C-01 Customer Maintenance

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We're going to start off with one of the most regular activities you're going to do in the system, and that's working on customers. So when you work on customers, there's really two pieces to every customer. You have the QuickBooks portion, which is all your typical name, address, email, phone number, things that you'd find in any customer setup.

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And you'll see all those in your QuickBooks. And then the second portion are the items that are specific to HomeWatch. And these you'll find in the HomeWatch method application.

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So you'll normally set up your customer starting in QuickBooks and add the name, address, email, payment terms, all of those pieces of information that are part of QuickBooks. That information will sync over to your HomeWatch IT application in a minute or two. And once it does, you'll then be able to add the HomeWatch specific information.

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You could start a new customer just by going in the method and hitting New Customer. But we'll cover that later in the video. It's usually recommended that you start with QuickBooks.

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So now we're here on the method dashboard. And you'll notice that you have your HomeWatch customers application right here. What we'll do is we'll click on that.

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When we do, this will open up for us a list of all of the customers that we have in our system. So the customers that you've put into QuickBooks already will appear here. And now you can go in and start adding a HomeWatch specific details to them.

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So we're going to go to Mr. Brower here and click on this item. And this will bring up for us all of the details. This one's already pre-filled in.

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I don't want to take the time in this video to do all the typing, but I'll show you all the different pieces. And then you can easily take this and apply it to your business. So here in the top section, all of this should be pre-populated from QuickBooks, which is the name, address, email.

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The one exception is you have this field here that says Report Email. So it's important to keep only a single email address in the email box so that your clients will be able to log in to the portal. If you have more than one email address here, the system will not be able to find the customer and they will not be able to log into the portal.

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The difference is with the report email is you can send the reports, the inspection reports, to more than one email or to different people. The email here on top is the person who will receive the invoice. The people here are the ones that will receive the reports.

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If this field is left blank, the reports will just go to the same email address that the invoices go to. So you don't have to fill this in. Unless the report needs to go to a different person or more than one person.

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If you're entering multiple email addresses, just separate them with a comma and you can add all of those on the line. The other exception here that you will not find in QuickBooks is the credit card markup checkbox. By default, that will be unchecked, but you can check it for any clients that you need to.

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That process will be covered in a separate video. Over here on the right, you're able to attach documents. Attaching them here will store them in the cloud and you'll be able to access them from anywhere.

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You'll see that I have a contract stored, but if I want to add additional documents, I can either drag them here or I can click the little link and it'll allow me to pick those documents from my computer. Down below, we have the addresses, both the billing address and the property address. These map to QuickBooks directly.

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The billing address is the one that is typically called the mailing address in QuickBooks. The property address maps to the shipping address in QuickBooks. If addresses need to be modified or changed, you can click the little pencil icon here to change them.

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When you do, it will open up the details of the box. You can actually do a search here, the actual address. So if we find Northwest 23rd Street, we can then click on that and that will then fill in all of the boxes below with the find.

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Now, we could edit this if we need to maybe add an apartment number or something, but once that's done, we'll just save it and that will then save that address. We can also click the little map icon here, which will bring up Google Maps and map that address for us on the screen. Over here, we also have property statistics, which again can be modified by clicking the pencil icon.

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You can pick different types of dwellings and these are all preloaded for you, but if you need to change them in any way or add to them, you can click Manage Info and be able to do that. Same thing with the square footage. We have different ranges already predefined, but if you'd like to tweak that a little bit and change it, click Manage Info to do so.

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I recommend changing it before you put in any information, though, because if you were to go back in later and change this particular item to a different range, it's going to impact anybody that you picked the fourth item on. So change those first and then once they're done, just leave them as is. Number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, any other information you may want to put and then hit Save when you're done to save the statistics.

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Tags is just a way for you to put an identifier on the customer itself. It can be anything you want and all you have to do is just start typing. Let's say you wanted to put in here that this is a business associate.

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You can just type in business associate, hit Enter, and that's now in there. You can change colors or manage them by clicking the Manage here. Otherwise, we now have that in, that he's a business associate.

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I'm going to actually delete that just to leave it. You can see that what I have here is just that he has both a HomeWatch customer and an RBO customer. You can use the tags for anything you want.

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Other examples might be if this is a storm shutter client and you need to put up the shutters. If it's a snow removal customer, you could put snow removal. Any tags, any identifier you want to put in, you can.

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Then you'll notice down below, we have some additional pieces of information about the property. So let's look at HomeWatch info first. HomeWatch info basically gives me different buckets here for everything I need to store about a particular property so that I'm able to manage it.

