E-04 Series Best Practices

(0:11) So the whole idea is what is a series and why do we use it? So the easiest way to think of a series (0:20) is it's basically your template that you're going to use for creating work orders. (0:26) And a work order is any event that you need to schedule and or bill for. So basically everything (0:34) you do, you know, you want to have a work order for it so it's on your schedule and so that it's (0:39) easy for you to bill for it at the end of the session.What a series does is it creates a (0:44) template for that work order and allows it to repeat on a regular basis. So the whole idea is (0:51) that this will give you that set it and forget it scheduling capability. Once you create the series (0:57) or a collection of series for a particular customer, you should be able to just let it go.(1:03) Keep that schedule created for you and keep it current and you should be able to go from there. (1:10) So let's look at what our best practices are as far as the demo. I told you we're going to jump (1:15) right into a lot of demo scenarios.So we're going to start with something very simple and (1:21) very familiar with to everybody on the call. And that's basically we're going to create a bi-weekly (1:26) home visit schedule starting from January 15th until the end of May. And we're going to use (1:32) the client of William Russell for all of the demo today.So this is how we're going to start out. (1:38) So I'm going to flip over to my system. And those of you who are familiar with series know that you (1:45) get to it by going into the HomeWatch admin.And then all of the series maintenance is covered in (1:52) the upper right hand corner here where it says series. So we'll go into that. And now this is (1:58) where we can add, manage, delete our series.We're going to be working on William Russell, (2:05) so I will pick him. So you'll see that this is brand new. It's got no series.He has no series (2:13) scheduled. It's a brand new customer, so we're starting out from scratch with him. And so this (2:19) will show you how the different series can build on top of each other to create what could be a (2:25) fairly complex schedule if that's your requirement.So what we'll do now, since he has no existing (2:31) series, we'll go ahead and hit the button to add a new one. (2:35) Our first scenario is to create a biweekly home visit from January 15th through the end of May. (2:41) So we'll go down through the process of how to create that series and then how to create (2:45) the actual schedule itself.So this is going to be a biweekly home visit, (2:55) and we can set up our default report template if we have different templates. It's always good to (3:01) create it in the series because then you're able to vary it by client. So I'm just going to pick (3:06) my regular home visit template.Tags are optional. This would be some way that you can identify a (3:14) particular service. We'll probably use it later in our demo today.Starting and ending times don't (3:20) matter a whole lot for home visits. It's just there to put it on the calendar at a particular (3:26) time. You can set up the assignment.This would mean that every one of our home visits are going (3:31) to be assigned to a particular person. It will default to whoever's entering it, which is me. (3:37) We're going to skip over the vendor items right now, but what we'll do is we'll jump down here to (3:45) the detail section.So this section is where you put in all of the information about what you're (3:51) going to build and any particular notes that might need to be part of the work order. So for example, (3:58) we have a code for our HomeWatch Weekly. So we'll put that in here, and then we'll put in whatever (4:07) the rate is for this particular property.You'll notice it brought up a rate of $45. (4:12) This is a default rate that's set up in QuickBooks, and it's just kind of a standard. (4:15) But here you can change the rate so that this rate pertains to whatever customer you're working on.(4:21) So in this case, let's say Russell was actually a $60 per visit rate. So we'll put that in. (4:27) Now, we might want to put some note in here that, you know what, we're going to do a HomeWatch, (4:33) but we're also going to drive their car and get their mail.So we can come in here and we can (4:40) pick a different code if we have it to say we're going to do mail. Now, I actually have mine set (4:45) up to charge $5, but in this case, this is just going to be a note for my technician. (4:52) So what I will do is I'm going to get rid of the $5, and I'm going to uncheck the include on (5:00) invoice.So let me explain what this does now. If we uncheck this box, this item is not going (5:07) to appear on the customer's invoice. It's only going to show the one that is checked, (5:12) which is our $60 charge.But when the technician goes out and brings up the work order details (5:20) on the RouteTech app, it will show that he has to do the HomeWatch, and he's also got to do the (5:27) mail pickup. So this is a reminder to him that here are the different things that you have to do (5:32) at this home visit. And you can add multiple items on the series.You can add multiple items (5:39) on any work order just as reminder items, and you can uncheck the include on invoice so that it's (5:44) an internal item at that point. So having set this up now, we'll hit save and add occurrences. (5:53) That will then save this template and bring up our occurrence section.So you'll remember we (5:59) said we wanted to start on January 15th and go through the end of May. So I'm going to pick (6:05) January 15th as my from date and end of May as my end date. The system knows, based on the date (6:16) that you picked and from, that it's going to schedule this every Wednesday on a weekly basis.