well as in the report. If you do have issues with connectivity, I'd recommend leaving it on and just manually deleting photos at the end of the day.

All right. Any other questions? Gary? Yes. Hi, John.

Hi. Back to admin, the admin screen. Okay.

When you check the boxes, create the reports. Yes. Yep.

Okay. And you pick some and then click on create reports. Now that create even if previously created, I think I can take you literally.

If you were to check that box, does it blow everything that existed and then recreate the new? If you have previously created reports here? Yes, it would. For that day? For that day. Yes.

(28:03 - 31:08)

And only the ones that are for these particular work orders that you've checked. Yes. Yes.

I was never sure about that. That it would not just add the new version and the old report still existed. Yeah.

The old unfinished report. Yeah. It will replace it with a new copy.

Okay. As long as I got you. Sure.

If you extend the automatic creation of reports, how does that work in conjunction with calculate best route? Or does it? There's no correlation. The automatic creation of reports is just going to create the reports. That's route is just going to give you your routing.

So you still have the same reports for the same day. Just sequencing might be a little different. Now that brings up the question.

If you did the calculation first, you've got them lined up the way you want them. And then let automatic happen. It would go in that order, right? Good point.

Yes, it should. Okay. I monkey with my order.

Sometimes I don't like the way calculation works, but in reality, it probably is very good. Well, let me just go into that because there's probably some folks that aren't familiar with that. So let me just check all the work orders that I have on my schedule for today, all the Gary's and come down here.

And so say, calculate best route. When I do that, this will take all of the addresses for those work orders and create for me a routing to show me the least mileage distance. And it's actually kind of ugly because I'm all over the place on this day, but you get the idea.

So you'll see, if you look at the sequence that it calculated, it's not anywhere near the times that were originally assigned on those work orders. So it's going to reroute them this way. Now it's very easy to then say, okay, you like this routing and you like this sequence.

You can reassign these start times so that they're in that sequence by using this button right here. So you hit the reassign and it will come up and show you the routing that it's calculated. It will allow you to say, okay, I'm going to start it.

It assumes eight o'clock and allow 30 minutes for each one. So I could hit the update. And when that's done, you'll see that now they're all in sequence time-wise.

Same sequence that it sorted by address, but now they're all in sequence time-wise. So they'll appear in your route list in this particular driving sequence. Now you do have the ability to muck you with, I think is what you called it, John, in that you have them sequenced here.

(31:09 - 32:05)

And let's say you just know that you're going to do these a little bit differently. You're going to do this one sixth and this one fifth. So you can change that sequence, say save the updated, and now it'll save that routing.

And you notice now, see the 12 o'clock is before the 1130. So I probably want to recreate or reassign my start times to make it in sequence again. But this now allows you to change the routing of the items so that you're going to do number five before number six.

And then we'll close that. So that's a nice feature. And I know quite a few of clients get a lot of use out of that one.

Hey, Gary. Yes. I have a question about the numbering, the automatic numbering, because we do have our QuickBooks set up to do automatic numbers.

(32:07 - 33:09)

And I just want to make sure that that is going to continue to work. Or do we have to select that every time we're going to sync from HomeWatch it and leave the custom invoice numbers off here? Okay. Because this is the one that's going to automatically assign them in the HomeWatch invoicing program.

If you turn this to yes, then it'll use my format and invoice numbering and generate my invoice numbers here. So that is a no. And what I would suggest is, again, if you're not touching the invoice program in QuickBooks, you should be fine.

If you go into the invoice program in QuickBooks, yes, I would definitely check the setting before you generate your invoices in HomeWatch IT. Okay. Occasionally, we do change it if I'm importing items in, but not very often.

(33:10 - 33:30)

And even if I do, I change it right back. But I will check this. Yeah.

Something to check. And if you ever notice that it's leaving it off like it should and not turning it back on, let me know. Because it'd be nice to know when and if Intuit fixes that issue.

(33:32 - 33:51)

One of my colleagues called him and complained about it. And he said, no, there's nothing wrong with it. It still assigns numbers.

