E-02 Recurring Work Orders and Series

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In this video, we're going to talk about series entry. So if you don't know what a series is, please go back and review the Intro to Work Orders video just to make sure that you're understanding that. So we're going to start here on the work order list, which we got to by clicking on HomeWatch Admin.

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Here we'll see all of the different occurrences that appear for today and tomorrow and so on. And you can see all of those listed. Now you can get to the series that created these items by clicking the Edit Series button on any one of these lines.

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What we're going to do for this video is we're going to create some new series from scratch. Up here in the upper right, you can see there's a button that says Series. And you'll also see something similar to this when you're in the Customers screen.

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If you click on that, it will take you to the new series entry screen. So we'll pick the customer that we want to work on. And I'm going to work on Bill Russell here.

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And you'll see that when I pick him, I do have several series already identified for him that I've created. So you can see here exactly what repeating events we've got going on for Mr. Russell. Weekly home visits, car drive, we're going to change the air filters every quarter, car drive is every four weeks, and so on.

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So this gives you the idea of what we have going on. So I'm going to pick a client, and we're going to start from scratch and have a client that's fresh. So I'm going to pick Mark Rivas.

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And you can see for them, there is no series created yet at all. So that's great. We don't have to worry about that.

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We could hit Add New Series. This will bring up for us our Series Entry screen. And you'll see that the top part of this looks very similar to the Work Order Entry screen.

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And some of the information is the same, simply because this now generates a template to create all of the regular work order occurrences for this series. So we've got Mark Rivas for the job name. Let's put in weekly home visit.

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Again, something descriptive so that when it shows up on your calendar or on your work list, you know what it is. Default report template. You can either leave this blank, and it'll use the template you defined in the customer's profile, or you can come down and pick a particular visit template that makes sense.

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So I'm going to do condo visit because it's a small one. We can put tags in here if we want to, just to identify, you know, maybe it's a condo or maybe it's something special. Tags are a different conversation.

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Starting and ending times, it'll always default to 10 o'clock for a half hour. You're more than welcome to change that. Normally, the time doesn't matter much for home visits.

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So we don't need to worry about that. Who it's going to be assigned to. So you can assign these events to anybody.

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Let's assign them to Robert. So the occurrences will all go to Robert's file. We can also update the, you know, status, invoice status.

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I don't think there's any reason to do that for a weekly home visit, so we'll leave that alone. And we're going to bill for every one of the visits. How do we bill? Well, that's easy.

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This next section, which is identical to what you had on your work order entry. And this is where we would pick what we want to bill for each weekly home visit. So for example, I'm going to put in that this is a HomeWatch weekly visit.

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And I can put in what the rate is for this particular visit. So it's $50. I can, and if you're missing class on your screen, that's okay.

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That has to do with your QuickBooks version. So don't worry about that. If you do use classes, you'll see it appear there and you can identify the class.

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Let's say that you also want to put note there that you need to start the car each time. And we're not going to charge for that. So I'm going to get rid of the rate.

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And we don't necessarily want that to appear on the invoice. We just want that to be information for the technician when he gets out there so that he's going to start the car and do the home visit. And you can add additional lines here as well.

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If you want to put more note fields out there for the technician so that each of those will appear on his screen when he's doing this visit. Once we've entered all of this information, think of this as a template because this is going to repeat now on a weekly basis. We will save and add occurrences.

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The occurrences, remember, are the weekly repeating events, the weekly repeating work orders of this series. So I'm going to click here where it says save and add occurrences. When I do, this will now open up for me my occurrences section down below.

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Let's say that this particular client, we're going to start their visits on the 18th of January. And we can put an end date here. We can say, well, he's only going to be gone for three months.

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So I can pick through the end of April. Or I can also check this box where it says no end date. And you'll see the end date goes away.

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And now we know that this will repeat weekly forever, basically, or until we come in here and turn that off. When you set up the from date, this identifies what day of the week we're going to go to this home. And you'll see that we picked Wednesday.

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So it's going to show you it's Wednesday. And here's where we can set up the frequency. Now, because this is a weekly home visit, weekly is the most common.

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It'll be defaulted. But your other options here are daily. And in daily, the system will allow you to say how many days in between.

