2/1/22 - Webinar - Using the "Multi Series Extend" screen to easily manage seasonal clients

(0:04 - 2:00)

All right, everyone. Thank you. Actually, let me do this.

I'm going to go ahead and put it on mute. Okay. If you're new to these, just so you know, I usually mute while I go through the initial first slides and the presentation and so on, primarily because it makes it really nice recording that we can then add to the Help Center video files that others can use in the future as a reference and tutorials and so on.

Once the standard presentation is completed, then I'll take it off mute, and then we'll do the Q&A. So if there's any questions you have during the initial presentation, kind of jot those down and keep those for the end. Today, actually, we're going to have a little bit shorter presentation compared to last time anyway, but you'll see how this one piggybacks off of the material that we covered last time.

So a little bit of an agenda for today, the introduction elements. I've got a couple items to talk about. I'm going to give you some preliminary info on the upcoming version, which you may have read a little bit about here in the email that was sent out last month with regard to requesting for beta testers.

I still have that request out there, and we'll talk about that. And then we're going to talk about the multi-series extension screen, which is a pretty new addition. Those of you that are 4.2 and higher will have this.

Anybody that isn't up to 4.2 yet will not. But if this is a feature that you're going to be able to use and want and don't have it on your system currently, let me know, and I'll get you upgraded right away so that you'll have it available. So we'll talk about why it's here, what the purpose of it is, and then I'll go through a pretty simple demo on how to use it.

(2:00 - 3:01)

And I think once you see how it's used, it'll really click and make it very easy. And then, of course, we'll finish up with our Q&A session. Just a little bit more info here, upcoming webinars.

Most of the webinars are centered around the business management system simply because there are a lot more topics, and it's a little more involved, and it really makes sense for these webinars. But I'm going to break that streak a little bit here on the next webinar in April. And this is going to be targeted to the many clients I have that are still running the Starter Kit software.

And I get a lot of questions on how do I know when it's time to upgrade? What am I really going to benefit from that? I know some of you on here are still running Starter Kit, but you attend a lot of these sessions. So for you, you already have a good feel for what's available to you when you do upgrade. But I have a lot of clients that say, well, this isn't really relevant to me yet, and they want to know when is a good time to upgrade.

(3:01 - 5:34)

So I think this will be a good session for a lot more of my clients. And we're going to schedule some additional ones here. Time tracking, you're going to say, what's that? We'll talk about it in a minute.

The home inventory, vendor management, and again, you'll see those coming up here on the next slide. But as always, please give me ideas for things that you want me to prioritize for these sessions. So as you know, here's the full suite, which comprises of the three programs for the reporting, business management, and the QuickBooks.

Today, we're going to again focus on the business management system, as I had said. I'm going to give you a little bit of a preview here on the upcoming version, which I hope to have out to almost all my clients in the springtime, but that depends on how the remainder of the beta testing goes. Currently, I've got quite a few clients actually running it, and it's working extremely well.

But the new version has some really nice and significant updates. So the first of those is time tracking. The idea with time tracking is kind of twofold.

If you have employees, they can put their time in on each and every work order. And this is different from the billing time. So keep in mind, like on a home visit, you're billing a unit of one and a set rate, but you can also put in there that you spent 0.75 hours at the property doing that home visit.

Same thing with concierge items. You may have spent one and a half hours at the property, and that's the time you spent, but you might be billing the client two hours because your policy is a two-hour minimum or you round up or whatever the case may be. So the time entered that you spent is different than the time that's actually going to be billed.

If you have employees, you also have the opportunity to sync that time to QuickBooks, and it'll show up in QuickBooks under the time entries there so that you can generate your payroll right off of that time. If you don't have employees, you may want the time tracking as a way to just see where your time is being spent and be able to kind of quantify where you're spending time on home visits versus concierge, and are you charging enough for the home visits considering the amount of time you're spending on them, and you can analyze the time by customer, and it'll give you a lot of variety there. So this is going to be, I think, a pretty key component for a lot of you.