It might assign numbers in QuickBooks, but it's not working with any program that's integrated with it. Again, short-sightedness on there. So we've got a workaround here that gives you a little bit more flexibility, and it's there if you want it.

(33:53 - 35:22)

Okay. It kind of sounds like, oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Go ahead. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I was just going to say that on the first email from last month about this, I thought that because it happened at the same time I engaged with a new bookkeeper, and I thought that she had changed something.

So I told her, hey, listen, I don't know what you did, but none of the invoices have any numbers. So she went ahead and created all the numbers one by one on each invoice. And then I told her not to change anything without knowing this happened.

And then I got the email from you. But then this month, I didn't change anything. I didn't do anything.

And when I did my invoices, all the numbers were created automatically. So I don't know what I did, but I don't have any problems with it. Good.

And that just means that the setting is still set to off QuickBooks like it should be. And as long as you don't go into the invoicing program in QuickBooks, it'll leave it. There is an option right now that says use the old invoicing screen instead of the new one.

And if you switch that back to the old one, it also will leave it alone as it should. But I know that they're taking that away, I think, this month so that everybody's using the new one. And so that's the reason I really wanted to call that out as a potential issue to make everybody aware that this could be a problem.

(35:23 - 36:11)

Okay. And I just have one quick question about when we were talking about the reporting. And let's say I'm in the middle of the route and I just got a vendor that called me and said, now I can go to this client and I don't have a report or even a work order created because I didn't even know what was going to happen today.

Does that automatically gets created because I have the automation to create the reports or will that one have to be manually open? Well, because you're creating the work order at 10 o'clock while you're on your way to meet the vendor at 1030, it won't get automatically created. It runs through the work orders in the morning between 4 and 5 AM. Oh, I see.

(36:11 - 36:23)

All of the work orders for that day and creates the reports. So if you add something in after it's already done that, then it will not be automatically created. Not a problem.

Just wanted to know. Thank you. Good question.

(36:25 - 36:29)

Gary? Yes. Back to the QuickBooks bug. Okay.

(36:32 - 36:59)

The first part of this is counterintuitive. Inside QuickBooks in their options, if it's set to off, your program works. But off means that QuickBooks cannot create a custom invoice number.

It's so counterintuitive. It is. The whole idea is custom transaction numbers means you're going to key something in.

(37:02 - 37:24)

So turning it off means it's just going to assign its own numbers one by one, and you're not going to key anything in. It removes the whole field from the screen where you can key things in in QuickBooks. So that's the reason it says what it does say, but it almost seems like it's a lurking time bomb that's going to get you someday.

(37:25 - 37:45)

Well, I tried to, when I put it here as custom invoice numbers, yes and no, I was trying to keep it at least the same thought so that at least you know that if both of them are on or both of them are off, you're in good shape. Okay. If one's on and one's off, you're kind of mismatched at that point.

(37:45 - 37:55)

Okay. Well, so mine is off in QuickBooks. And if I or my accountant ever goes into the new invoice screen, that's going to turn it on.

(37:55 - 38:38)

I may or may not know. And I'm kind of trying to avoid the whole problem. Can I just check the box in HomeWatch IT and it overrides anything else? That's correct.

If this is yes, whatever you have in here will overwrite, that'll be the invoice number that's on the invoice. And if all you want is a number like 1512, just use three pound signs and whatever that number is, it's going to fill it in with this. If you wanted to say like SEP-1512, you can do something like this.

(38:40 - 38:48)

Get the right keys. You know, MMM-number. Now we put SEP-1512.

(38:49 - 39:06)

So you have, and those are all documented on that link that I sent to you to write up. So you can put the month, the number, the last name of the client, month number, if you don't like the three alpha months. So lots of flexibility on that.

(39:06 - 39:41)

And yes, if this is set to yes, this will overwrite the invoice number from QuickBooks. But if you're using the invoice numbers here, just keep in mind, they're not necessarily going to be in sync with what's in QuickBooks. QuickBooks is supposed to look at what the last number used was, increment it by one and take it, but that's not necessarily going to update it here.

