2/7/23 - Webinar - Using Service Dates

(0:00 - 1:45)

All right, I wanted to say good afternoon to everyone that's had a chance to join. Appreciate that. I think we've got a relatively short presentation today and we'll leave things open for a lot of Q&A at the end, but some good material to cover here, so I'd like to just kind of go through that with you.

Let's start with the agenda for today. So just a little brief introduction. Please, if you can, keep your system on mute.

Feel free to unmute at any time if you have any questions. The presentation itself is going to be relatively short, so don't worry about asking questions in the middle. Feel free to unmute and ask as necessary.

We're going to talk about a couple of the enhancements that went out last week that I think are important for everyone to know, and I'll bring up a couple slides on those. And then we'll talk about service dates, which is today's main topic. We'll look at what they are, how do you manage them, how do you assign them to work orders, and how they can really be utilized to take advantage of some of the processes that you may have within your business.

And then we'll of course end up with our Q&A session. Just a heads up, the next scheduled webinar will be next month, and we're going to go back to an every other month schedule after that, since we had this one delayed. Next one's going to be creating an information page in iAuditor.

And Vicki, I know you're on the call, and we just did that for you today. So sorry, this is about a month too late for you, but that's the topic next month. I've got some other topics that I do need to get on the schedule.

(1:45 - 3:27)

Please give me other ideas for areas that you would like for me to dig into and have other webinars on so that we can get into these items and share the information. So as usual, I talk about which systems are which. This particular presentation, we're going to be concentrating primarily on the HomeWatch business management system, or commonly everybody calls it method, but that's what it's written in.

So we're going to talk first, if you've had a chance to put in a series or go back and review a series here recently, since the up enhancement, you probably noticed that the screens for series have changed completely. In the past, the screens were entirely based upon the work order entry screen. And so they looked exactly like the work order entry screen with just a couple of small changes.

And I'll mute that one. And that created a little bit of confusion with regard to the work orders themselves and what's a series and what's a work order. So the screens have been changed based on some user input I received to make them simpler.

Only the information required for series will be on the screen now. So that makes it really quick and easy to put in. And you'll also notice that the occurrence of section has been cleaned up a little bit so that if you're using no end date, there's no confusion about what is that date that shows up and so on.

(3:28 - 6:36)

You'll also find that when you go into the series link from either the customer screen or from the work order list screen, it will first bring up a list of all of the series for a particular customer. And this makes it really nice and simple to see all of these series in one straight shot so that you know what that customer has going on. And I'll give you an example of that here in this screenshot.

So this is my client, Bill Russell. And you can see he has four different series that are going on for him and his schedule. So he's got some regularly scheduled weekly visits.

It shows you the next date. This is a no end date item. We have his car drive set up to go every 28 days.

So it lines up with his weekly visits. We have another series in there to change his air filters every quarter or every 91 days as I have it so that it lines up with his weekly visits as well. And we also have an older series in here from last February, March.

And you can see that, you know, that hasn't had anything scheduled on it in a while. So they all show up on here whether they're in use or not. My recommendation is if this were me, I should probably delete the last one because it's not in use.

And then that would simplify things and you'd be able to see his weekly visits, his regularly scheduled car drive, and his regularly scheduled air filters. So by having it all here on this one screen, it makes it very easy to see exactly what occurrences, what regularly scheduled items you have for a particular client. So I hope that, you know, these changes here will make that easier to use, especially if you have multiple series for a client.

Having it on one screen, I think, makes it very visual and easy to manage. Then the other big change that occurred, which I'll be honest, I thought more people were going to jump on this one right away based on how many people asked for it to happen. So maybe after this brief presentation, more people will turn this off.

But the idea is that instead of having to jump back and forth between your iAuditor Safety Culture application to back to the Method Route Technician app and create an issue, you can simply add an action right in your report in the Safety Culture app, which will automatically create an issue to match in HomeWatch IT. Once that issue is created, that issue and the action are tied together. So making changes in either system will update the other.