(6:22) And you can change whatever your terms are here, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, etc. And you'll see as we (6:27) create different work orders that we'll use these in order to line up everything. So in this case, (6:33) we're going to set this up for this period, January through the end of May, every week on (6:38) Wednesday.Once you've added this information, you just hit the insert button. This will verify, (6:45) hey, here's what it's going to do. We're going to insert occurrences weekly from January 15th (6:49) through May 31st.Hit okay. And the system will then go out, create those, and then bring up the (6:58) for us here. And you see it's scheduled a total of 20 items.Now what we can do at this point (7:07) is I'm going to hit save and close, which takes us back to our series screen. And you'll see here (7:14) is the first series we put in, bi-weekly home visit, weekly on Wednesday. The next occurrence (7:21) of it is scheduled for January 15th.And the last date that's scheduled is the end of May. (7:26) So this shows us exactly what we have on the schedule for REST. I'm going to pull up a little (7:32) side screen here just to show you a little bit more detail.Now I think that most of you should (7:39) be familiar that you can duplicate or open up additional tabs within your system. So for example, (7:46) let's say I wanted to open up another tab of my admin. I can right click on my admin icon, (7:53) say open in a new tab, and this will now open up for me in this tab, my admin.(8:01) What I'm going to do here is I'm going to just show you how we're going to build out (8:06) the work orders and what it looks like. So I'm going to come down here and say I'm (8:10) going to show everything for this year. And I'm going to show only Russell.(8:16) And you'll see here are the occurrences we just added starting January 15th. (8:21) And this is going out through May every week. And even though I typed in biweekly, (8:27) I did it weekly.So that was my mistake. So let me go in here. And I meant to do this weekly.(8:38) So I'm showing you exactly how to fix the mistakes as well from January 15th. So we'll (8:54) the end of May. And I meant to say biweekly.So how do we fix this now? We have all of these (9:04) created down here on a weekly basis, but we only wanted biweekly ones. (9:08) So there is a little checkbox right here called delete existing. What this does is it deletes (9:16) all of the existing occurrences within this date range that are already here before creating new (9:24) ones to fit the selections that we put here, the biweekly.So what this will do is it's going (9:31) to correct my mistake. It's going to delete all of the ones that are here on a weekly basis and (9:35) create new ones that are biweekly. If you watch, I'll hit Insert Occurrences.It'll tell me what (9:41) it's going to do, that we're going to do occurrences for every other week. It takes (9:47) it a second to process. And you'll notice now we have it every two weeks.So this is what we (9:56) meant to do. This is what we wanted. It's now set up here.If we were to go back to our work order (10:03) list and refresh that, you'll see the same thing. It's deleted every other one. Basically, we've (10:08) created new occurrences every other week.So that, we'll hit Save and Close. Now, biweekly home visit, (10:18) biweekly on Wednesdays from this day range. So this looks a little bit more like what I (10:23) meant to do.So now we've fixed our mistake. All right. So that's scenario number one.(10:29) Scenario number two, let's add a work order to the schedule to drive the car every other visit. (10:37) So we want to just drive the car every other visit. So this is pretty easy to add.(10:43) So we know that our first visit was January 15th, and we want to do it every other one. So right (10:51) now, it's biweekly, which means we want to do it every fourth week. So we'll come down here, (10:56) we'll hit Add a New Series.And we'll put in here, this is his car drive. We can pick a template. (11:06) So if you have, for example, a car drive template, you can pick that.