So you could potentially end up with two invoice 1512s. Oh. So it's always best to pick one way and just stick with that.

(39:42 - 39:50)

Well, I'm kind of leading on checking your box. Yes. Let QuickBooks do what QuickBooks does.

(39:51 - 41:23)

Use just the next invoice number, like, you know, plain old invoice number, but make it a higher number. So hopefully they won't run into each other. Perfect.

Yes. You can do that. You may start at 3000 or something in case internally, the last invoice in QuickBooks is 1512.

I might just start at 3000 and then pretty good odds that I'm there where they're never going to run together. Unless QuickBooks, if you edit 3000 in QuickBooks and then go and create a new invoice in QuickBooks, there's a good chance it might pick 3001 to try to be helpful to you. Just so you know.

Oh, great. So, oh, because you create too many invoices in QuickBooks though, honestly. I don't.

Exactly. So you really shouldn't have a problem. So also, if you do that, your estimates, if you do estimates will not have running numbers in QuickBooks.

Correct? I don't touch the estimates, so it shouldn't be a problem. But if you turn it off in QuickBooks, then it will not create running numbers in QuickBooks. If you turn off the custom transaction, I'm just saying.

(41:24 - 41:48)

Yeah. If you turn off the auto-numbering in QuickBooks, then that auto-numbering is turned off for both invoices and estimates. Well, if custom transaction numbers is off, that means it's going to create numbers automatically.

They're not custom. So you want it off, ideally. And then it'll create all your invoice numbers for you and your estimate numbers.

(41:49 - 42:03)

I think we're saying the same thing, but it doesn't, it also impacts the estimates also. You just have to remember that if you're using estimates. Okay.

I was not aware of that, but it's good to know. We use estimates a lot. So.

(42:03 - 42:29)

Okay. It's good to know. How about creating, can you auto-create? Oh, yes, you can.

You can auto-create for future days, plural. Yes. Yes.

Right. Okay. Gary, I just put on the chat, is it possible to do the next webinar about actions and issues? I have an issue with all the actions and actions for the issues.

(42:33 - 42:50)

You have an issue with actions. Okay. This is Maureen Cook.

It's my turn now. Ron had his turn. I'm having my turn.

(42:50 - 43:03)

Just a quick question. I have two of Ron's customers that are not populating. The invoices are not populating over into QuickBooks.

(43:04 - 43:41)

So I've been manually the last few months, just creating them in QuickBooks. What's not populating over? The invoices, I can see the work orders and method, but I can't see when I create an invoice, it's not coming over into QuickBooks. Everybody else is fine.

It's just these two particular customers. So I didn't know if there was someplace I could look, some setting that may not be correct for them. There is a way for me to be able to tell that.

(43:43 - 44:01)

So you can always email me about that. And I'm happy to take a look at that. Okay.

I'll email you the names of the customers. But let me know because it can be something really simple. Yeah, I'm sure it is.

(44:01 - 44:14)

Something that's come up recently. And when I say recently, I mean about the last four months or so. Is what I found is QuickBooks will not allow a customer to sync to it.

(44:14 - 44:31)

If you put in a bad website address. So if you use, and I had a couple of clients that were using the website address field for notes, putting some kind of special note about that client. And so now all of a sudden QuickBooks won't accept the customer and it won't sync it.

(44:32 - 44:59)

So it was causing that issue. So I don't know if you know what the case might be with you here. But are you talking about an email address? Email address has to be valid too.

But I'm talking about the actual website address. But that's something to keep in mind is I can always go to the logs. If you find something isn't working quite right like that.

(44:59 - 45:11)

See, I don't see any issues with your system. So let me know which ones are not syncing and I can look at the details. Okay.

Okay. I'll email you those names. Thank you.

(45:11 - 45:23)

Because everything, nothing's in your log. So it should be okay. Okay.

All right. Well, it's been consistent for the last maybe two, three months. Okay.

(45:23 - 45:33)

So, and it's the same two people. So definitely something quirky going on there. Definitely let me know and I'll be able to tell you what's going on.