(5:34 - 9:02)

The next one is there's going to be an additional app for vendor management. So some of my clients that do a little more of an estate management type of situation have a number of vendors that they want to track on a property-by-property basis. The vendor management allows you to set up discount rates.

It allows you to set up markup rates for each vendor, for each customer on a separate basis so that you can automatically create those. And then those of you that have used the bill entry that's built into the work orders, that bill entry will now utilize this system and create the line items on your work order to bill your clients automatically based on what the vendor bill is and what your markup rates are that you set up. So it's going to really simplify and streamline things if you have a lot of vendors to be able to track those on a customer-by-customer basis.

The planning and charting has been enhanced. It now allows you to drill all the way back to the original work order if you want to. So that's nice.

It's also been enhanced to include all of the time tracking features. You can automatically create work orders from estimates. So there is an estimating application in QuickBooks.

And if you use that to generate estimates, you can automatically turn that estimate into a work order with one button push. Method also has an estimate app that mimics what's in QuickBooks. But my opinion is if it's in QuickBooks, you're not paying for it, you might as well use one in QuickBooks.

But if you did want a method, let me know and we can add that. Home statistics. So I've also had a lot of requests for people that want to say they want to know how many or what percentage of my properties are homes versus condos or are 1,500 square foot versus 4,000 square feet or have three bedrooms versus five bedrooms and so on.

So the home stats will give you the ability to break down all of that information in a nice graphical format. Another one that I've asked for, you know, has kind of come up with several of my clients is how do I know my client opened their email? They're telling me they didn't receive the email. What's the status of the email? So now on a work order by work order basis, you'll be able to see exactly what the status is of the report email you sent for that work order.

You'll be able to see if it's been sent, if it's been delivered to the client, if the client has opened the email, and ultimately if they've actually clicked on and viewed the report in the email. So it'll be really nice that you'll be able to validate that and see who's opening reports and who's not. So full release notes are out there in the Help Center.

If you want to get a better look at them, you know, feel free to do so. And if you want to get in on this early and help out with the data test, I would appreciate it. Just let me know.

Send me an email and we can take care of that. So moving forward into today's topic on the multi-series extend. So the purpose of this is to take your series, you know, which many of you, most of you know, is the repeating schedule that you've set up for your client and be able to extend it easily over multiple series.

So let me explain that a little further. If you go back to some of the examples we did last time, we created, for example, a bi-weekly home visit, you know, from December 1st until the end of April for our client Russell. We also added, you know, a car drive, you know, to schedule at every other visit.

(9:02 - 15:21)

We added, you know, this monsoon to change the weekly visits for February and March. So we went through all of these examples and how you would create those. But now let's say you want to extend these.

This is important for seasonal clients like all of my Florida folks where you might put into the series as good from, you know, April 1st until, you know, October 31st and then everybody comes in and the next year you need to re-extend it. Right now you've got to go into each series individually one by one, put in the from date and the to date and then hit the occurrences and that would create it. So it's not hard to do, but you'll see today that this is even easier.

So it allows you to do all of your series or many of them, I should say, at the same time on the same screen. So this will save you tons of time and, you know, make it much easier for you. One little piece of info here is that the work orders will automatically resume on the same day of week that you previously had scheduled.

And I'll show you this during the demo. So it's smart enough to know that if you've always been doing the Smith House on Tuesdays when we create the additional occurrences, it will continue to do those on Tuesdays going forward. So as I mentioned, this is what we did last time.

If you didn't watch the video or attend the webinar from the last session, you might want to do that because we covered how to set up all these scenarios with series and really get creative and do different things with them. So if you want to know the best practices for setting up your series, that was a good video to view. What we'll do today is we're going to take two of those scenarios, number one and number four, and we're going to take a look at how to extend them.

So the Russell client was set up for bi-weeklies from February 1st until the end of April. And in scenario number four, we added weekly visits, those monsoon visits for the same client. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how we can extend these and even more on the multi-series extend screen.

