12/8/21 - Webinar - Getting Creative With Series

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And then we'll get going. Hopefully you all still see the screen. All right, thanks everyone for joining.

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Like I said, we have a pretty good group here this evening. So I think that the information is valuable and it's also timely because a lot of people kind of revisit their series here at the beginning of the year and wanna get everything situated. So what I've done is I've put together a lot of the questions that I have received with regard to what's the best way to set this up with a series or this with a second series and how do you work together with them and so on.

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And so really that's what I'm gonna put together with today's presentation is how you can use series and use it for really the flexibility is pretty intense and pretty immense. So let's kind of move forward here. The upcoming webinars, there is a second piece to this which is a multiple series extend screen which is a brand new feature in 4.2 which allows you to easily manage seasonal clients all on one screen.

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I'm gonna touch on it just a little bit here during tonight's presentation, but the next webinar we're going to go into how to use that in detail. So kind of make note that that's kind of going to be a part two to what we do today. As always, please send me ideas for topics that you'd like to see in more detail for these webinars.

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I really would like to make sure that these are targeted to your particular requirements and needs and we can address those as we go. So as all of you have seen this slide before talking about the different components of the business management system with iAuditor, the business management and QuickBooks. Tonight, we're going to be focusing again on the business management system.

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And what we're going to be doing is talking about series. As I mentioned a little bit here in the introduction that the whole idea is with the series you can get very creative and schedule really anything, any situation that you have for your particular business whether it's strictly home watch or whether you have a lot of concierge and maintenance type of situations, you can schedule them all through series and be able to really use the system to give you a set it and forget it type of manipulation of your schedule here. So for those of you that are relatively new with the business management system or you're not using it yet, let me define what a series is.

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So think of the series as your template for a recurring appointment. So many of you have used like a recurring or repeating appointment in your outlet calendar or your Google calendar where you can set the system up and say, repeat this item every Tuesday at 10 o'clock from a date to a date, from a date to forever. And the same idea here is with a series.

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This allows you to set up something that repeats. So in our types of businesses that could be your weekly home visit, that could be a auto drive on a periodic basis, that could be changing air filters on a periodic basis. It can be billing the client a monthly fee on a monthly basis, all of those.

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And we're going to cover all of those scenarios today to show you how you can use the existing system to create and easily manage each of those types of scenarios. So we're gonna jump right into the demo because I'm going to just illustrate each of these particular scenarios and how we set them up and do that with the system. So the first one that we're going to do is relatively simple.

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Now, those of you who have been using the system for any period of time can easily do this type of scenario. But I wanted to create a basic one first and then we're going to build upon this basic one as we go forward. So what I'd like to do is I'm going to set up a bi-weekly home visit schedule from December 1st through the end of April for my client, Russell.

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So here's the scenario. So let's go and set that up in the system and then we'll build upon that with the other scenarios. So I'm gonna go into my system.

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And again, for those of you who aren't familiar with this, this is the basic business management system. We're going to go into the admin, which is where you set up all of your work orders and your schedules. What I'm going to do here first though, is I'm going to set this up to show all of the work orders in a date range.

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And we're going to set this to go from December 1st through the end of April. Since that's the timeframe that I mentioned we're going to be using here for this particular example. Okay.

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And we're going to do it for client, Russell. So I'll search for him. So you can see here that from December through April for client Russell, we have nothing in the system right now.

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We have a clean slate. So this is perfect. So now we're going to build our first scenario up and then we'll be able to look at each one and see how it acts on this screen.

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And we can watch it be built up as we go. I'm gonna click up here on new series. This is where we set up that recurring feature within the series.

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And we're going to set this up for customer Russell. And this is going to be our bi-weekly home visit. I'm going to just leave my start and end time at 10 o'clock, 10.30 and we're fine with that.

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I'm not gonna make any other adjustments to the rest of the screen. I'm going to just come down here and put in my work items. So the first thing I'm going to do is put in that we're going to build, this is our home watch bi-weekly.

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So I'm going to pick my code. These are the codes that are straight out of QuickBooks. So they're all set up for you right here.

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Now, one thing I'm gonna point out is, and this was in the email I sent out last week, is how do we set up a work order to show different tasks that need to be performed, but not put them in the work order instructions. If you need a refresher on what the work order instructions field is, go back and look at a couple of webinars ago, but basically it is not there to say, start the car, get the mail and so on. This is for special instructions that you need to put in to the system to remind you to do things on a date.

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You don't want to put them in here on a series for the reason that if you ever change it here in the series it will not change and update your future occurrences. And that's by design because it'll overwrite any notes that you put in on future dates. So do not use that.

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How do we put in information to tell us what to do at this particular home visit? Some of you may be familiar with the Route Technician app. And the one item that it brings up right here is what you have to do at that particular property on that date. We're gonna do a home watch, we're going to get the mail and we're gonna start the car.

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So you see all of these show up and this is what you're supposed to do at that visit. We can set that up right in here as well. What I can do is put, we're gonna get the mail.

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So it'll say mail pickup and processing. Now I have this set up in QuickBooks to automatically charge $5 for that particular item. Let's say though that this particular home visit with Mr. Russell, this is already included in his weekly price.

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So we don't wanna bill him for that. But we do want it to show up back here on our Route Tech screen. So we know we're supposed to do that item at that home visit.

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So what I will do is I will put it in here. I'll go ahead and just zero out the rate. And I'm also going to uncheck this box that says include on invoice.

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What this will do is it will keep this item now on the series and on any occurrences, on any work orders. It will show up for my field tech to remind them what to do but it's not going to come forward to the invoice. And I'll do the same thing here.