(45:34 - 45:35)

Okay. Great. Thank you.

(45:37 - 45:45)

Vicki, going back to your comment. Yes. Actions and issues.

I can definitely do. I would love that. Thank you.

(45:46 - 45:55)

I'm going to make a comment. That was scary. With certain, in iAuditor, I have certain questions.

(45:56 - 46:48)

Like if the air conditioner is not working, I've set up an action that alerts me personally via email. Is it possible to create an issue in business management without going through all the manual steps of an action? You can create an issue without having to put it in as an action. Sure.

You just go to the issues app and hit new issue and type it in. That's not a problem. Okay.

I'll read the notes on that. The integration is just there because I have quite a few people say I just want to be able to create them right while I'm in the report, add the pictures and have it sync over. I just wanted to do it in one place.

(46:48 - 47:00)

So that's why that was added like that. Okay. I'll study up on that.

Thank you. Sure. Gary, this is Jill.

(47:00 - 47:33)

Is it possible just to show real quick, when you have different email configurations, I just need to be able to connect it to like a service order and a certain email to service orders. We have the one for the home visits. I'm just missing one part.

Can you show that? Explain that a little bit to me. You want it to be sent from a different? No. So we have one email template that is for home visits.

(47:34 - 47:59)

Okay. Okay. Yes.

Yes. I'm sorry. Okay.

So what you're saying is you would like to use different email templates for one for home visit, one for service visit, one for car drive. I've got clients that have five of these. So down on your dashboard, you've got the send email app.

(47:59 - 48:10)

To modify the templates, you can click on the dots and you'll see edit templates. Okay. So in this case, you can search for report.

(48:11 - 48:19)

And I have two. Everybody will have the base one, which is report email template. This is the one that comes standard with your system.

(48:20 - 48:33)

This is what you see on your preferences screen. It's very easy to do. What you can do is open up that template, come down here on the bottom and say duplicate that template.

(48:34 - 48:46)

When you do that, it'll now create a new one called copy of report email template. So let's rename this. And let's just say this is going to be the one for my car drive.

(48:53 - 49:04)

Okay. Then here I've got my standard. So I can say your car drive report is completed, ready for your review.

(49:04 - 49:20)

And you can, you know, whatever you want to change, you can change. Once that's done, just come down and save it. Now to attach this email template to a report template, it's very easy.

(49:20 - 49:36)

You go back to your preferences screen and you open up the settings. Yours will say safety culture settings works the same way. So safety culture settings, monitor QA, and you'll see click to manage templates.

(49:36 - 49:47)

You can click on that item. It will open up for you, your templates. And all you've got to do is come in here and change the column that says override email template.

(49:47 - 50:03)

So you can see I've got, if I let me type in the word report. So now I have auto drive and concierge, and I can pick which template I want to use when I'm using this report template. Works the same way in iAuditor.

(50:03 - 50:13)

Let me, I'll flip over and I'll show you that. So I'm going to change my system back to use safety culture. So now you'll see click to manage templates.

(50:15 - 50:27)

This will take you to the safety culture version, which is a little more involved than the one you were just looking at a monitor QA. Here you can pick, like here I have my card drive. So that's perfect.

(50:27 - 50:38)

We'll assign the card drive email template. So I'll click on that one. It takes it a few seconds to load up because it loads everything from safety culture.

(50:38 - 50:55)

And you'll see right here, override email template. So I can assign my card drive to it. So what's going to happen is if this override is blank, the system will use the default template, the one that's in your preferences.

(50:56 - 51:18)

If you want to change the template for a particular template, reporting template, too many templates going on. If you want to change the way the email is formatted based on the reporting template, then you can choose that email template here after you've created it. Great.

(51:18 - 51:26)

Does that make sense? Makes sense. Okay, I'll save that. And now whenever I do a report with this template, it's going to use this email.

(51:28 - 51:50)

Coming up to the top of the hour is, have I covered everybody's questions? Are there still any open questions? I have a quickie, Gary. Sure. Is there a variable for today's date on a report in an email template? For today's date? Yes.

