10/6/21 - Webinar - Managing Price Updates

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We'll get started here. Thanks for joining. Tonight we've got a little bit of an interesting presentation here on managing price updates.

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And I know that a few of you have had this situation here in the past, and recently were you trying to decide who you want to institute price increases on, when was the last time you updated them, and then again, how do you actually manage those within the system? So that's what we're going to talk about today, which I think you'll find it's going to be very easy for you to manage the prices, be able to look at historical items, and so on. So we'll cover that. We'll have a little bit of a demo on it.

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We've got a few other little important thoughts regarding the process that we'll go through. And then we'll do our usual Q&A, which might be a little bit abbreviated tonight for the smaller crowd. Upcoming in December, I've got getting creative with series.

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And I know this is one that several of you have asked about recently with respect to how do we manage car drives, if they come every other visit, or how do we do monthly items and try to line those up with weekly visits. And so we're going to go through the process of how to set all that up. And then in February, I've got a new feature called multi-series extension, which is really handy if you have seasonal clients.

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So I've kind of targeted there in February because I thought that's a good time, especially for my Florida folks, where coming March, April is when the people start leaving again. And so what this will allow you to do is extend their series in a very simple way all from a single screen. And so we'll work through how to use that particular program as well.

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Okay. Today we're going to primarily talk about the business management system, as that's where the price management tool falls. So, again, what's the purpose of this? The whole idea is to keep a history of the price changes by customer, by item, so that you can see exactly when you raise prices for a client and be able to determine if it's okay to give them another price increase here, when you should schedule that.

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And then it allows you to put those price changes in for any time period in the future, and the system will automatically pick up that price increase beginning on the date that you give it. So it's really nice because you never have to question when did you do raises or increases and have to go back and look through old invoices. You'll have everything right in front of you on the screen.

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You don't have to worry about trying to change a series item basically the day before, you know, you're going out to the property and the day after you've invoiced it, trying to fit it into this little window. You can do it any time weeks ahead if you want to, and it'll take care of itself as far as managing when that price goes into effect. So it's very simple.

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You know, we'll look at the demo here in a second, but just one little thought is keep in mind that if you've done the price increases, don't go back and recreate your occurrences because, in that case, you will recreate them based on whatever is in the series at that time, which will be your new price. So just keep that in mind as an important thought. So it's always better to update work orders than to recreate them if possible.

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Let's take a look at the price planning system and how it works. So this is part of the planning application here on your main dashboard. You can get to it either by clicking here and going into the business plan, or you can click directly on the link here that says price planning.

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Let me go into the main planning dashboard here just to kind of show you where that is. You may be familiar with the statistics that it gives you here with respect to forecasts and so on, but you'll see price planning right up here at the top. So they both will take you to the same place, whether you click on it from the dashboard or whether you click on it from here.

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This will take you into the actual price planning screen. So the easiest way to look at that is you get two different ways to manage the prices. You can change all of the prices to the same amount, and this would be handy if you're, say, doing an increase on your car drive and you're bumping it from, you know, $5 to $7.50 or $7.50 to $10.

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If you're going to change everybody globally, you can do this one. You've also got the ability to enter in different prices for each customer, which is what you primarily use if you're updating, let's say, your home watch business prices. So you have the ability to do either one, and the system will function very similarly depending on which one you take, but you'll see that it will make it very simple.

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Let's start with looking at all of the prices to the same amount. So I'm going to click that box, and then I need to pick what item it is that I want to update. So let's say that I want to update my mail pickup.

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I'm going to select that item, and you can see it right now. All of my mail pickup people are at $7.50 to actually do their pickup, their processing, et cetera. Let's say that we want to raise that price to $10, and we want to make that price effective on December 1st.

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So you see you can put in a date weeks ahead and any price, and the system will be able to update that for you. At this point, this is really it. You can look down the list of two different customers.

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You can see the information about their series as far as what their work order number is, the mail item pickup, what the job name is. So this would come straight from the work order series. You see my weekly home visits, weekly home visits, what their old rate was, and what their new rate is.

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The key here is this little column that says show the price history. Let's say we come down here. I want to just take a look at Irene Canoa and just say, have I ever raised her prices before for mail pickup? I can hit that button, and it will give me a whole history here.