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If I want to tell the system to put an auto, I could do that too. I'm not going to do it on this one because we're gonna set up auto a little differently which you'll see on the scenario going forward. But basically you'll see that we have this set up now to do the home watch biweekly and a little reminder message to grab the mail and pick it up.

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I can save this at this point before I move down to my series options but you don't have to. I just like to do it, I'm a little superstitious. Now I'm going to move down here to my series options.

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So this is what I want to do with what I typed in up top. So you'll remember this is a biweekly home visit that we want to schedule from December 1st. So let's pick December 1st and I'm going to schedule that through the end of April.

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So I'm just gonna pick April 30th. Now the start date matters in that it sets up what day of the week we're going to be scheduling on. And you'll see here it's already told me Wednesdays because the first was a Wednesday.

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The due date doesn't matter. We can put in April 30th. It will stop on the Wednesday before that date.

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So the system will know that. We're going to do it on a biweekly basis, right? And that's it. At this point, we're going to create a biweekly home visit every Wednesday from December 1st through the end of April.

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I'm going to hit the button that says insert the multiple occurrences. That will then create them after it prompts me. And we now have a schedule built to go out to Mr. Russell's property, starting December 1st, every two weeks.

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And you can see how it did that here. At this point, I'm going to save and close this particular series I just built. This will take me back to my admin screen.

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And you can see that in my date range, now I have those biweekly home visits set up for Russell. So that's exactly what I created and what I expect. So that's it for scenario number one.

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So now let's start building upon this. Let's say that we also want to do a car drive every other visit. And also, what I didn't put on here is, keep in mind, we have a different template that we're going to use for the car drive, which is used to, I have a special template that records some notes about the particular auto when you drive it, you know, checking the tires, checking for damage, what's the fuel level, it'll take the odometer's reading and so on.

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So I'm going to set up this schedule now to repeat that every other visit. So I'm going to come in here, I'm going to hit new series. I'm going to put this in for Russell.

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And for the job name, I'm going to put car drive. I'm not going to worry about the time again, because it's really not that important on this. I could if I wanted to.

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In this case, though, I'm going to tell it I want to use a different iAuditor template for my report. So I'm going to open the report tab over here. And under my default template for this series, I'm going to change it to use my car drive template.

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So now when I do this particular work order, it will create a separate report for me for car drive. Now under item, I'm going to put in my car drive. And I have my five to 10 minute one here, which is what I'll pick.

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We're going to charge him $10. Again, whatever your rate is, you can put in there. I will save that.

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So now is where we're going to get a little creative. We want to do this every other visit. So we know that we are going to go out to Mr. Russell's house on the first, and we're going to go biweekly.

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But if we want this to be every other visit, basically what that means is it's going to be every 28 days, right? There's a 14 day lag on the biweekly. Every other visit then would be 28 days. So rather than try to get creative with these items, all we've got to do is come in here and say daily with 28 days in between.

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I didn't populate the two date, which I should have here. So now it's going to create from the first through the end of April, every other visit, every 28 days or every four weeks. Insert multiple occurrences.

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It'll verify with me, that's what I want to do. And you can see now we have it created here. The first, the 29th, the 26th.

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So how does this work? Does this line up? Well, it should because we did it every 28 days and before we were doing it every 14 for the home visit. But let's take a look. So if we look here, you can see that on December 1st, we've got them scheduled.

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Then we have a regular home visit. Then the week after that, December 29th, we have them both scheduled and then a regular visit. So we did set up exactly that scenario that every other visit, we now have a card drive on the schedule at the Russell's property.

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So let's build on this a little bit more. For scenario number three, I also promised the Russell's when I signed them up that I'm going to change their air filter every quarter, just as a matter of fact. So let's add a work order to put that on the schedule.

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So I'm gonna come back in here and we'll add a new series. And I will put in the Russell's and change air filters. And I'll come down here and I think I have a code for air filter.

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Yep, I do. $20 each and he's got four filters. So we'll charge him 80 bucks.

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Okay. Now let's get a little bit creative with how we're going to schedule this particular series. So there's a couple of ways we can do this.

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Number one, I can go in and say quarterly on December 1st and just say quarterly. We told him we're going to change the air filters every quarter. You can do that if you're doing the air filters as a separate visit.

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I would rather do it on the same day I'm there for the home visit anyway. And just get everything done at one time rather than make a separate visit. So rather than do quarterly, I'm gonna get really creative.

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I'm gonna put in daily. And for the number of days between, I'm gonna put in 91. Why not 90? Everybody thinks 90 is a quarterly.

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Well, 91 is divisible by seven. So I know that if I schedule it on the 1st of December, it'll end up on a home visit 91 days later. Hopefully.

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This one's biweekly, so it may or may not. But let's give it a try. I will insert and I will agree that's what I'm looking for.

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Okay, so now that it's created. Sorry about that. I missed that.

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4-30-22. Now this is a good time to show you another little key here is that since I only created this one visit kind of by accident, but I really wanted to do every 91 days within this range. Since I already have this one here, I'm gonna check this box as delete existing.

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What this will do is delete any work orders that I have previously created within the date range for the series and then insert them fresh. If I would have hit the insert button without checking that box, I would have had two on the 1st. As it is now, I have one on the 1st and one on March 2nd.

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So let's save and close this. And let's see what it did on our ongoing scheduler building up. So here's our card drive.

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You can see that we have air filters on the 1st of December and we have air filters on March 2nd. And well, as I kind of predicted, that unfortunately fell in between the home visits that we already have on the schedule here. We have it on the 9th and so on.