Okay, so let's say we want to extend all our work orders from May 8th until the end of July. I know those dates are a little nonsensical because, you know, why would we start on May 8th of all days? But just I'm picking that because, you know, we went to the end of April before and I just want to kind of skip a week and show you how it creates. The dates that you use, of course, are not important compared to, you know, my dates are not important.

Your dates you're going to be putting in as to what makes sense in your particular scenario. So I'm going to switch over to my demo system. If you're running one of the last two versions, to find the multi-series extend, you will click on the three dots that are on your admin tab and you'll see it located right there on that list.

So when I click on that and open that, it's going to ask me where do I want to insert my occurrences. So kind of what we talked about here on the slide, we're going to insert them from May 8th. I'm going to bring this up here to May 8th and I'm going to go in through the end of July.

All right, so I'm going to put those dates in. I'm going to say find series. When I find the series, what the system will do, let me hit the button, it will go out and locate all of the series that don't have occurrences in the date range that we selected.

So kind of follow what I'm saying here. I'm picking this date range from May to July and these are all the series that, as you can see, either have ended before or during that time frame. So here it shows you all of my different series, the dates that we last had an occurrence that we visited, and based on the dates I picked, it's showing what it's calculated my next date should be, assuming we're starting on May 8th.

And you'll notice that this is all different dates of that week after May 8th because it is taking into account day of week. So for example, this one here, this is the one from Russell that we created for scenario number one. The last occurrence was April 20th.

April 20th was a Wednesday. And if you look, May 11th is also a Wednesday. So that is essentially how that will, you know, calculate and work through there.

So to actually extend these and create the occurrences for these dates, all you have to do is check the box or boxes of the ones that you want to, you know, create. In this case, this was actually our weekly. So I do want to adjust this one and you can adjust it easily here.

So I'm going to have this one start on May 18th because we need to, you know, integrate that or, you know, interlace that one with the previous. And let's see, I'm also going to create the one here for Tro. And yeah, that's good to start on May 11th.

If you need to actually edit the series before doing anything to it, you have a button here that will allow you to do it. In this case, I'm going to extend these three. So let's keep in mind that these series numbers, I'm going to go into them and we'll look at them here in a moment.

In fact, I'm going to do that right now before I even hit the button here. I'm going to, sorry, let me just duplicate that. And I'm going to go into my work order admin and let me get rid of this banner.

I'm going to pull up all series. Okay. So 9938 for Russell and 9961 for Russell.

So let's go down here and I'll just filter on Russell. Okay. So 9938, right? That's the one we're doing.

(15:24 - 16:17)

9938. Yeah, I said 68. 9938.

So I'm going to go into that series, 9938. Let's just take a look at it real quick. If we bring this up and we look at the bottom here to take a look at what our series dates are, you'll see that we have from December 1st through April 6th, basically through April 20th.

So what the screen showed us before that that was the last occurrence is correct. The last occurrence was April 20th. So in this case, that's correct.

So let's go ahead and insert the occurrences now for those three months for these three different series. So I've added those. I'm going to just hit the button here.

This is insert. It's going to give me a little, you know, okay button here to make sure that's what I want to do. And as fast as that, we have now changed those.

(16:17 - 17:05)

Now the last schedule occurrence for that particular series is July 20th. If we go out here and let's just refresh this one, the last date that we saw was April 20th. So now if we come down here, we'll see our April 20th and then we'll see our bi-weekly visits happening from through the end of July like I told it to.

It's that easy. And the other series that we, you know, the other two series that we checked, also created. So it was very easy to take those three customers, recreate, add those work orders in there, and we're done.

(17:06 - 19:13)

So as you can see, in the case of, you know, seasonal folks, especially I said Florida and Arizona where people start and stop, it's very easy for you to go in, just insert your occurrences from a date to a date, pick all the ones you want to insert, and then hit the button. You're done. And you can see what it did right here.