Very similar to right now when you make a change in HomeWatch IT, it updates QuickBooks and vice versa. And so this is going to make it really nice so that you can manage the either action in Safety Culture or the issue in HomeWatch IT and vice versa, and both systems will update each other. Full details of this are in the Help Center, but I'll give you a quick overview of how that works.

(6:36 - 8:28)

So you'll see I have my phone screenshot here where I've put in an action that there's screen damage on the lanai. I put in a little description of it, the status, if you assign it to a user, the due date. And you can see this was created from an inspection, and you can actually click the button and go straight to that item on that inspection to see it.

Those items map over to the issues, and this is a screenshot of my issue screen in HomeWatch IT that matches this particular action. What you'll notice first is that the reported date, the original work order, the customer, all gets filled in automatically because it knows based off of the work order who is who. Then what will happen is what you put in as the title of the action will automatically populate back and forth to the issue description on the issue screen.

And again, if I make a change here, it will populate back to the action. So even though my arrow is one directional, the changes are bi-directional. The description that you put in here will show up in the issue notes and vice versa.

Status will update status. Now there's a couple limitations here because the Safety Culture app only has like I think three different statuses, whereas with HomeWatch IT you can have an unlimited number of statuses. So basically the way it works is the to-do status in Safety Culture will map to new issue, completed of course will map to completed, and any other statuses in HomeWatch IT will map to an in-progress status in Safety Culture.

(8:30 - 10:35)

If you make an assignment in Safety Culture, it'll update the assigned to in HomeWatch IT as will the due date. And due date is actually a new field that was added in here just to make it link up with the due date option that you have in Safety Culture. It's going to remain optional in HomeWatch IT Issues app, so you don't necessarily have to use it, but it's there should you want to.

All right, we'll move on to the services dates. So basically what are services dates? So this allows you to track and manage dates which you perform certain services. What are the services? There are some defaults that are put into the system that you'll have when you first get loaded up, and you'll have these five.

You'll have air filters, batteries changed, water heater serviced, garage door serviced, humidifier media changed. Now these are just defaults. You're able to add any additional dates that you wish to track, and as many as you want, and you can use those on any customer as necessary.

And it doesn't have to be all of them. It can be any, or some, or one, or two, or all. The purpose of these is many of my clients are now getting into more of an estate management type of function, and so they're now responsible for making sure that various services like this are performed and performed on a regular basis.

So we need to have a way to track when these services were last performed so that you can easily go back and check on that. So again, this is your default list, and you can add to it, and I'll show you in a moment how you can add and change the list to make it match whatever you'd like. As far as service dates, where do you get to them? So the first is on the customer screen.

(10:35 - 15:14)

Very important when you're looking at that property and you aren't looking at those details that you want to be able to see what are the service dates that are in use for that customer, what are the last dates that were serviced, and of course you have to be able to change them. You can also access and change them from the Route Tech app. Very important because you might be on site in the property, you hear the smoke detector going off, and you say, geez, what was the last time these batteries were changed? You would have that availability right in the Route Technician app and be able to get to those dates.

You can update them from, as I mentioned earlier, the customer screen. You can also update it from the Route Technician app, and most importantly, you can update them directly from work orders. So what I will do is I'll show you each of these items, you know, within the system just so you can get a feel for how it's set up and how you can manage them.

So I'm going to flip over to my methods screen, and I'm going to start by showing you where the list of available dates is maintained. So the first I'm going to do is go up here to my Preferences by clicking the three dots on my HomeWatch Admin. I'm going to go to my Preferences screen, and you'll see that I have a section here called Service Date Descriptions.

You can open that section by clicking the little arrow, and here I have six different dates in my system. I've got Water Heater in there twice, but that's just because I was messing around playing with it. You can use this area to change these any way you want to.

Now, if you've got dates already in use, I recommend you don't change descriptions because that's just going to change the description against the date you've already got in place. So keep that in mind that, you know, if I've already put in air filter dates and I now change this to, you know, HVAC serviced, that is going to, you know, mess things up a little bit. You can always add additional items as usual just by clicking on Add Lines and typing those in, and you also have the ability to change the sequence by adjusting the numbers that are in this column.