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But just so happens, this is going to lead us to our next scenario. So let's go and take a look at that. So scenario number four is, well, in February and March, he asked us to come do weekly visits instead of biweekly.

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So some of my Arizona clients do this in the summer months and they call it their monsoon season where they do get daily, almost daily thunderstorms. And so rather than biweekly, they go out and do things every week. The Ruffles, they're not in Arizona, but let's just say that he wanted weekly visits in February and March because it's exceptionally cold in his area or whatever it may be.

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But I'm just going to use this as a scenario to show you how to add weekly visits within the range that we have already created through April. So in February and March, we want to have weekly visits rather than biweekly. So how do we do that? So let's take a look here.

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In February, first visit we have scheduled is the 9th of February. Well, since we want to flip this over to weekly visits, really the first visit in February should be the 2nd. So keep that date in mind, February 2nd, because we'll need that in a moment.

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I'm going to click it up here and say new series. And for my customer, let's put in Russell. For my job name, I'm going to put weekly visits, February and March.

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And down here for my item, I'm going to keep it with my biweekly code. Don't have to, but I'm just going to do that to keep the price the same and so on. So I'm going to save this one.

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Now let's get creative with our series. So remember we said February 2nd should be our first visit. February 2nd.

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And we want this to be February 2nd and we want it to be through the end of March. So let's pick the end of March. Now, what do we put in the frequency? We're going to put in biweekly.

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So let me explain that a little bit. What we have in place right now is we have visits on the schedule already on February 9th and then two weeks later. So that would be the 23rd and so on.

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If we put this on the week before and still say biweekly, it's now going to put that work order on those in between weeks, effectively giving us a weekly visit for that two month period of time. So you'll see this is, you're able to schedule that biweekly for a longer period, for the whole year if you want, but only for a certain period of time, you can flip them over into a weekly schedule. So let's do that.

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Let's hit the insert multiple occurrences. And we're going to confirm this time. I'm going to read it carefully because last time I didn't.

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So from 2-2 to 3-31, biweekly. You can see here it did February 2nd, biweekly, and it ended at March. So again, let's go back and take a look at how that impacted our ongoing schedule we're setting up here.

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So you can see that we've got biweekly through January. And now in February, we've got it going weekly. The 2nd, the 9th, the 16th, the 23rd, 2nd, the 9th, and so on.

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And so now our air filters line up. Finally, the home visit, we're in good shape. So you can see that now we've got weekly visits in March.

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We have it differentiated with our job names so that it's very easy to tell what is what. This is the normal one. This is the filler one.

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And you can see how I filled it right in. It's a little tricky, but you see that that flexibility is there for you. So what do we want to do next? Well, let's say that the car drive would be set up for every other visit, basically every four weeks.

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Let's say we always want it to line up with the 1st of the month. For example, here in December and in March, if you look at the calendar and you look at Wednesdays, there's five Wednesdays in those two months. I don't want to do the car drives necessarily on an off in between week.

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So can we change that? So that we do it on the 1st visit of the month rather than just... That way we don't end up with three visits, I guess is what I should say. We don't have three car drives a month, we'll only have two. So this gets a little bit interesting.

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So let's take a look here. In December, we've got a car drive on the 1st and on the 29th, because it's every other visit. Well, this is kind of my off one here.

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I would rather do this car drive on January 12th, and then shift the rest forward. So it's going to be that 1st visit of each month. How do we do that? If you have used the actions on selected items down below here, this button, this is what we're going to use to make that change.

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And it's easier than you think. So let's go up and pick the car drive for December 29th. I'm gonna check the box next to it.

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And we basically want to move that to our 1st visit in January, which is the 12th. But at the same time, now we're going to have two car drives in January. So we'll naturally want to slide this one to that next home visit, the bi-weekly home visit.

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We want to push it forward. So let's come down here. We want to change the date on that particular item, which right now is on the 29th of December.

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As we said, we want to move it to our visit on the 12th before we hit this button here. Let me point out this drop, this little checkbox, slide all future occurrences forward. What this means is we're moving that car drive forward those two weeks, but it's also gonna take all the car drives after it and also slide them forward two weeks.

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So hopefully this will give me something closer to what I'm looking for, which is putting it at the beginning of the month. I'm gonna hit the button. It's letting me just a little reminder that it's gonna do all the future visits.

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Okay, and now it's done. So let's take a look, see what we ended up with. So here, January 12th, that was what we expected.

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It now slid this car drive forward. To the ninth, so it lines up with the biweekly visits. It now slid this March one up to the ninth.

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So it lines up with the biweekly home visit. And looks like April is also lined up to continue forward with a biweekly home visit. So sliding that one took care of all of them for me.

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So that's that. That was a kind of a tricky one, but that's something that I get asked every now and then is how do I get those to line back up? Use the slide checkbox on there. Then the last scenario I wanted to go through today, a little bit trickier, is some of my clients have a monthly fee and they do all their home visits with a monthly fee that they charge at the first of each month, but they still wanna have a schedule of regular home visits on a weekly basis, biweekly basis, whatever it may be.

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And they want not only the fee to show up on the invoice, they want an itemization of all the home visits to show up on an invoice. There won't be any charges on the home visits, but they want those items to be there. So we can do this scenario and create it with two different series.

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So we're going to do that here. I'm going to use the Tro client, primarily because I wanna start fresh on this screen. So I'm gonna put in Tro.

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You can see we're starting with nothing. Let's go into new series. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna set up that monthly fee that we're gonna build up.