(11:11) And we'll come down here to the item, and we'll pick our auto drive item. So here's our auto (11:21) drive. So this sets up our template.You see, very easy to do. Let's save and add occurrences. (11:29) Now, this allows us to come down here and schedule that.So we know the first one was January 15th, (11:36) because remember, that's where we started. And we basically want to put a no end date. I'm going to (11:43) just leave this one open forever.So even though we did just through May, let's put this one in (11:49) the no end date. And we want it to be every fourth week. So what you can do is you could do monthly, (11:58) you could, you know, then it would be like every month, you know, which kind of is every fourth (12:04) week.But we want this to line up with our home visits, so that every other home visit, (12:10) when we're there, we're going to do the car. The easiest and the easiest way to do that is we know (12:16) that biweekly means every 14 days, right? So that means we want to do the car every 28 days. (12:25) So we'll change this to daily and set this to every 28 days.Insert our occurrences. (12:33) It's telling us what we're going to do. Now, if we look at the occurrences, we'll see, okay, (12:38) January 15th, February 12th, March 12th.So it's kind of every month, kind of every one month. (12:47) But the nice thing is, if we go back and save and close this, we'll now see, okay, we've got the (12:53) biweekly, we've got the car drive every 28 days. And if we look at our work order list, (13:00) let's refresh this to bring up the new ones.You'll see that on February 12th, (13:06) on March 12th, it's lining up exactly with our biweekly home visit. So using the daily (13:15) allows us to create that extra interval so that it doesn't matter what the interval is between (13:21) visits. We can set it up using that daily interval.So that's getting to be a little bit (13:28) flexible here, but hopefully you're following that instead of every 14 days, it's every 28 days. (13:35) Let's look at our next scenario. So we're going to add a work order to schedule quarterly (13:40) air filter changes.Okay, perfect. So let's go back to our series. (13:47) Okay, so we have biweekly, we have car drive.Now we're going to put in (13:52) a quarterly air filter change. So let's just call this quarterly, if I can spell it, quarterly (14:01) air filter change. And you might have a template for it.I don't. I could probably (14:08) use my service template, but I'm just going to leave it blank for the sake of the demo. (14:12) And we want this one to really stick out on our list.So here I can put in a tag and you'll see (14:21) what this will do in a moment. Okay, this just gives me a way now to be able to pull those out (14:25) of the list. For our item code, we might have a code for air filters, or you might just have (14:34) a reimbursable or concierge charge.However you have it set up is fine. But I have a particular (14:39) code here for replacing the air filter, $20. I'm going to say save and add occurrences.(14:47) And now we want this to be every quarter. So I'm going to start it on January 15th. I'm going to (14:52) have everything start on the 15th just to make it easy for the demo, but you can pick any day (14:56) that you want to start.And I'll pick no end date. And I could at this point just do quarterly. (15:04) This would be great if you've got a handyman who's going out and they're going out strictly (15:09) to do the air filter changes.So you can do it every quarter and then they would take that (15:14) date and schedule it every quarter. On the other hand, I would like to do it myself. (15:21) As long as I'm there during the home visit, do it at the exact same time.So I'm not making (15:25) a special trip. So whereas I could do it quarterly. And let me just show you how that looks.(15:32) I'm going to hit insert. I'm going to hit okay. And you'll see now it's every quarter, (15:37) January 15th, April 15th, July 15th, October 15th.But we know that this doesn't necessarily (15:44) line up with the home visits. So let's do this. I'm going to come back here, say January 15th, (15:50) and I'm going to change it to daily.And I'm going to put in 91. Now why 91? Well, (15:59) everybody knows a quarter is like 90 days roughly, but some months have more. But I did 91 (16:06) because if you do the math, seven times 13 is 91.Seven being the number of days in a week, (16:14) every 13th week, basically every quarter is 91 days. So if I do it January 15th, (16:21) every 91 days, it should line up with our existing home visits. So I want to delete (16:27) these quarterly ones.So that's why I checked the box, delete existing. And now I'm going to say (16:31) insert multiple, say okay. And now that will create for me every 91 days.Now you notice it's (16:39) a little different. January 15th, April 16th, July 16th, October 15th. But if I go back and (16:47) look at my overall schedule with my home visits, let me refresh this.We should see it line up. (16:53) So we have the quarterly on January 15th. If I look down here, quarterly on April 16th.(17:04) See, we did it based on every seven days. And you'll notice it didn't necessarily line up (17:10) with my weeklies. Okay.So a little bit off on the logic here, but you get the idea that we (17:19) aren't necessarily 100%. If this was a weekly home visit, it would have lined up. (17:24) This is where we can now change those.You'll notice I'm at the host on the ninth. (17:32) And my air filter change is on the 16th. So let's say I want to change this to the ninth.