(51:52 - 52:09)

If I say, here's your report for September 7th, 2023 in a variable. Yeah, there's not one for today's date, but you can pull the date of the work order in. Which, or the date of the report in.

(52:10 - 52:25)

Oh, okay. So, the variable for either of those would be activity.due date start. Is that in your list? It should be on the list, yeah.

(52:25 - 52:34)

Okay, great. Thank you. In fact, we can go to the help, and this will bring up the help for that.

(52:35 - 52:52)

Setting options on the preference screen is not exactly what I wanted. So, let's go into here. Okay, what is it? There we go.

(52:54 - 53:02)

I know the key word to look for is linking. Okay. So, linking safety culture reports list of available merge fields.

(53:02 - 53:15)

I could have typed in any of that, like fields. So, that'll give you the list here in the help center, and it's down here under activity. Due date start, the work order assigned start date.

(53:15 - 53:21)

Oh, perfect. Thank you. Hey, Gary, Chuck, one quick question before you leave.

(53:21 - 53:47)

Just curious, what percentage of your customers are still on the HomeWatch IT, and how many are on the Monitor QA? As far as customers that were on safety culture and switched? On safety culture, right. Yeah. Actually, the ones that have switched, I want to say there is about five.

(53:47 - 54:11)

The rest are still with safety culture. Now, from about March 1st to today, everybody that has signed up new has been on Monitor QA, except for one who opted for safety culture, because they already were familiar with it. So, it's actually worked out really nicely.

(54:11 - 54:23)

I've been very pleased with them. In fact, the VP of development emailed me this morning. We emailed back and forth, actually, about a feature that he's adding that I'm very excited about.

(54:24 - 54:38)

I can share that here. It's not a done deal yet, but basically, you'll be able to set up attributes on any property. So, for example, you might have an attribute of pool, and you can say yes or no.

(54:39 - 54:53)

You can say type of property. You can say house or condo or office. And whatever those attributes are, can turn on and off sections of report automatically when you create it.

(54:54 - 55:08)

So, what this means, and I'm excited about it, is you can create one big template that has everything in it. And when you generate a report for the Smith house that has a pool, it'll include the pool questions. If you do it for the Jones house, it doesn't have a pool, it won't include that.

(55:09 - 55:25)

You can have a section for wine cooler, right, or a wine room. If you set the attribute that they have a wine room, it'll add that section in the report. So, it's going to remove the requirement of having a different template for every property.

(55:25 - 55:35)

You know, if you'd like to really have it tailored that way into having one big one, and it'll just turn on and off the sections dynamically as it creates the report. I think it's going to be really cool. Really cool.

(55:35 - 55:47)

I'm really excited about that. Will it be like a dropdown? Exactly. And you'll be able to define what the attributes are that you want to use, you know, like, you know, wine room.

(55:48 - 56:02)

And then you can, you know, say yes, no, you know, whatever. And depending on what you put in there, you can have it include that section on the report or not. That'll be in monitor QA? This is a monitor QA, yeah.

(56:04 - 56:20)

So, guest house, you know, anything, boat house, boat dock, you can just turn them on and off based on the property, and it'll all be automated. So, yeah, I'm kind of excited about it. I think it'll give it a lot of flexibility and power.

(56:22 - 56:39)

For these old school boys, we better step it up a little bit, huh? Get with the program. Well, you know, I still think Safety Culture has an excellent program. Some of the, you know, the bugs that they've had over the past year have been very aggravating for all of us.

(56:39 - 56:46)

Yes. So, I know that we've all done that or dealt with that. So, I'm, you know, I still represent them.

(56:46 - 57:03)

I will still, you know, sell the package. I just think that monitor QA being a smaller company has been a lot more attentive to our needs and definitely nimble. David Ling is not on the call, but I can just give you an example.

(57:03 - 57:24)

You know, we've seen the Safety Culture bugs, and usually when I report them, you know, at first they argue with me that there's no bug, and then when they agree that there is a bug, you know, they'll say, we'll fix it in three weeks. I think all of you have seen those emails with me letting you know that it might be three weeks before they fix this issue. Sometimes even longer.