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So we'll put in Tro, put Tro, and we'll, for the job name, call this monthly fee. Now, the one thing I'm gonna do a little bit differently on this one is on my work order status, I'm gonna come in and mark this completed. The reason I'm gonna do that is twofold.

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Number one, it will always invoice the completed item that's within date range. And by marking it completed, it's not necessarily gonna show up on my screens where I have it set up to only show my not started work orders. Another little trick, and Kate can attest to this, is maybe you create a username.

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We called hers billing user, and we assign it to there. So it doesn't show up on the admin or on my schedule in this case, because it's Gary. It'll kind of hide it, but it'll still manage the work order.

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We can talk about that one individually. I'm gonna leave it as Gary because I want it all to show up on my screen. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come in here.

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I don't have a monthly fee item. I have monthly home visits. But let's just pretend that this monthly home visits is going to be my monthly fee.

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I'll just change the description accordingly. Monthly service fee, home watch. And then we'll put in whatever the rate is each month.

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Let's just put in $500. And I can do a save. And the same thing here.

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Let's come down to my series. And we'll do this from December 1st through April. And this one we'll do as monthly because it's gonna be a monthly fee.

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And we want this to be on the same date each month, which will be the 1st. And we'll insert that. Now you can see I have a monthly fee created on the 1st of each month, December through April.

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If I were to go back, I'll do the same and close. We'll see that here on my admin list each month. Now, the second part of that is we wanted to set up weekly home visits.

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Whoops, sorry. Weekly home visits for Tro. Again, starting on whatever day.

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Let's, we'll just keep it on the 1st just to keep it consistent with everything we've been doing. And we want that to show up on the invoice, but we don't necessarily want it to be built. So let's come in here and we'll do a new series to set up our weekly home visits.

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We do want that to be on the schedule so that we know that we have to go out there every week. Weekly home visits. In this case, we're gonna leave all of this alone.

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I want this to be to be invoiced because I want those home visits to show up on the invoice. Even though they're gonna be zero, I want them to show up. If you don't need them to show up on the invoice, you can change this item here to say, do not invoice.

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Let's go ahead and put this in. My code for home watch weekly. In this case, I'm going to put this rate to zero because it's all inclusive in that monthly fee.

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So I don't want these to bill any additional amounts. So we'll come in here, save from December 1st. And I'll continue to put in the end date here rather than the no end date.

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For 3022, a weekly basis, insert. Okay, that looks like what I want. Okay, December 1st, December 8th, December 15th, perfect.

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So now let's go back and take a look at what we did here. Okay, and now you'll see we've got the monthly fee, home visits every week, monthly fee, home visits every week, and so on. In this case, let's also take a look at the amount.

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I'm gonna go ahead and click this gear. If you're not familiar with that, this gear allows you to change what columns you can view. And down here, I have a column called total amount.

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I'm gonna check the box on that, say update. And that'll put my total amount of each work order here in a column. So you can see I'm gonna be billing the 500 and then each week is set to zero.

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And then the 500 and then zero. So this is going to work perfectly. I now have the work orders set up where I can do the visits.

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They're on my schedule. I can do the reports and reports as normal. It'll put them on the invoice with a zero amount, but it's going to bill the client $500 each month.

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And that is basically the end of scenario number six. So I hope that the different scenarios I just went through can all be applied to different requirements you may have with your business. If there's a particular item that you have or a requirement you have, and you're not quite sure how to fit it in with these different items, let me know.

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Yeah, that's what I'm here for. At this point, I'm going to go ahead and unmute and open it up to questions. And I'm sure there will be some about what we just covered because that was a lot.

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We'd like to go first. Hey, Gary, it's Terri, I'll go first. Okay, Terri.

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I have a client that I bill a retainer and I bill it three times a year. So in that case, could I just use individual occurrences to set the date for when that bill is going to be? You can, is it even spaced or is it? No, it's well, I was just, I don't know, I'd have to go look and see, I don't recall. But I do like the quarterly thing that you did with the 91 days.

(35:00 - 35:13)

That's, I figured out how to do the card drive, but I never considered the quarterly being 91 days. So thank you for that little piece of information. No problem, let's go to the series here.

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And I can, I think I know what you're asking about here is, okay, so here's the series for the monthly fee. And you're saying, instead of using the occurrences here, just do the one occurrence. Right.

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Yeah, absolutely. You can go ahead and say this is on December 1st, March 1st and May 1st, and that's it. So you can just put in each day and insert it one at a time and then it'll put it out there for you.

(35:41 - 35:48)

Okay, cool, thank you. Okay, sure. Hey, Gary, this is Kurt.

(35:49 - 36:12)

Hi, Kurt. So I have, you know, that Arizona situation. So how do I go and take, you know, June, July, August, and September and have those repeat yearly for those in-between weeklies? Ah, that was my little teaser about joining next time.

(36:13 - 36:38)

Ah, I'm sorry. We're gonna go through exactly that scenario. Basically, it's going to be for anybody that has highly seasonal businesses, where you can take these series and, you know, like right now, my Florida clients, you know, they're sitting around, but the, I shouldn't say that, sorry, Terry, sorry, Steve.

(36:39 - 36:51)

You know, you're slower at this point in time. Let's put it that way, this point of the year. But come April, May, you know, it's going to be gangbusters through, you know, September, October.

(36:52 - 37:18)

And that's part of the reason why I scheduled that one for February, because it's gonna line up perfectly with all of the Florida folks. It's a little, it's a couple months earlier than you need, but you'll get the gist of it. But the whole idea is for, especially those Florida ones that have a lot of seasonal clients, they're going to be able to go in and reset up the series for the next year, basically all on one screen for all their clients.