So actually quite simple to use. One little caveat I was going to put on a slide here is that prior, if you have version 4.2, it will only create up to 30 occurrences at a time for any given series. That should be enough, I would think, for anybody that's seasonal, you know, unless you're doing weekly visits for the whole year, in which case you probably wouldn't be doing start and stop anyway.

You'd be using the no end date. But if you're doing seasonal, it'll create up to 30. If you're, if you've been upgraded from version 4.2, that 30 is now up to over 100.

So that you definitely won't have that limitation. Just keep in mind that if you are creating over 30 in a session for any series, it will stop on that 30th one, and then you can just continue to extend from there. That is actually everything on this agenda.

So I'm going to go and take the mute off. And let's just see if you have any questions. All right, I hope that made sense to everybody.

Hey, hey, Gary, it's Kurt. I have a quick question. While you were going through the demo, I was just getting ready to do side by side with you.

And I noticed for a couple of my clients, they're missing a next occurrence date. And then there are about three that are missing, but they weren't on the model that I do during the summer. So there's two questions I have.

(19:14 - 19:59)

Does it matter that I don't have a next occurrence date for a client? It's possible, depending on the series, that it couldn't calculate the next occurrence date. In which case, all you've got to do if it's empty is just go in and tell it what the next date should be. Because that is the starting date.

If you don't have a starting date in there, it's not going to create the occurrences, because it has to have a starting point. Okay. And then, say, for instance, I never created a – if the client was a bi-weekly client all year round, but now I've moved them to a – what I call like a monotone book out here.

(20:00 - 20:18)

So do I have to go in and create that first as the old-fashioned way, and then next year it'll just come into play? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All this does is bring up any existing series that needs to be extended. So if it's brand new, yeah, you'll have to create it first.

(20:19 - 21:34)

Okay. Perfect. Wow, that's a time saver.

That is for sure. Thank you. Gary, this is Terry.

Hi, Terry. I have used no end date on almost all of my clients, and then put them in residence, you know, for the period of time that they're here. So if I wanted to use this extend, I'd have to go back and eliminate the no end date, right? Correct.

Correct. I mean, doing it the way – there's nothing wrong with the way you're doing it at all. You just have two options.

Doing it with no end date and then putting in the in residence is fine because then you're able to maintain that list of who's in and be able to compare that. So you can use that to manage your business. Either way is fine.

You don't necessarily have to conform. You can do it the way that makes sense to you. Well, I like the new way.

(21:35 - 23:44)

Okay. In that case, yeah, then you'd remove the no end date. And then all of them are going to have an end date in there, you know, because it keeps creating in 12 months ahead.

But then, yes, you can go back in and change that here using these. Okay, thanks. What I really didn't show is that if this end date is in the middle of the range – let me go ahead and change this here.

Let me go ahead and make this like 7-1 until September 30th. Even if the date is in the middle of that range and you extend it, it will pick the next occurrence date calculated off of that. So the nice thing is all those things that you have in there right now, you don't have to necessarily delete occurrences.

It will just continue to extend from that date forward. So that makes it real nice. You just keep extending and extending and extending if you have to.

You know, 2020 would have been a great example. Everybody, you know, was set up for a certain period of time and then, you know, the Canadians didn't come down to Florida. So you could have extended that for another, you know, three months, then another six months and so on, depending on what you had to do from this table as well, because it would just allow you to keep extending on the fly right off of your last date.

Okay. We have any other questions? Sorry. I'm going to quiet that one.

(23:48 - 24:13)

Any other questions on today's topic or in general of any topic? No questions on the new features. That surprises me. Everybody's quiet today.

(24:22 - 25:11)

All right. Well, if everybody is okay and doesn't have any questions or anything you want to talk about, we can make the nice early meeting this time. Gary, can I just ask one quick question? This is Kate.