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So all of these in the first two columns are notational fields, and you can see how to access the property, what to do with the mail, exterior, and so on. There is a checklist here right below the air conditioning settings, right, that then says the owner controls them. So if the owner has a Wi-Fi thermostat, like a Nest or some sort, you can check the box here just to give you a reminder that the owner is going to control the settings on the thermostat.

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Additional notes here, water, auto, Wi-Fi, other. Then on the right are other informational fields, like if there is a pre-authorized limit for things that you can spend to get fixed, the default report template for this client, and this is where you would put what the default iAuditor template is or other reporting software template is that you're going to use for this customer. If you're going to use routes, that's a different video.

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Who the normal assigned to person is, you don't need to fill that in, but if you're going to assign your properties to different managers, you can assign it, and that person then will be copied on all reports and kind of be the designated person for this property. You can also set up a link to external files, like in a Google Drive or a OneDrive or a Dropbox. I'm not going to go into that here.

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That is part of the write-up and available to you. The next informational section are my service dates. There's a whole video on service dates, a different webinar, but this is where you can track different services that were performed and the dates they were last performed for the customer.

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If you need to add dates, you can do so or delete the lines here and be able to manage those. The next section is security info, and this is everything you need to get into the property, such as the security gate, if there is a lockbox or a garage code, the key ID that you have on the key ring, and all of the panel information right here. Next section is contacts.

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In the contacts, it's set up so that you have your primary six service providers listed here at the top, but you're not limited to those because you have a grid where you can put an unlimited number of additional contacts. Simply by hitting the add new contact button, you can add additional contacts to this grid. The contacts can be anybody related to the property that you just want to keep notes of.

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So you'll see, for example, I have a couple family members. I could put in additional service providers that maybe don't fit into the top six, such as the elevator technician or the Crestron programmer or anything else, and all of that information is now stored with the property and easily to access whenever you need to. There's also a section for RBO here, which I'm going to skip for this video.

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It'll be covered in detail for the RBO clients in a separate video. The last item is the work orders and activities, and this basically allows you to see any and all activities that you've had with a client, emails that were sent, home visits that were performed, any other work orders like repairing the garage springs in this case or meeting the plumber. So you're able to see all of your history with the client.

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Now you're able to access any of the work orders or set up new work orders right from this screen using these items. However, my preference and my recommendation is manage all your work orders straight from the HomeWatch admin screen because there are some additional features on that screen that will make managing work orders easier to do. It's not going to stop you from doing it here, but I recommend that you do it in the other screen.

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Once you've set up all the information, it's just a matter of hitting Save and Close. That will then save this customer, close it off, and you can continue on to the next one. So now that we've gone through that process, let me just walk you through how we would actually add a brand new customer if we didn't have QuickBooks or an accounting system and just wanted to add it in straight here or if you'd just prefer to add the customer in here.

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Keep in mind that you don't want to add a customer in both places because adding a customer in both places will end up with duplicate customers. So only add a customer in one or the other. So what we'll do to add a new customer is you'll see up here in the upper right is a little link that says New Customer.

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I'm going to click on that. And what that will do is open up a screen which will allow us to set up the basics similar to what you would do in QuickBooks. Now, this is going to be a customer type, so you would check on that.

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You can ignore lead and vendor at this point in time. So what we'll do is we'll set up our new customer, Brian and Susan Brower. Now, typically, if it's a husband or wife, you'll put both of their first names in like I just did here.

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What this will do then is it will always address all of the emails and every contact that you do to Brian and Susan so that when you send invoices, et cetera, it will show that. And let's fill out the rest of the information and then we'll return. At this point, we filled in all of the information.

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I'll point out a couple things. Number one, it automatically defaults the first and last name here. And this is how it's going to appear in QuickBooks.

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I like to put mine last name comma first. So what I'll do is I'm going to move the Brower to the beginning with a comma and a space and that will then alphabetize it by last name. Sales tax, you can skip over.

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Most of yours will be non-taxable. But if for some reason your state does charge tax, you would have to set that tax code up in QuickBooks first and then it would synchronize here and be part of that dropdown. There's also a link here to add the address information.

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I'm going to skip that because we'll address that when we get to our HomeWatch specific tasks. But what I'll do now is save this customer and it will go out and create a contact and a customer for me and take me back here to my list screen. And you'll see the Browers appear here.

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So basically what we did is we took care of the QuickBooks setup, even though we were in Method, which we could have easily done within QuickBooks itself. So it just is a way to add information very easily without even having to look back and forth. Remember that your data will always synchronize between QuickBooks and Method automatically.

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So the Browers will appear in there. Now it's just a matter of clicking on the Browers and putting in all of the HomeWatch specific items just as if we had synced the data from QuickBooks. Good luck and have a great day.