(37:18 - 37:31)

So it'll make it very flexible, very easy to do, many of them at a time, and not have to go into each series individually and set up- Correct. Starting end dates. Yeah, it's like I'm having to do that every year now.

(37:32 - 37:44)

And so hopefully that'll fix the situation and we'll automatically go into Gary Magic. Yeah, you won't have to do it this year. You'll go to one screen, pick your clients, and say go.

(37:45 - 37:50)

Oh my God, such a time saver. Thank you. No problem.

(37:55 - 38:03)

Hey, Gary- Well, I did learn. Go ahead. Gary, Matt Germstad.

(38:04 - 38:11)

Hey, I got a question. Hi, Gary. Hey, so basically the same thing, just a scenario.

(38:11 - 38:38)

Say that you have like a annual fee. You would make a new series and set it to yearly. Is that kind of, and whatever date you pick yearly, say it's January 1, you'd have to go to every single client and put in January 1 series annual, and it would pop up.

(38:39 - 39:00)

Right. You'd check the box that says no end date on that, and then that way it would reestablish it every year on that date. Now keep in mind, if you do it this way with the series, it's going to show that annual fee on the same invoice that you'll have all the home visits, the concierge, everything will be on one visit.

(39:01 - 39:19)

And the only reason I'm bringing that up is I think a lot of my clients that have annual fees like to send an invoice separate just for that fee. Okay. If you'd rather have it separate for just that fee, I would do it just in QuickBooks with a recurring item.

(39:19 - 39:29)

That way it won't muddle up your schedule and so on. If you put it in here, it's going to be on the same invoice as all your visits and your concierge items and so on. Okay.

(39:30 - 39:49)

As a best practice, that's what I do, Gary, is I do have an annual fee and I just have it in auto, a recurring fee out of QuickBooks. So it's a completely separate invoice that goes to my client every January. Yeah, I think that the clients probably would want to see that as a separate invoice.

(39:49 - 40:01)

So that's why I just pointed that out as a caveat. But again, Matt, it's how you want to do your business. Correct.

(40:01 - 40:19)

Either way. System will handle it, that's the good news. Any questions not relating to today's topic? Hey, Gary, it's Frank.

(40:20 - 40:29)

Hi, Frank. How are you today? All right. So being very new to Method.

(40:30 - 40:53)

Right. I'm going to crawl before I walk or run, obviously. So if I just was wanting to get used to setting up schedules and the work order status, if an invoice status to be invoiced, that means you're kicking off the automatic invoicing from the information that's in Method.

(40:53 - 41:19)

Do I get that right? That is correct. That means that work order will be invoiced when you run the invoice process. Okay, so if I just say it's my first month that I'm scheduling all my clients and I wasn't quite certain that I had it right, I could just select the status to be in, sorry, do not invoice.

(41:20 - 41:32)

Then what I would do, Frank, because I hear what you're saying. You're saying you might have, you know, December's kind of your first month, right, using it. So maybe you're not going to do the invoicing in December.

(41:32 - 41:57)

You're going to start in January. What you can do is use this button I showed below. It basically checks the boxes on all of your work orders for December, come down to this actions, click the one that says change invoice status, and then change those.

(41:57 - 42:11)

I would personally say change it to invoice because they are going to be invoiced, just you're going to do a manual if you're QuickBooks. But if you change that to invoice, the system will not invoice in a second time. So if you- I'm sorry, say that again.

(42:11 - 42:20)

The system will not what? It will not invoice in a second time. Okay. Okay, so I would check that, change that to invoice.

(42:20 - 42:34)

If you hit the update, then what you'll see is those are now marked invoiced. So they will not get invoiced when you go in and do the process. So I would not, don't muck around with the series itself.

(42:34 - 42:53)

Leave the series as to be invoiced, but just change the December work orders, the December occurrences to an invoice status, and then you'll be ready to go come January 1st. Gotcha, okay, thanks. All right, and we can, if you need to walk through that again with me, just give me a minute.

(42:54 - 43:16)

Okay. When you're ready to do your first invoicing, we can always schedule a time to do some of that together. I do that with a lot of my clients when they do that first invoice batch, just to make sure everything's set up properly between method and QuickBooks, it syncs properly.

(43:17 - 43:33)

The numbers are working. There's a lot of moving parts. So if your first batch of invoices you wanna do like on January 31st, let me know, we'll schedule a hard and fast time for an hour, invoice five or eight of them, just make sure it all works, and then you can go from there.

(43:34 - 43:43)

I think that would be a time well spent. Avoid a hard schedule. Yeah, you wanna do those right.

(43:47 - 43:54)

Hey, Gary, this is Joe Marsh. Hi, how are you? Good. Quick question on QuickBooks.

(43:55 - 44:06)

When I do my invoicing and the customers pay with the paid out feature? I don't think so. I don't know. I don't remember using that.

(44:06 - 44:26)

QuickBooks, it says that if QuickBooks invoices a person or this person, Can you hear me? Can you hear me? No, I'm sorry. There's a little bit of noise going on there. Go ahead.

(44:26 - 44:32)

Let's try this. Go ahead and now, Joe. Okay, can you hear me now? Yeah.

(44:33 - 44:42)

Okay. My customers pay through QuickBooks using the pay now feature. Right.

(44:44 - 45:00)

It's returning back to QuickBooks showing me that it could be one of three people because they all, let's say they all have a $90 invoice. All right. And it's not identifying the person specifically who paid and it's making it challenging for me.