(17:38) And at the same time, I want to change all the future ones at the same time. (17:43) In other words, I want to shift everything back one week. So I'll check the box here.(17:49) For this quarterly air filter change, it's on April 16th. (17:53) I'll come down to my actions on selected work orders. And I want to change the date.(18:01) In this case, I want to change that date from April the 16th to April the ninth. (18:10) This is what you want to check. Slide all future occurrences forward.Or in this case, (18:15) backward because we're going back a week. It doesn't matter. It will slide anything (18:19) by whatever period you put in.So if I hit that and I hit update selected work orders, (18:27) it's giving me a reminder here that you told me you want to slide them. And there's no undo. (18:32) Once you slide them, they're slid.You can go and slide them again, but you can't necessarily (18:37) just undo. So I'm going to say, okay, now what did that do? Let's bring up our air filters. (18:44) So we see that we have the 15th of January.Then we have our air filter change on April 9th. (18:58) So that's great. That lines up with our home visit.And then we come back here, (19:02) July 9th. Remember, it slid it out or back a week. So this is okay.We don't have any home (19:09) visits scheduled because we only did three at the end of May. But you'll see that it also slid this (19:13) one and this one, both back a week. Maybe in this case, when we add additional home visits, (19:19) we'll slide it out a week, but you get the idea that you can slide back and forth.(19:27) All right. What is our next scenario? How are we going to add more here? (19:32) So add, we're going to change to weekly visits in March and April, like Arizona's monsoon visits. (19:40) So the reason I bring this up is I know that I have a lot of clients in Arizona and their clients (19:48) might be biweekly through most of the season, but it isn't March and April.It's actually (19:58) June through September. But I'm picking March and April here because it's a lineup with what we did (20:03) up here through May. But we want to change this to weekly visits.And like I said, in Arizona, (20:08) they do that during monsoon season. So weekly visits in March and April. Okay.(20:15) So let's take a look at what our schedule currently is here. For Russell in March, (20:22) we are going out there on the 12th and the 26th and so on. So what we want to do is we want to (20:30) have weekly visits in between here.So that means rather than March 12th being the first visit in (20:35) March, it should be March 5th. So how can we do that easily? Well, we have every other week. (20:46) So what we need is every other week in between the 5th, the 19th, and so on.Let me show you (20:56) how we would do that now. Sorry, save and close this. So we have all of those.Let's add a new (21:03) series. And this is going to be our weekly March and April series. I'm going to set my default (21:15) template back to my home visit because I know that's what I have.We're going to do the (21:20) home watch house weekly. We know the rate was $60 for him. Now I could put in more notes again, (21:28) like I had the mail processing before, but I'm just going to save this.Now we know that we (21:35) want it to start on March the 5th, the week before we already have scheduled. (21:42) And we wanted weekly visits through March and April. So I'm going to pick April.(21:49) I'm going to say bi-weekly. Now why bi-weekly? Again, because we already have the visits there (21:57) on the 12th and the 29th, but we want to create the ones in between the 5th and so on. And that's (22:04) where we have this one saying weekly March and April.So if I go down here now and say insert (22:11) occurrences, this has created it every other week, 5th, 19th, 2nd, 6th, through the 30th. (22:22) And if we go back to our list and refresh, if we go down to March, we'll see now that we have it (22:31) March 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th, because we have the original ones we put in that said bi-weekly, (22:40) and we have the filler ones that we just put in here now that say March and April. (22:45) So you see, this is really adding everything into the schedule we wanted to.So we're purposely (22:51) getting a little bit confusing on the scenarios, but I just want to show you how really any type (22:59) of scenario that you need, you're able to do with a little bit of creativity using the scenario (23:06) management. Let's look at the next scenario. So we want to do the card drive work order so that (23:11) it's always the first visit of the month, accounting for five weeks in December and March.