So, for example, if I wanted to make the humidifier, you know, down at the bottom of the list, I can just change that, let's say, to a nine, and then when I hit my Save button, it will now save it. See, because I clicked on these, I now have them, so it's not going to allow me to do anything. I apologize.

Let's just refresh. It's probably good to show you these mistakes because we all make them. Don't, when you add on lines, don't necessarily click into them because then the system thinks that you're using one.

So, in other words, I can hit Add Lines and not do anything with it, but now change this and hit Save, and it should work this time, and it did. So now it's moved it down to the bottom because I put in a sequence number of number nine. So you're able to add as many lines as you want and change the sequence around as well and hit, you know, Save when you're ready, and it will update those lists.

So let's take a look first at where this list shows up within the Customer screen. So I'm going to go back to my dashboard, go to my Customers, and as usual, I'm going to pick on Mr. Brower. Down here under my Additional Information section, you'll notice it has service dates.

I can open that section, and you can see here are the dates that are in use. Now keep in mind, I had six different dates on my list, and you'll see only five show up. That's because one of them is not in use yet, but if you set up that list and start using them, you can always say Add a Date, and it will allow you to pick from your list and then be able to put in the service date.

So you can see right here, I'm able to track all five of these dates and the last date that I actually performed that particular service. If I decide I don't want it anymore, I can always trash that particular line, or if I need to update it, I can easily update it here, like the batteries, you know, will replace March 1st of last year. If I want to change it to, you know, March 1st of this year, all I have to do is click on here and change the date.

(15:15 - 19:28)

So this gives you the ability to manage those within the office, but even more important is to be able to manage those within the field when you're out in the field. So I'm going to open up my phone screen for you, and I'm going to go to Mr. Brower from my RouteTech app, and when I do that, it brings up the details of the work order. It also brings up all the details of the property in this section.

I can open up my Date section, and here you'll see all of the dates that I had listed just a minute ago on the property. So again, these are all available to you in the palm of your hand when you're out at the property going to do a service. This is also an easy place to update the date.

So if you're at the property, like I said, you know, you walked in, a smoke detector was beeping at you, you pulled this up, you say, well, I changed them last March. It's been almost a year. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and change them right now.

So you go ahead and you replace all the batteries. All you have to do now is hit the update link that's right here next to that, and that will immediately change your date to today. I'll say okay, and now it's done.

So very easy to update and manage those dates just by clicking the one button. All right, now where this can get really interesting is when you attach the dates to work orders. So I'm going to go back to my work order screen, and this time I'm going to go into my series.

Earlier I had up my Bill Russell client, which I'm going to bring up again, and you'll remember I have a work order there to change his air filters every quarter. So I'm going to click on this item to open up that series for changing his air filters, and you'll notice that over here on the right side there is now a place called service date. This will bring up for you that list of dates that we've been using all along, you know those same six, and you can attach a service date to a work order, and in this case even attach it to a series.

This is going to create for me an occurrence every quarter, and you can see that here. We had it, you know, December, March, and we just have it, you know, going on every quarter now. Every time we go out, you know, once a quarter, when we go out and change that air filter, when we complete that occurrence, it's going to update the service date to match when we completed the occurrence.

So now it's going to automatically track and update that last change date for you simply because we put it here on the series. You can also do this as a one-off on a regular occurrence work order. So let's say, for example, I'm going to go back to my work order, and like today, I'm going to go out to the McMurphy residence, and when I'm out there, I've decided even though I'm going out for a regular home visit, I am going to go ahead and replace the smoke detector batteries.

So I can add that date to my work order even though I'm going out there primarily to do a home visit. Once I complete it, it will also update my batteries date to show that I replaced the batteries today when I did the home visit. So you can attach a date to any work order, any occurrence, and even better to a series so that you can have that regular update to remind you to perform these services, whether it's monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, whatever the interval is that you want to use to maintain.