(45:00 - 45:19)

Is there something I'm doing wrong there? If they're paying you through QuickBooks, it should always be keyed to the right person and the right invoice. Yeah, and it's not. Where are you seeing that? Is that in your bank download? Is that where you're having the issue? Yeah, well, yeah.

(45:19 - 45:27)

When I look at the banking, it shows who's paid. It'll show multiples. It'll show like three possibilities.

(45:28 - 45:31)

It could be one of these three people. It's not showing. Yeah, yeah.

(45:32 - 45:42)

What you should look at is where it shows not the, you know, where it tries to match it. Look for the one that says deposit. Not the one that says payment.

(45:44 - 45:58)

Because if you're paying through QuickBooks, it should actually record each one as a deposit as well. And that would be the one you'd match. And usually you can, between the date and the deposit, you know, you're usually good on that.

(45:58 - 46:06)

Okay, if it happens again, Gary, I'll get ahold of you and we'll, I'll take a screenshot and we'll work it out. Sounds good. Sounds good.

(46:06 - 46:15)

Happy to help you with that. No problem. Hi, Gary, this is Kate.

(46:15 - 46:19)

I just have a quick question that's off topic here. Okay, Kate. If there's no time.

(46:20 - 46:28)

Yeah, of course. So in, you know, I'm in New England and so my clients are all getting ready to walk out the door right now. So my business is ramping up.

(46:29 - 46:37)

Right. When I look at the in-residents, I feel like it's almost counterintuitive. If they're in-resident, I don't really care about them.

(46:37 - 46:57)

I would be more interested in who's out of residence. And I was wondering, I was wondering if there's a way to show the data as out of residence, as well as who the route technician is that's assigned to it. You know, as I'm looking forward in the next couple of weeks and people are starting to walk out the door, I need to make sure I have my coverage and everything's lined up.

(46:58 - 47:13)

But right now it's almost counterintuitive how the information is shown to me. So I can cover half of that, Kate. If you go to your HomeWatch admin and it says three dots, you should have an item called the here and away report.

(47:14 - 47:33)

And this will allow you to come in, pick a date that you want to calculate from. I'm going to do it just as of today. And what this will do is go through all of your clients and shows you who's on the schedule, who's in residence and who's not accounted for between the two.

(47:34 - 47:45)

So I think that is kind of what you're asking for, to make sure that you've accounted for everybody one way or another. And that's what this particular item will do right here. Great.

(47:46 - 47:53)

So what's the button called accounted for? It's called the here and away listing. Okay. That's great, thank you.

(47:53 - 48:07)

Who's here, who's away. Okay, that's helpful. But there's not a way to see who may be the route technician, right? Yeah, that's not on here right now.

(48:08 - 48:13)

Okay. But I can see in your case, that would be helpful. So I'll make a note of that.

(48:14 - 48:29)

Okay, thank you. But I think that'll get you most of the way. Gary, to piggyback off that, if you can stay there, I like that feature, but it doesn't seem to work for me because it's picking up all of my contacts that aren't clients.

(48:31 - 49:01)

Is there a way to- All of the contacts that aren't clients? Yes. So it's picking up- So you're saying in this particular column here, it's bringing up non-customers? It's showing me, yeah, contacts that have reached out to me and I put all their information in the database. I want to still market to those people, even though they didn't select me that year.

(49:02 - 49:12)

But it's showing me not just my customers. Okay, let me look into that. That shouldn't be the case, but maybe I missed it on that column.

(49:16 - 49:24)

Okay, Kurt, I'll look at that. I'll get that checked out. Can you show me how you get back into that? I missed that part.

(49:25 - 49:31)

Under Home Watch Admin. Home Watch Admin, under your three dots. Yeah.

(49:31 - 49:40)

Here in the way of report. Okay, I'll log into that and check that. Hey, Gary, this is Joe again.

(49:40 - 49:53)

I'm sorry, I just logged in and I don't have anything but preferences. I don't have that multi-series extend here in a way report. Joe, you might still be on version four then.

(49:54 - 50:09)

Okay. Yeah, because the 4.1, 4.2, those have all been based on request. So if you'd send me an email and just say you'd like to take advantage of that, please upgrade, I'll get you on the upgrade list.

(50:09 - 50:28)

Upgrade to what? To version 4.2. Version, okay, thank you. The thing is, it takes me literally about two hours to do an upgrade for each client. So I try to do a major upgrade with everybody annually.

(50:29 - 50:49)

And then sometimes these interim features that come out in the middle of the year, I don't send them out automatically, but I do send them out by request if you let me know. And we typically talk about those on these webinars and I know you, when you participate, you get kind of a list here of what's going on. All you gotta do is let me know that you wanna be on, you can take advantage of that feature.

(50:50 - 50:59)

Some of the features may not be anything to you and there's no reason for you to bother upgrading. But in this case, if you wanna take advantage of that, just let me know. Thank you.

(50:59 - 51:17)

Hey, Gary, this is Chuck. How can we tell if we're upgrading to the 4.2 of our system? When you go into your preferences, you should see a version number right here. That'll tell you which version you're on.

(51:17 - 51:25)

Thank you. Wait a minute, I'm sorry. Can you show that again? Because I have the same problem.

(51:26 - 51:34)

I bumped over to see that as well. And I have the three dots and I only have the option for preferences. Okay, yeah.

(51:34 - 51:44)

If you go to preferences, it'll tell you what version. If you need that here and away report and you're still on version four, just send me the email and I'll get you upgraded. Thank you.