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And I had this checked from earlier. Normally this is not checked, so it would only show the customer that we bring over, which was Irene Canoa. And you can see that we did raise her price from $5 to $750 a little over a year ago, June 1st of 2020.

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So now we know exactly what we have done. If I want to say, well, when did we raise any customers, I can check the box. This is kind of what you saw when I came in here, not display all customers.

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And here you can see, yep, we raised all of these customers from $5 to $750 back in June of 2020. So it makes it really nice in that you're able to have that view and be able to really analyze what you have increased when. So let's say at this point now we're going to go ahead and process this increase of $10 on December 1st.

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All I have to do is come down here and click my little check mark. And when I do that, the system will verify that, yes, this is what I want to do. I'll say okay.

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And let's see. A warning here that I didn't check the box, so I need to check the box or boxes to be able to update those items. Let me try it again.

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You know, I do this on purpose. I make these errors come up just so you can see the system watching you. So anyway, hit the process.

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It's going to go out. It's going to update everything from December 1st forward to $10. It's going to update the series.

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And it'll come back in a moment here and be done. Okay. It's still working.

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Probably shouldn't have done it as far ahead as I did. The further ahead you do it, the more time this takes to process because it has to be done. It has to update everything separately between now and December 1st.

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It hasn't been billed. Okay. Now we're done.

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So now I can go back in and look at Irene again here, show my price history, and put this back to Irene. And you can see now we can see the history starting to build here. On June 1st, 2020, we raised the price.

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On December 1st, 2021, we raised the price again. So you can see you can start keeping track now of that whole historical item as far as when your price increase has happened. And what's also nice here is it's set to display just the mail item because that's what I was working on.

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But I can also say display all items. So maybe I want to see what my price changes were with respect to Irene for everything that's out there. So I'll check that.

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And you can also see that, okay, here is her home watch, her biweekly home watch. And back in February, we raised that from $50 to $55. Well, good, that's been about 18 months, so she should be okay with me raising another chunk of money, so I will do that.

(10:08 - 10:20)

I can also look at all my customers. If you want to look at everything in the whole world, so you can say all my customers for all my items, and now you can see everything here. I don't know how useful that really is.

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It's probably a little bit better to come in and pick a single item. So let's go ahead and do my weekly home watches. And now I can see everybody that I have on weekly home visits, when I increased them, what their rates were and what they went to, and on what date.

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So I've got a good history of all of my clients. So that takes me back to the next part, which is, well, how do we update different rates for different people and do that at the same time? So that's what I'm going to do right now. I'm going to say enter in different prices for each customer.

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And the difference is, instead of this having the price here at the top, it will now give me a price in columnar format for every client. So let's go back to our weekly clients. This time let's make this effective on November 1st, so we don't have to update quite as many.

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But here I've got my list of all of my weekly clients, what their current rate is, and what we want to update them to. So here we can see, okay, good one. We definitely want to raise them, so I'm going to put them to 60.

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Same thing with Russell. I'm going to put them to 60. And, oh, let's see.

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Let's go ahead and make Peterson here. We'll make this one 70. So you only have to fill in the ones that you want to increase.

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The system will skip over any of the ones that you don't put a number on. So we'll just update these three to these rates. I'll say process here.

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Again, it will confirm that I want to make this change. Once we make it, you really can't back it out easily. You've got to go ahead and change all the work orders.

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It's doable, but I just want to make sure you have the right date before you hit that button. Okay, this should go out and update those three pretty quickly here. Done.

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Let's just take a look at the history here for Goodwin. We'll hit the show. This will bring up Goodwin, HomeWatch Weekly.

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And here you can see here is the whole history of price increases. They started at 45. We bumped them up March 1st of 2020.

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We bumped them up again June 1st of 2020, and then we bumped them up again November 1st. So you can see exactly when the increases were and how. So let's go back.

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Let's try to validate this a little bit. So we know this is the Goodwins. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my main work order list screen.

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And let's go ahead and just go until the end of the year just so we can see all the work orders. And I'm going to search on Goodwin just so we see theirs. Okay, so here's all my weekly home visits.

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I'm also going to add to the column for total amount just so I can see what the total amount of each work order is going to be. And here we can see now that these home visits in October are 65. Okay, well, why is it 65? I thought we just updated it to 60.

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Well, if we go into that work order, we'll be able to see that, okay, we updated it to 55. Or it was 55. We updated it to 60.