With regard to you're looking for volunteers, are there particular criteria you're looking for each of us to have within our business that make it more potentially useful for... Kind of in general. I mean, if you're able to test out the newer features, you know, that is, of course, the most helpful for me. You know, in your case, maybe vendor management might be something that would apply.

(25:14 - 25:59)

Home statistics might help you out a little bit. You know, if not, it's okay. It's just more of a general usage thing.

I mean, I'm sure the status of the report email will be good for you. Yes, that's interesting. So, I mean, yes, I'd love it if any of these were important to you and you wanted to have now and test and that would be great for me.

But, you know, it's just kind of just general testing. You know, you definitely use the system a little bit differently than a lot of my clients do, Kate, so it's good for me to have you on there for sure. With regard to the vendor management specifically, though, that is where we want the vendor... Okay.

(25:59 - 26:24)

Is that true? I'm sorry, you cut out. With regard to the vendor management for the additional app you said on here, does that mean the vendor would be agreeing to use the app to tie back into the software? No, no. It's more for you and I can pull it up here if you want to take a little view.

(26:24 - 26:56)

So, essentially, these are all of the vendors that I have in my system. And again, this is as normal. So, all of your vendors would come over automatically.

If you pull up a particular vendor, you can then just track some information about them that, again, is more specific to our business. Like, you know, if you have their COI or you listed as an additional insurer, you could check their contractor registration if you need to. What is your normal market percentage for anything? And then you can attach any of those documents.

(26:56 - 30:51)

And then if you want to, you can actually assign them to customers just so that you know that, okay, these customers always use Anthony's Handyman. And in fact, when you go into their customer screen, it does the switch, the vice versa. It has a little vendor tab now.

You open it up and it'll list Anthony's Handyman, you know, on the Browers tab. So, you have that back and forth. And then if you really need to get detailed, and this is kind of a, I'm going to say very uncommon, but in your case, maybe it is.

Let's say that on the Browers, they have a special agreement with Anthony's Handyman. And this is actually set up by the services codes within QuickBooks. So, first off, we have our default.

In this case, remember, our default was 10 on the previous page. Well, for Brower, it's only going to be five. But perhaps whenever, you know, you'll have different codes in here.

But let's say if he comes down and does replacing air filters, okay, that one is always going to be, you know, marked up by, you know, $50 over whatever the price is. So, in other words, anything you enter now, if the air filters will go up $50, anything else will be marked at 5%. So, it will do all that for you automatically so that when you enter that information in on the work order, it will do so.

And then you can always track what are the open bills for the vendor. You know, you can see which work orders they've been assigned to. You can always take a bill that is not assigned to a work order and assign it to a work order here or create a work order for it.

And lastly, you can take a look at any work orders that you may have assigned directly to that vendor so that you can, you know, track those as well. So, it tries to cover all the bases all the way around. The nice thing is that because it's driven by product service code now, it will tie very nicely with everything in QuickBooks.

So, I know in the past you were changing things like to match the accounts and now it will actually do the services codes rather than the accounts. So, one of the things I, yeah, and then, so one of the things, let's say for one of my clients or for each client at the bottom of the client information, there's an area where you would put in the contact. And you have those boxes the particular client might need.

So, when I get outside your sort of tester handyman, then I start adding these people in as contacts so that I have as a reference that, you know, something goes sideways and who's their HVAC person that doesn't fit into your box that you've provided me, I've tried to put them in there. So, it sounds like this is almost a better way to tie them. Exactly.

Exactly. Because then you have your vendors that's added right here and here's Anthony and then you can go back to the agreement if you want to from this perspective as well. Or this can be really nice, and let me go back here to the vendor, is, you know, quite often you've got a vendor that belongs to or works with a lot of the clients.

Right. So, when you come in here, you can easily add them right here. So, let's say if I want to go ahead and add this to, you know, Russell, which, you know, I can just pick that, add it.

Okay, it's done. It's now on his file. I can go in here and pick the next one, you know, maybe it's with Thompson, add it.