(51:50 - 52:00)

4.3 will go out to everybody. Preferences are on the HomeWatch admin screen. Right here, hit the three dots and you see preferences.

(52:05 - 52:22)

And where does it say what version you're on, on that page? Upper right-hand corner should have your version. Thank you. Frank, you definitely have 4.2. That's pretty much all I've been sending out since about September.

(52:24 - 52:38)

Gary, mine says 4.2. I do not have that option, anything beyond preferences under HomeWatch. Mine does say 4.2. This is something I manually have to add. Okay.

(52:39 - 52:46)

When I do the copy, so maybe I missed that. Would you just send me a quick email and I'll make sure I get that. I'll make sure I get the address.

(52:47 - 53:04)

Thank you. Gary? Yes. I have a question on how to handle, I don't know if it'd be series or just individual work orders, but jobs that are just sporadic.

(53:05 - 53:32)

A good example this time of year for me would be snow plowing. I never know when I'm going to have to plow, usually until either the night before or even the day of. Is it just best to do individual ad hoc work orders for those clients, or is there a better way to do it? Let me ask, when you do this snow plowing, is it kind of the same rate for the same client each time? By client, yes.

(53:33 - 54:07)

Not all clients would be the same rate, but generally it would be the same rate for each individual client, though. What I would do is I would set up a series for each client for snow plowing, and that way you have the rate in there and everything is in there. And then where we saw that insert single occurrence item, what you can do is if you say, well, geez, we had a storm today, I'm going to plow these houses tomorrow, go into those series, insert a new occurrence, single occurrence for the next day using that.

(54:07 - 54:21)

That way, everything will be built for you already once, as far as the name, the description, the rate, everything. And it's just a couple of button pushes to put it on the schedule. If you had to build it as a one-time work order, you'd have to fill all that information in.

(54:22 - 54:34)

So I would do it that way and take advantage of that series. And this actually goes back to what actually could be scenario number six on the list we had there. And I'll just sort this out.

(54:34 - 54:47)

We use that for a client we had. He was a traveling salesman. And it would be the type of thing where he'd send me an email and say, by the way, I'm leaving Sunday for three weeks.

(54:47 - 55:02)

Can you visit my house? You know, the 10th, the 15th and the 20th. So we had a series all set up for miscellaneous home visits. And we would just go in and insert occurrences and hit those dates that he requested and put them in because he never knew when he'd be in and when he'd be out.

(55:03 - 55:10)

But it made it real nice and easy. Then everything's tied together under one occurrence as well. You know, the rates are there and so on.

(55:10 - 55:16)

So in your case for the plowing, I would do that. That would be my first choice, but you could do it either way. It's whatever you're comfortable with.

(55:17 - 55:40)

All right, good, thanks. Okay, Gary, going back to the time and away report or here and away report, are we able to change the time period within that grouping? It does it automatically on a week ahead, week after, based on the date you put in. Like I put in, I guess it was the 8th, so it did the 5th to the 18th.

(55:40 - 55:51)

And it groups it based on day to week. So it's like the Sunday through, you know, for two weeks. Okay.

(55:53 - 56:07)

So you can change the date back at the beginning of it, but it will always go that Sunday to Sunday. That way it makes sure it grabs everybody, no matter what day you have them scheduled. Right.

(56:15 - 56:29)

Hey, Gary, it's Frank. Another question. How do you tie in a rate for an act specific activity to a customer? In other words, if you- Right.

(56:29 - 56:37)

75 bucks for a weekly health visit, you set that up ahead of time. I haven't tried it yet. That's why I'm asking.

(56:38 - 56:54)

Yeah, when you put that in, when you do their series, you just override and put whatever the rate is for that particular house when you're doing the series. Yeah, that one's 75, that one's 85, that one's, you know, 67, 50. And then that way you do that.

(56:55 - 57:16)

QuickBooks Online just came out with pricing by customer. Honestly, I don't think that's gonna make a big difference with the home watch side of things, unless you have maybe multiple concierge rates. And I know like in Las Vegas, we had certain areas of town we charged more than other areas.

(57:18 - 57:31)

And that could work. However, right now Method doesn't synchronize that feature because it's a recent addition to QuickBooks. And so I'm not able to bring that forward yet.

(57:31 - 57:45)

But that is something that probably will be coming next year. Thanks. All right, good questions today.

(57:45 - 57:53)

Anything else? We're at the top of the hour. Gary, one quick thing from me again. Here's something for you to think about.

(57:53 - 58:37)

And I know you're so good at thinking about all the different needs that we have. The first part of the year is spent like thinking so much about, you know, where my customers are located, what days I'm going to need to be scheduling them based on where they live and how many visits we do bi-weekly or weekly or whatever your schedule may be. I wish that there was a way to put all of that information into the database and have it sorted by location and scheduled so that it doesn't require my thought process going through all of it to see, you know, what works out best on which day.

(58:38 - 58:51)

So just- Yeah, there's, that's good. There is a way you can schedule out different areas of town on different days of the week. You know, if you haven't looked at it, it's the route planning.

(58:51 - 59:01)

I won't get into that now, but route planning, there's a couple of videos on it. And it's under the planning module. It'll schedule the different neighborhoods for different days of the week.

(59:02 - 59:15)

It doesn't take into account any capacity planning though. You know, if that's what you're looking for. So that, you know, it'll take you partway there, but it doesn't have the capacity planning side of that yet.

(59:15 - 59:24)

That is something that I'd, yeah, I'd love to build in, but that's a tough one. Yep. Okay, thanks.

(59:30 - 59:37)

Well, there's always something new I learn. So thank you again. Oh, happy to hear that.