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So you see we've had the 55 plus a card drive. So that's the reason it's 65. Sorry about that.

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And you can see that the October visits there are at 65. And if we look down here, starting after November 1st, because that was our increase, now the work order shows 70 because we put the $5 price increase in there. If I open up that work order, just to compare it to the one we just looked at, you see nothing is in there.

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The reason is it's now reflected according to the series. So let's just copy the line from the series. And here you can see that now we're at the $60 rate with a $10 auto drive.

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So the system automatically managed to put that increase in starting November 1st without us even having to think about what it did. So now all we've got to do is our invoicing is normal. The price increase will take effect and everything will be good.

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That's pretty much it in a nutshell on the price planning. It's pretty simple, pretty straightforward, I think. Are there any questions about that particular item? Any questions that we can go back through or anything in general that you'd like to bring up? I wish I would have had this when I started, Gary.

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And maybe I did. I don't know, did I? Or is this something new? It's been out there about a year. Okay.

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Yeah, I just went back to look and see what it would show me if I currently clicked on my old clients. And it, of course, shows me the different entries, but it doesn't show me the history. And I've actually done my own.

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You wouldn't have that, right? Yeah, I've actually done my own spreadsheet just so I can keep up with all that information. But this is excellent. This will replace that spreadsheet for sure.

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Yeah, this is really a great feature. And you know what, if you've got a spreadsheet of that history, Terry, let me know, because perhaps we can take some of that information and kind of feed that into the history already. You know, if you've got a spreadsheet, if it's in the right format, we might be able to import that.

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Oh, well, that's interesting. What I did want to also show you is that information is also accessible from the customer's master file right here. So if you're ever in a customer and working on them and say, geez, what's the history on this particular customer, you can click that button and it will go straight to that customer, and now you can take a look at all the items for him.

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Great. So it gives you two different ways to look at it that can be very informative, depending on what you're doing as far as planning goes. I am rethinking doing prepayments as a level of complexity that may just not be worth it.

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I've had a few clients that have decided to move away from it. It does add a whole other level of complexity in managing that and knowing that, you know, the money is in your account, but it's really not yours yet because you haven't effectively earned it. It can be a little bit tricky.

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I know that, you know, some groups are training that that's the best way to do it. I know with my own personal experience, I really didn't like it, but it's personal preference. It's however you want to manage your business.

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As long as I'm in here, I don't know if you have noticed, but you will have a whole bunch of additional icons appear over here now as well that allow you to go back and look at the in-residence for whatever customer you have up. So the in-residence can be brought up. You know, their invoices can be brought up.

(19:10 - 19:38)

Their open issues can be brought up. I'll just click on it just as an example here, and it will open that up in a side view, and then you can actually go from here to either enter a new issue or click on that particular item, and it will go straight to the details of that issue so you can update it. So the nice thing is you can actually go here into this particular list and be able to bring up anything, the in-residence.

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If you have rentals, you can bring up the rentals. You have the ability to bring up the work orders. So all of that information is available to you right here, and, again, you can click on that item and it will take you straight to the appropriate screen where you can, you know, manage and make the changes if you need to.

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So that works out very well. So that's relatively new that that's been added. And then also the ability to send your QuickBooks invoices directly from my invoicing program.

(20:15 - 20:29)

I know I've had a few customers that have already taken advantage of that. I don't know if you have yet. But that actually makes it really nice where you can generate the invoices and email them all from the same screen without having to go into QuickBooks and do it separately.

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And the nice thing is my program actually tells QuickBooks to send the invoice. So all of the log that QuickBooks maintains about when it sends it and when the customer views it is all still maintained because it's getting sent directly out of QuickBooks, even though it's my program that's initiating the send. So that kind of works all together there.

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Pretty sure you're not going to need us to do this stuff. It's just going to do it all on its own. Well, somebody's still got to flush the toilet, right? Amazing.

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All right. Well, like I said, I knew it was going to be a short one today and a little bit smaller group. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

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If not, we'll just cut it off early here. I'm good. Thanks, Gary.

(21:32 - 21:37)

No problem. Thanks for attending. Gary, anything else? No, I'm good, too.

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Actually, I would like to ask you something about what we were talking about a little bit earlier. If you can hang on for just a minute. No problem.

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All right. Let me go ahead and turn off the recording. Thanks for attending, and we'll talk to you next time.

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Okay. Bye-bye.