(19:30 - 20:23)

So a lot of power here within these service dates, but it's important information, and I know that in the past, the ability was there to just update dates, but it was difficult to keep them updated and keep them current. Here, by attaching them to a work order, it makes it much more seamless and you don't have to worry about going in and doing an extra step of updating the dates. The system will manage all that for you.

So that is service dates and how to use them. Moves on to our Q&A. So that is, as I mentioned, a pretty brief presentation today, but I do think that the service dates is a pretty simple feature, but yet a very powerful feature.

(20:25 - 24:47)

So at this point, I'm going to open up to anybody on the call. If you'd like to unmute yourself, feel free to do so. If you have any questions either on this topic that we can go into or any other topic, I'm more than happy to cover those as well.

I do have a question, Gary. Yes, hi Vicky. Hi.

Can you repeat on the series? So if I already have a series created and I just need to start, I never use this, which is amazing now that I know about it, but how do I start adding dates on a series? So, and how does it show up on like, does it only show up in method in the root route or does it show up also in iAuditor? It only shows up on the route tick as far as the, you know, the service date, the link that you have there. To add it to a series, it's really as simple as opening up the series. We'll go back to the RESTfuls.

I have my series here for changing air filters and all you have to do is just pick that date right here in the service date dropdown. Then every time you complete that occurrence of the series, it will update the air filters and you can add this to any ongoing series and it will add it to any future occurrences that have not yet been started. So for each service that I perform, so let's say it's not just the air filter, but also the, I don't know, the batteries in the separately or how does it take the, let's say three services into like a series of quarterly or something like that? Yeah.

So each of those are going to probably have different dates, like the air filters you might do quarterly, batteries you probably wouldn't do any more frequent than twice a year, but it's the same thing. You would create a new series and just change air filters, do it quarterly, create another series, change batteries and that's exactly it. Especially with this new series screen, you can have as many series as you want for a client.

It's going to create those additional work orders, but that then reminds you on those dates when those occurrences happen that you need to perform those additional functions. Got it. Thank you.

Sure. Hope that helps. Yes.

Great. Right. Any other questions? I'm sure there are.

I know we've got a few folks on here that are newer with the system, so don't be shy. I know that sometimes diving right into a topic like this can be a little intimidating if you've not had the opportunity to use the system too much. Don't worry about that.

This is always good exposure and the questions are always very helpful to everybody. You can always go back and review the recorded webinar later after you've had a little more exposure. I see a few new folks on the call.

Don't hesitate about asking any questions. Gary, quick question to JP. It's just my understanding that let's say we have an in-residence and less in-residence and let's say I have also a series to go maybe every two weeks.

If the client is in residence, all the work orders related to that client should be canceled continuously until I change the in-residence dates, right? That's correct. Okay. I'll test that.

(24:48 - 25:07)

Okay. Recently, I just did that and when I canceled the in-residence, it re-established all the work orders, but they're all shown as canceled. I don't know how that happened, but anyway, I need to maybe use a dummy client and experiment with that.

(25:09 - 25:40)

Okay. Yeah, but it should. Now, there was a change that was just made as you're aware because you helped suggest it where it automatically cancels now when you put in the in-residence and it brings up the work order list so you don't have to select and cancel.

That should not have impacted the way that works with the no end date, but I'll double test that as well. Yeah. Like I said, I'll create a dummy client and experiment a little bit.

(25:41 - 26:32)

Okay. I appreciate that. I'll double check it as well just to make sure that something didn't break in the last update.

John, I know you have a question. You always have a question. Hey, Gary.

This is Joe. Hi, Joe. Hey.

I've got to go. I just wanted to say thank you for the recent updates and the speed of the iAuditor system has increased substantially and it's made my life a lot easier. Granted, I'm in the slow season right now, so I'm not real busy, but I just want to say thank you for all of your efforts and everything.

Enjoy your evening. Hey, thank you, Joe. I appreciate that and glad to hear it's working a little bit better for you.

(26:33 - 26:55)

Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Sure.

Anyone else? This is a great opportunity here to- Hey, Gary. It's Asai speaking. Hello, Asai.