(59:37 - 59:42)

Hey, Gary. Gary, it's Kurt. Again, I give you kudos.

(59:42 - 1:00:15)

You've designed a great system. I really, it just helps me run my business so much easier. At any rate, you know, under the planning tool, are you gonna put a little bit more business intelligence around that? Do you know, we can kind of drill into things and see, you know, how many visits that client is using per year? Anything, any thoughts around that? There is a little bit of the drilling into, but I would be more than happy to entertain other thoughts.

(1:00:16 - 1:00:34)

Like, for example, work orders by customer for date range. Let's say we want to look at, you know, this whole year, and this will show me then, you know, the total amount I billed each customer and how many work orders they had during that period. Now, you can click on an individual item.

(1:00:34 - 1:00:39)

Let's go ahead and click on the good ones. Yeah, let's get, hang on. I want to jump in there and see that.

(1:00:40 - 1:00:59)

Because I know you gave me that feature to use. It wasn't working last call we had together. You know, again, all of a sudden, it's all about maximizing the amount of visits we can do with the customer, right? So, until I had your tool, I couldn't really see how many I truly was doing very quickly in my business.

(1:00:59 - 1:01:11)

I'd have to manually go and add it up. So, I was kind of trying to see- No, I did give you the latest one to make sure that you can drill in. So, you would be able to click into the customer and then see the details for that customer now.

(1:01:14 - 1:01:27)

Do you have that? Can you show me on yours on this webinar? Maybe, I don't even know if everyone knows about that. It's pretty cool. You can see my screen right now, right? I think that's yours.

(1:01:29 - 1:01:31)

It's refreshing. Yes. Okay.

(1:01:31 - 1:01:55)

So, like right here, Lisa Wilson, if I click on Lisa Wilson, this will then set her up and then redraw this to show me her work orders month over month for that time period we picked, which is this year, and also the amount of revenue that we generated for her. So, you can definitely drill into those customers now to get into those details. Okay, but we can't drill any further than this.

(1:01:55 - 1:02:24)

So, I know that, hey, on January 1st, they did 390. You know, we have, I'm sure a lot of people on the phone are like, you know, have multiple things that are going on in that, not just the home watch. So, I'd like to see- So, would you like to click on this and be able to bring up what constitutes the 390, the flow of orders? That would really get my attention because then I can, because, you know, I lob a bunch of services and charge fees per month.

(1:02:25 - 1:02:34)

And I wanna know if I'm actually being profitable on my time. It's kind of hard to do that. Kind of letting a little too much information out on the phone call, but.

(1:02:36 - 1:02:51)

Send me an email about that request. Yeah. Because that would be very exciting to be able to drill in on that first line item and see what does that 390 and those four work orders consist of to make that happen.

(1:02:52 - 1:03:09)

I've got a very thorough plan for the next two months with the new vendor management system. So, I can't give you any kind of, you know, guesstimate on when I'd be able to do something like this. But after that period of time, then it'll make sense.

(1:03:10 - 1:03:16)

Yep. And that would be a very cool tool. And maybe an export feature right here.

(1:03:16 - 1:03:28)

Is that something that can be really easily done quickly or no? Ooh, a method that doesn't make these charts very exportable. Okay. So, this is baked into CRM.

(1:03:28 - 1:03:30)

It's not. Yeah. Yeah.

(1:03:30 - 1:03:33)

Okay. Yeah. They've developed the chart tools that are on here.

(1:03:33 - 1:03:46)

I just use them. But if I create something that gives you that detailed breakdown of those four work orders, for example, that would be exportable. That would be so very cool.

(1:03:46 - 1:03:58)

I would love to see that. Then I could really see where that's coming from per client. I know we can probably get that out of QuickBooks, but it's kind of nice to be able to just do it right in your system.

(1:04:00 - 1:04:05)

Okay. Yeah, because QuickBooks don't give you the detail by work order. It'll just give you the billing.

(1:04:05 - 1:04:10)

Correct. Right. That's not going to take you all the way to where you want to be.

(1:04:11 - 1:04:14)

Correct. Okay. Gary, this is Joe.

(1:04:15 - 1:04:23)

Hi, Joe. I'm on the home watch planning, and I'm looking at the work orders by customer and date range. I did it for this year.

(1:04:23 - 1:04:35)

It's only showing me the top 20. I've got 60 customers. Where are the rest of the numbers? So, this is one little issue that I have with the method charts.

(1:04:35 - 1:04:49)

It probably had a lot of tiny little lines in between. And I think if you mouse over them, you'll see the names up here. The problem is, I wish that it would allow that chart to expand more than it does.

(1:04:50 - 1:04:58)

So, it tries to cram them all in that same, you know, two-inch, three-inch space there. But if you mouse over them, you should see the name. I just put my glasses on.

(1:04:58 - 1:05:00)

I see it now. Thank you. Okay.

(1:05:04 - 1:05:10)

Yeah, that's a cool tool. Yes. All right.

(1:05:11 - 1:05:15)

All right, everyone. Thanks for your time tonight. Thanks for the questions.

(1:05:15 - 1:05:22)

I hope this was helpful. Again, send me ideas for areas you want me to talk about in the future. I can always use them.

(1:05:23 - 1:05:30)

And I hope the rest of you have a great rest of your week. And holiday season. Thanks for all you do, Gary.

(1:05:30 - 1:05:32)

Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Gary.

(1:05:33 - 1:05:36)

Thanks, Gary. Thank you. Bye-bye.

(1:05:38 - 1:05:39)

Happy holidays, everyone.