(23:19) So this, we jumped ahead a little bit with the shift, but this is kind of what we want (23:27) to do again here. We want this to be the first visit of each month. So it's the first visit in (23:32) February.In March, it's actually the second visit. So in this case, card drive, we want that to be on (23:40) the 5th. So I'm going to, sorry, I'm going to go back up to that card drive on March 12th, (23:52) and we want this to now match the 5th, the first home visit of the month.So we'll check that box, (23:59) and we want to now do the same thing that we did a minute ago. We want to change the date. (24:04) We want to change this date to March 5th, and we'll slide.Update. Say okay. Now let's take a (24:18) look and see what we have here.So now the card drive is on the 5th, so that's the first visit. (24:23) If we look at April, the card drive is on the 2nd, which is our first visit. So because we're on (24:30) weekly now, it lines up perfectly.Now May goes back to the bi-weekly, and you'll notice that the (24:38) card drive actually ended up on April 30th. So this ended up being a five-week month in April, (24:44) so our card drive is a week earlier than we wanted. So this is again where we're going to (24:50) need to move it.So we're going to move it from April 30th to May 7th. So we'll come down here, (24:57) change date, make this May 7th, leave slide check, say update. So because of the five-week (25:10) months, it does get a little trickier, but you'll see that what we're doing now is May 7th, (25:16) first visit, okay, and then we don't have any home visits scheduled in June, so you know these (25:21) are all fine, we'll just leave these alone.But the five-visit week, you know, kind of throws it (25:27) for a loop when you're doing things the first week of each month, but it's really easy to hit (25:31) the slide and just change the two or three months that you need to during your season, (25:35) and everything else should follow suit because you've used the slide feature. I'm going to come (25:42) back here to say save and close. Now you'll notice we now have four different series for Williams.(25:49) So no matter what we have, we can create that, and you can have as many different series for (25:55) a customer as you need in order to build out their schedule. So the last scenario that I have (26:04) on my list for today is we wanted to build the client TRO a monthly fee on the first, (26:11) but still schedule home inspections weekly and have everything show in the client's invoice. (26:17) So this is exactly what we did a minute ago with Russell.So let's just go ahead and set this to (26:24) TRO, and we want to bill him a monthly fee on the first of each month. So I'm going to click (26:38) add new series, and we'll just call this his, you know, monthly home watch fee. I just have (26:50) a monthly here, you might have says, you know, monthly service.So let's just say we're going (26:54) to charge him $300 per month. Okay, so we'll save and add occurrences, and we're going to have this (27:05) start on January 1st, and no end date, and it's a monthly fee. So we'll just do monthly.(27:16) When you do monthly, you have two options. You can say, I want to create it on the first, (27:21) third, fourth, Wednesday of the month, because, you know, we picked a Wednesday, or create on the (27:27) same date each month. Well, I want it to be on the first each month, so that's why I'm going to (27:31) pick create on the same date each month.Otherwise, if it's something you do on the first Wednesday, (27:35) you can do that as well on the second Wednesday. I'm going to say insert. This will hit the button (27:41) there, and you'll see now that sets up all my occurrences on the first of each month.(27:49) Now, we also wanted to put in, we're going to do weekly home visits. (27:54) So I'll do these weekly home visits, add a new series, weekly visit. (28:03) I can pick my template, and this is my weekly home visit.Now, in this case, (28:15) we don't want to bill for it, because we're charging him a monthly fee, but we want to be (28:22) able to put that weekly visit on a schedule so that we know what we're doing, so we can do a (28:27) report, so the report gets emailed out. So this will allow us to do that and not charge him. (28:33) Now, the other option you have here is, do you want that to be on the invoice or not? (28:39) What, if you have this as include on invoice, it will put this line on the invoice, even though (28:44) it's a zero fee, and this is nice, because this will now give him an invoice that says, (28:50) here's your monthly fee, and here's all the dates we went out in January.(28:55) Here's your monthly fee, and here's all the dates we went out in February. (28:58) So this would show both. If you don't want to show him the dates you went out on the invoice, (29:02) you can uncheck it.I'm going to leave it checked and come down here, add my occurrences. (29:11) I'm going to stay, say I want to start this on the 9th, and it's weekly, no end date, insert (29:20) hit okay, and I'm done. So now I have weekly home visits, say save and close.(29:33) And now you'll see, we're going to have a monthly fee, so we're going to bill him monthly, (29:40) and we have a weekly home visit starting on the 9th, and that's going to go on every week on (29:46) Thursday. So these two together now gives me the scenario I was just looking for, (29:50) to bill him a $300 monthly fee, but yet have him on the schedule every week. (29:56) All right, so that's basically everything that I had scenario-wise.(30:02) We covered the slide as well. I hope that was beneficial.