(26:55 - 28:17)

Just want to say hi and thanks for having me on. It's a little overwhelming, as you mentioned, and a method I haven't got into that yet, so as a newbie, definitely a little bit, but I'm sure I'll get there and I appreciate all your efforts. I appreciate that and this is really good, Asai, especially if- I think there's a couple of you on here that have the Startup Kit software and there's one particular gentleman who is not on tonight, but he has the Startup Kit software.

He attended every webinar, literally for a year and a half, learned all he could about the software and then he upgraded. It was just his way of just looking to see what the additional features and functionality were and evaluating if it worked for his business. Even if some of this is not necessarily part of the system you currently have, it's always good to know that as your business grows and you now have the need, let's say, to track service dates, that that capability is there and that helps you then decide, well, yes, I need to move to the next system because I need to start tracking that information and I know it's available to me.

So glad to have you. I'm glad to have all of my newbies and the Startup Kit clients as well on the call. Thank you.

(28:20 - 29:46)

The housemate from South Carolina. Hi there. We are here.

We were a little delayed in getting started. Technical difficulties and we have our group here, which is great. I don't know if you can't see us, but we're here and we're trying.

We're the newbies trying to figure it out. I have a question. How does the service date relate to the work orders and which ones are the ones that will make it back to QuickBooks for invoicing the homeowners? So the service dates relate to the work orders, kind of like what I was saying here, but this is really a way to say that when we go out every quarter and change the air filter, it's going to show up on the schedule and it's going to update the date.

The way that this comes back to QuickBooks is when the work order is performed, you have the ability, and this is in a series now. Remember, this is in a series. So we have an item here, replace air filter, and you can see it.

I'm charging a flat $20 per filter to do that. And I'm going to do four of them. So this particular item is going to show up on the invoice as a line item on the invoice when you generate the invoice at the end of the month.

(29:46 - 29:57)

It does not go into QuickBooks until it's part of an invoice. Only the financial transaction goes to QuickBooks. But that's where you tie it together right here.

(29:58 - 31:16)

Okay. So the service dates are placeholders for the work orders to be completed? Just think of the service date as another checkbox, really. You know, I'm going to change air filters.

You've got a schedule listed below so that you know you're going to change the filters on these dates, January 6th, April 4th, and so on. And as soon as you complete it, let's say you complete that one on January 6th, it's just going to update the service date so that you can easily bring up the application on your phone, for example, which I'll do here. So that if the technician is at the house and says, you know, these filters look pretty dirty, when's the last time they were changed? Well, these haven't been changed since September, so that explains why they're dirty.

So it's more of an informational reference is what the service date is, so that you can see the last time it happened. Okay. It sounds like it's very useful for recurring type services.

That's the primary purpose, yeah. Okay. Even if, I guess, well, I'm thinking almost all the services are recurring that you'd want to track.

(31:18 - 33:16)

You know, when's the last time the refrigerator filter was cleaned? You know, again, even that is a recurring item that you probably want to do a minimum of every year. You know, when did we wash down the dirt off of the, you know, condensers outside, compressors outside for the HVAC system? Or, you know, these are all going to be regularly occurring things, and you would track what date you last performed the service. Okay.

Would you set up inspections under the service orders, recurring inspections? Like regular home visit type inspections, or a more detailed inspection? Yes, no, home visits. No, I wouldn't, because you've got that on a regular weekly, theoretically weekly schedule anyway, so it's always easy to go in and see what dates those were. I would say if you did, had a more detailed inspection, like maybe you do a thorough inspection of the irrigation system, you know, once a quarter, you know, that would be an inspection you might want to track, or even once every two months, but something like a weekly home visit, I wouldn't put that in, it's just too frequent.

You could, I mean, technically the system would allow you to do it, but I don't know that I would bother doing that, because you know it was always in the past week. You can always look at the previous inspection report by clicking the link right here as well, so that gives you that same information, plus you have the whole report at your fingertips. Thanks, Gary.

Okay, glad that helped. Garious John. Hi, John.