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So if this is one, that means it's going to be every day. So if you need to go to a property every day for some reason, to feed a pet, to meet a vendor, a regular, you can leave that as every day. This can be, I could put this as daily seven.

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And this would now repeat every week. And there's some ways you can get very tricky here with this. So I would recommend that you watch the webinar that says getting creative with series, as that will show you different ways to use this information.

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Also note on daily, you also have a box here to exclude weekend days. So for example, if this is going to be every day, and you don't want to go on weekends, you can check the box. And it will not assign it on weekend.

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Weekly is easy. Bi-weekly is the same idea as weekly, except it's every other week. Semi-monthly would be basically the first and third Wednesday, or the second and fourth Wednesday.

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So whatever you select here is when it will get scheduled. Monthly gets a little more interesting. You can see, say, create it on the same day each month.

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So let's say it's a monthly deal, and you want to go out there on the 18th of every month. You would just check that box. And now it would create an occurrence the 18th of every month.

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If, however, you want to say, I want to go out on the third Wednesday. And again, remember Wednesday is identified by the date you put in here. This will then create a new work order every month on the third Wednesday of that month.

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So you see, you can set that up for any of the weeks during the month. Quarterly is very easy. It's just basically every three months from that date.

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An annual would repeat on that same day every year. Again, we want this to be weekly because it's a weekly home visit. So now once we've set up the from date and the end date and said weekly, all we have to do is hit the button here that says insert multiple occurrences.

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It will then tell us exactly what it's going to do. It's going to insert occurrences weekly from that date through that date. Don't worry about the through date if you did a no end date.

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This is basically calculated based on the horizon set up in the preferences, which is normally one year out. You don't have to worry about that. The system will continue to generate that every week as necessary.

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I will hit OK. And after it processes here for a few seconds, you'll see it's now come out and created for me all of these occurrences, weekly home visits, a week apart. So we have the 18th, the 25th, February 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and so on.

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And it's created all of those basically one year out. And it will continue to automatically create them as you go. Now, if you forget to hit this button, it will not create them immediately.

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But the system every Monday goes out and will automatically generate additional occurrences based on the no end date and so on. So if you didn't hit it here, it would have found it and created them for you the following Monday. One last option that you have here on this particular screen is this Insert One Occurrence.

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So let's say we also have a very heavy snowstorm. And the client says, you know what? Can you go out and do an extra inspection on the 20th of January? Sure. All we've got to do is come in here, pick the 20th of January, the time we want to go, say Insert Occurrence.

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And it's that easy. Now we've automatically created one here on the 20th. So we have one extra one.

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So that is how you use both the multiple occurrences and the single occurrences. At this point, it's all done. So we can save and close this particular series.

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I have a Save and Close button right here. If I hit that, this will take me back to my series screen. And now you can see for Revis, we have the weekly home visit.

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If for some reason we need to add additional series for Revis, we can click here on Add New Series and go in and do that. If you need to modify or edit the series for any reason, you can click on the line anywhere here in the line. It will take you back to the Series Entry screen.

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And you can make the change necessary. Let's say, for example, all future occurrences shouldn't go to Robert, but instead should go to Gary. So we'll change that here.

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Now I can, at this point, say Save and Close. And the system says, hey, do you want to update all the occurrences with that change? Yeah. So we'll hit that.

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And that will then change it. If we want to approve, you'll notice here it says Gary. If we want to kind of prove out exactly that point, remember that you can go into the series.

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And down here, you can open up your occurrences section. And you'll see all of your occurrences. And you'll see that they're all now assigned to Gary.

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So it's really pretty simple to use and to set these up. And these are now on the schedule. Let's go ahead and Save and Close.

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And I'm going to go back to my Work Order screen. And if I look at next week, I'm going to change this to Date Range. And next week.

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And the reason I'm looking at next week is because we started him on the 18th. You'll see here's Rivas on our schedule as an occurrence. And again, you can get directly to that series by clicking the Edit Series link right here on that Work Order.

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So if you want, if you say, here's the occurrence, and gee, I need to make some changes to that series, I can click Edit Series. This will now take me straight to that screen where I can make the changes I need to. And then once I save it, it'll go straight back to the Work Order list.

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And that's it. If you have any questions, please let me know. Good luck setting up your series.

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Have a good day.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai - Go Unlimited to remove this message)