(30:52 - 31:51)

So, now we've added. Do my route technicians have the ability to see that? So that, again, I know my business operates a little differently than other people. So, my route technician is the one that's going to say schedule an appointment with the plumber, for example.

Do they have in their view on the route technician screen that the vendor slash plumber is company X for that client? Ah, see, this is why I said it's good for you to be honest, because you do do it differently. No, the route tech currently does not have that view. Okay.

However, I can see how that would be quite valuable to you and a lot of my clients as well. So, yeah, we've got the contact info. So, it would be just another tab to enter down.

(31:51 - 33:56)

We've got the vendor bill, but to actually have the vendor info right there would be beneficial. All right. Good.

Thank you. Okay. All right.

Thank you. Hey, Gary, this is Kurt. Could you go back to the customer view? And under the, I think it's the home staff.

I'd like to ask a quick ask. I think you can only put in like, yeah, under the customer. Yeah.

Under the home staff, I think it's new field you just added. Can you just type in the real square footage of the property? Because I can't. And I want to be able to do that.

I don't want to get 1,500 to 2,500. Is there a way we can just put a nominal figure in there of the true square footage? No, because the reason I did it this way with these breakdowns is because then when it does the pie chart, it can do it. If you're doing actual square footage, there's no way to do a pie chart unless you're going to have 80 different slices and that's meaningless.

Now, you can adjust these ranges however you want using the manage info. Right. Which I did.

Okay. But I still have to pick. Okay.

Yeah. Otherwise, like I said, you'd have a meaningless graph to be able to do that. Right.

If you want to put the actual in there, you could put it in the other info box right here. Yeah. Through that.

I'd like that. Okay. Can you go through a scenario where you can show everyone or me how I can enter in, say I do a quarterly AC change, but I want that to line up to my other biweekly visit.

(33:56 - 35:00)

Can you show how to do that one more time? Yeah. We did that last time. That one's a little trickier.

Right. It is trickier. The key to that one is not to pick quarterly if you want it to line up, but to pick date, a daily recurrence interval, and then pick 91 days because 91 is divisible by seven.

So, if you put it in there to happen every 91 days, it will line up with your weekly home visits. If you do quarterly, it's going to do just that. It's going to be every three months.

It's not necessarily going to line up. So, you set it to daily and then to repeat every 91 days. Yes, 91 days because it's divisible by seven.

That's why we have you. And 182 days if you want it every six months. And it will always line up that way.

(35:02 - 36:46)

All right. Yeah. And then if I need to go back and reference that, how do I find where that, is there like a quick, you know, tip sheet to do that to find it where I can put it off? No, I just did the video with us later last time on the webinar.

I didn't necessarily make like a tip sheet on how to do that. But yeah, you're saying it'd be nice to have these, you know, six scenarios kind of written and how to do them? Yeah. So, you could quickly say, okay, I want my, you know, biweekly, you know, let's say a car drive to line up to my, you know, I just want to quickly be able to go through because, you know, I need to get that done, to be honest.

And I get the other ones, but I don't know how to do these quarterly services that I provide to my clients. Okay. I mean, I could do it.

It was a lot nicer on the video because then you can, you know, see exactly how it happens and how it lines up, which you wouldn't get on a cheat sheet. But if that's all it is, it's a cheat sheet. Gary, I wanted to ask you, if you can just send me the link for that, that would be awesome.

And I'll just reflect back to it and bookmark it. Yeah. If you go to the Help Center and go to the webinars, you'll see it right there at the top.

Okay. And it's customer.homewatchit to do that? Yes. All right.

Thank you. Sure. Good questions.

(36:50 - 37:27)

All right. Do we have anything else? Okay. In that case, we'll go ahead and call it a night.

Thanks, everyone, for attending. And as always, you know, stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll talk to you in a couple months. Thanks, Gary.

Thanks, Gary. Thank you. You too.

Thank you. Thanks so much, Gary. Thanks.

Thanks, Gary. Thank you.