Ah, I finally got my mic to work. You can't keep me quiet for the whole session, sorry. Well, like I said, I knew you had a question.

(33:21 - 34:22)

Do you, I think what threw me about your announcement about safety culture updating or creating a new issue was certain things were bi-directional, certain things weren't. Can you kind of explain that a bit? Sure, let's go back to that particular slide. So actually, any informational changes that you make are bi-directional.

The only thing that technically isn't bi-directional is you need to initiate the creation from safety culture as an action. So you create the action, and then I grab it, and I create the issue. Currently, I'm not able to go the other direction, just because I have more information and issue, and safety culture doesn't allow me to necessarily create it easily.

(34:23 - 36:16)

So the creation is a one-way, but once you create it, anything you change here on the issue will change it on the action, and vice versa. Okay, that makes sense, and that's what I thought. Thank you for explaining.

The one exception, again, as I mentioned, is status, because you can have as many status codes as you want, and you might know that those are customizable. If we have new people on the phone that haven't used issues before, you can add as many status codes as you want, like waiting for a vendor quote, waiting for vendor schedule, waiting for the customer schedule. You can have all of those different status codes on an issue, and those are not available in safety culture.

You have to-do, in-process, completed. So to-do, maps to new issue, completed, completed, and anything else will go to an in-process status in safety culture. Thanks, Gary.

Sure thing. That's terrific. I was going to look into that this week and play around with that.

Good. I've had quite a few people say, geez, it would be nice if I could just enter that in while I'm right in the middle of a report on safety culture without having to bounce back and forth. Now you can.

Well, I do have some-in an existing checklist, I do have some of those automatic notifications going out. For instance, if somebody puts issue on a fridge, it's not working. It alerts me, but doesn't create an issue, but it alerts me as the admin.

(36:17 - 37:12)

So that part, you know, that's as far as I had gotten. About the same time I got your email about the new update, which is terrific. Good.

I hope that works well for you. I'd love your feedback. Yes.

Yes. It's a terrific addition. Someday I'll ask you if Zapier can, if an activity gets created, Zapier can pick that up, can't it? Yes.

That's what I thought. I know you don't want to get into it with this session, but yes, thanks. You're referring to a method activity? Yes.

Yes, it can pick it up. We'll talk about that one, one-off, because that's probably- Right. Right.

Of course. I understand. Of course.

(37:12 - 37:52)

All right. Do you want to get into the eye auditor controversy? When you say controversy, clarify that a little bit, because I do think a few people misread or picked up some things from my email that maybe didn't, you know, probably weren't meant the way that some people picked them up. So please ask the question, and then I can clarify that.

Okay. Well, you did mention looking for a plan B or an alternate if necessary. Maybe that can of worms you didn't really want to open up.

(37:53 - 42:35)

That's right. You know, I was trying to word that very carefully. So let me first off say in no way, shape or form, am I getting rid of eye auditor? And you can see, I mean, I'm building and just built more detailed integrations right here, you know, right here on the screen in front.

So eye auditor is here to stay. I have had requests from more than a few people who would like to have an alternative to eye auditor. As you know, or maybe know, I think everybody in the Naples area knows, there seem to be some issues with eye auditor and offline capabilities and syncing the reports.

And this was blaringly evident during the hurricane. So they've asked me to look at an alternative. Eye auditor is not going away.

Nobody's going to have to move my auditor if they don't want to. I'm just going to have another alternative. And the beauty of it is the way the system is constructed with eye auditor as a built-in application, we can do that.

Everything else remains the same. It just, now you have a choice. What do I want to use for my reporting? Do I want to use eye auditor or do I want to use the other one? And yes, I am in some detailed conversations right now with a company that can provide a very similar program.

The program isn't as large. It doesn't have as many integration points right now, but they really want to work with us. So I do think that that second option will be available, I'm going to say in the next like three months or so.

Preliminary testing has been good, but there are some things that they don't do that I need it to do in order to get it to integrate properly. And so I'm waiting for them to come back to me with that information. But like I said, eye auditor is not going away.

So if you're happy with it, don't worry about it. It's just an information point. In general, I'm happy with it.