(57:26 - 57:48)

With David, he emailed me on a Monday and said, hey, my reports, the photos are coming off, you know, 90 degrees off on the report. What's the deal? I emailed, and again, directly to my support guy who immediately forwarded it to the VP of Development. Okay, I couldn't even tell you who the VP of Development is in Safety Culture.

(57:49 - 58:07)

He emails me directly and says, ah, we put a new PDF routine in on Saturday, and I see that there is a little issue with it. He goes, give us two hours to fix it, and then you can regenerate the reports and they'll be fine. And literally in about one hour, it was fixed.

(58:08 - 58:25)

So none of this three-week, four-week stuff, they're very attentive, and that's the one and only bug that we've run into in the last six months. So very minor, and it impacted a handful of reports, and even then we were able to redo them. So I've been very, very pleased with them.

(58:26 - 58:45)

Again, if you're happy with Safety Culture and it works for you, continue to use it. I think it's a great program. Just, I know that some folks that don't have really good connectivity have some issues with the reports, and this has definitely been an improvement for them to move to monetary care because it works better when it's offline.

(58:45 - 58:59)

I think it's hard, you know, we're in the middle of the season. You can't change the middle of the season now, too hard. But if you are interested in doing so sometime, you know, the off-season, let's chat and we can do that.

(58:59 - 59:34)

We will, thank you. All right, a little bit over, any other questions before we close off? Oh, Gary, could you go back to what you just finished saying? Is there a difference in low connectivity areas? Does one reporting system have an advantage over the other? Based on experience, yes. Now, Safety Culture is supposed to fix the syncing and they're working offline and so on.

(59:34 - 59:58)

I still hear from some clients that there's issues, you know, in the low connectivity areas. Monitor QA definitely syncs the entire audit to your device, and it shows you right on the screen, like I showed you earlier, that it's there, that it's available offline. So there's no question about it.

(59:58 - 1:00:22)

With Safety Culture, you don't know until you get out to an area that has no connectivity, and you try to open the report, and it says it can't load the template, or it can't find the template, or the template is archived. It gives some of these crazy error messages when, you know, it should already all be synced. And so in that regard, yes, Monitor QA is definitely better than Safety Culture for working offline.

(1:00:23 - 1:00:42)

It also works very well with multiple people. And a couple of my clients have proven this out. If you are off in a home, and let's say you're going, you know, husband and wife team, she's doing the interior, he's off doing the exterior, you can both have the report open and answer your respective questions.

(1:00:43 - 1:00:52)

And guess what? It syncs them together. So you can both be working on the report at the same time, and it would bring it all together into one final completed report. So very slick.

(1:00:52 - 1:00:59)

Like I said, I've been very happy with their product. It's not as pretty as Safety Culture. But the functionality works.

(1:01:01 - 1:01:17)

Thank you, Gary. It almost makes me want to play with Monitor QA to take a look at it. If anyone's interested, I can send you a video that shows you how it works and how to do home visits and give you a little bit of an overview.

(1:01:19 - 1:01:36)

Yeah, I'd be interested. I purposely have not recorded a new video with how it works out of the RouteTech app because I'm waiting for them to add that last ability for me to open the report directly, like I can do with Safety Culture. So no reason for me to record the video now and have to re-record it in three weeks.

(1:01:37 - 1:01:45)

So I'm just waiting on that. But I can send you one on how to set the report up and do it. OK, send me an email.

(1:01:45 - 1:01:48)

Just ask for it. So I don't, you know, because I'm not writing it down. Sure.

(1:01:49 - 1:01:52)

Happy to revert with that. Yep. All right.

(1:01:53 - 1:01:56)

Thanks, Gary. All right. Thanks, everyone, for joining.

(1:01:56 - 1:01:59)

Great questions. Good session. I hope it was helpful.

(1:02:00 - 1:02:03)

Thanks, Gary. Thanks. Take care, Gary.