I've had some hiccups, especially related to low cell signal Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of half works sometimes or blows up entirely and puts me in a screen I don't expect.

But if it gets to the point where you think it went and you trusted it went, and it really didn't go, that would really concern me. Correct. And I don't think that that's an issue.

I think that eventually, everything does sync up. It just as it does sometimes take it a while to get itself to a point where it knows where it's at and can finish the synchronization. But within 30 minutes, it's usually entirely synced without any problem.

Oh, so it's more of a delay than not happening. Correct. Correct.

If the sync gets interrupted, at least this is what I found from my testing and dealing with my auditor's tech support and their engineers. If the synchronization of the report gets interrupted at any point, it tries and it continues to retry at intervals whenever it has internet connectivity to resume the sync. Sometimes resuming the sync, it's not quite sure where to resume.

And I know a lot of people on this call have experienced a point where they go in and they generate a report. And some of the pictures are these little purple placeholders, and it doesn't actually have your photo in there. Okay.

I've seen that. That's because, yeah, it's continued to sync, but hasn't necessarily picked up the fact that, oh, I'm still missing photos. But on the back end, it keeps retrying, retrying, retrying, and eventually it's going to figure out which photos it has not synced, and it will bring them all over.

At that point, your report will then look normal and be filled in. Hey, guys, this is JP. I deal with this every single day.

Every single day. Right. It does figure it out eventually.

I mean, JP, I think you can attest to that. It takes anywhere from like 15 to 30 minutes. And typically the pictures, yeah, kind of get there.

(42:36 - 42:44)

So, you know, most of the time I kind of wait till I get to the other client that has Wi-Fi. Right. And I upload from there.

(42:44 - 43:04)

But it's a little bit of a pain because you would love to send the report right away. But if you send it, it's going to miss half the pictures or all the pictures. So you have to kind of wait till it's uploaded, you know.

That's correct. And doing the PDF, the PDF does require that you're online when the PDF is generated. That's correct.

(43:04 - 43:28)

So it's like JP said, we have to make sure it's all synchronized first and that you're online and then you generate the PDF. If you're using just the web link, you can send the web link out right away and the pictures will continue to get uploaded and the client can use the link and eventually the pictures will get filled in. So you're not as a big constraint, but with the PDF, you have to make sure it's fully synced before you can generate it.

(43:29 - 43:36)

That's correct. Makes sense. Can I change gears really quick? Go ahead.

(43:37 - 44:25)

Sorry. If you were going to talk about the same thing we're talking about, go ahead. My question to Gary was about the time tracking.

So not sure if we can jump onto that really quickly. When you say time tracking, Vicky, you mean being able to actually put in like payroll time? Or what do you mean by time tracking? Yes, time tracking the employees. Is that something that we, I don't know, I saw it when you started the presentation saying something about time tracking.

I thought it was. The beginning of the presentation, I may have said that we can do it as an upcoming seminar. Oh, I see.

(44:33 - 44:49)

So if that's a topic that is of a lot of interest, that can be one that we schedule for the next schedule in May. I was holding off because there's going to be a brand new invoice screen coming out. Actually, it'll be coming out next month.

(44:50 - 46:21)

Oh. And I wanted to have a session on that, but I think I'm just going to do a regular tutorial video on that one, just because I don't want everybody to wait till May to be able to fully utilize it. But just to give you a heads up, the invoice screen, and JP, thank you for your input on this one, basically will allow you to make any modifications and changes to invoices without having to go to QuickBooks to do it.

So you'll be able to do it straight from within HomeWatch IT in the invoicing section. And the nice thing is it's going to continue to be geared around work orders. So if you say you want to remove a work order from the invoice, you can remove a work order from the invoice.

If you want to add another work order to an existing invoice, you can add that existing work order to that invoice with a single button push. So it's going to really be a nice way to tie all of that together without having to go to QuickBooks to make changes. Oh, wow.

Okay. Yeah, that's going to be very helpful. And for the new VC, I just want to say Gary is amazing.

If you ever have a question, you can send him an email and he will answer it right away. It's really, really an amazing service that Gary, you know, customer service that Gary has. It's amazing.

(46:22 - 46:26)

Thank you, Vicki. I agree. Thank you, Gary.

(46:29 - 47:33)

I've been setting up his mailbox lately, so I'm trying to get quiet now. Gary, since you changed the create work order portion, you're in a customer, click on work order slash activities, and it used to be a new series. Where did create a new series go? How did that work? Oh, it's there.

The thing is, because now the series screen gives you that visibility of all of the work orders and series that a particular client has. Oh, I see. Sorry.

Well, right here. It's now moved right to here. Yep.

So plus new series, but now you hit the series and this will show you all of the series for that customer. Now, because I went to it from a customer, it automatically filled it in for me. So now I can see all the series for that customer on this one screen.

(47:35 - 47:46)

Now I get it. It gives you just one more detailed view, rather than having it lumped into this list and you had to look for series. How did you get that? It gives you a better visibility.

(47:46 - 47:53)

Just right here, it says series. You're going to the customer screen. Okay.

(47:53 - 49:19)

On the customer screen under work orders. Okay. And then click series.

And I think that just gives you a nicer view, because the other thing too, series doesn't necessarily fit into the same columns that everything else does. There's different information you want to track on a series. Like when's the next occurrence? What's the end date? What's the schedule of it? So you have the ability on this screen now to see the pieces of information you need that are particular to a series.

Yeah. It threw me for a minute, but I get your logic there. Okay.

Yeah. It's nice to see if this series has no end date and the next occurrence and the last scheduled date. Yeah.

It's an easy way to see that. Exactly. Exactly.

And before you had to click into the series to get to a lot of that information. Now it's available to you easily on the dashboard. And when you click a series, you're going into work order series details.

(49:20 - 52:47)

You could modify it here. Correct? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yes. From that. And the, I mean, you can click on any of these to get to the series, as well as the old edit series button here.

It still works the same way. If I click edit series, for example, on Schwartz, it's going to take me straight to that series. It's going to bypass that overview screen and take me straight to the Schwartz series.

I'm sorry, could you back up? Yeah, absolutely. If you have on your work order list, any one of the occurrences, because the idea is if I'm going to go, let's say Revis, if I want to make a change to his series, no reason to show you all of Revis's other series. Let's just jump straight to the one that we need.

And so that's right. Cause it used to take you to another screen and then you had to hit edit series or something like that. It took you directly to the series before.

Okay. All right. Yeah.

But this is, this should be a little cleaner. The multiple occurrences, I think is a little bit easier to envision as well. And you don't have to take up your screen with it.

You can hide them. But I do think that this will give you a nice way to be able to go back and forth with your series. Yeah, it's good.

I'm just going to get used to it. Exactly. And I noticed your change.

I think it was yesterday, day before I was doing a, an in-residence, a new in-residence. And when I hit save, you know, normally you see all of the occurrences just prior and all the rest after, but it already canceled. I didn't do that.

Right. That is part of the updated. Before it used to just put the red arrow on there.

Now it puts the red arrow on and marks it canceled at the same time. So it's again, one less step that you'll have to deal with. Yes.

Okay. Is that a good modification for you? I'm fine. I'm fine with that.

Okay. So it will flag all the conflicts just like before, right? It'll flag them, but it will automatically make the cancellation on account. It all canceled.

Sure. And so all you really need to know or look at is the one prior or after, if it's a short. Correct.

And if you want to cancel that. Yes. Yes.

Right. Thank you. All right.

We've got about five minutes left. Any other questions from anyone else that you'd like to cover? No. Okay.

I appreciate everybody's time and being online and thank you for being a HomeWatch IT customer. And hopefully we'll see you all in a month for the next one. And if you have any other questions or if anything else pops up about any of this material or any other question, feel free to email me whenever you need to.

(52:49 - 52:57)

Thank you, Gary. Thanks, Gary. Thanks everyone.

Appreciate that. Thank you. Thanks, Gary.