Webinar - 06/03/25 - Editing MonitorQA Templates

(0:00 - 2:25)I've been asked to do this webinar for a little bit here as far as Monitor QA goes. We did one way, way, way back when, but things have changed quite a bit with the way that their system works as far as templates, and I think that they've made some really nice improvements with regard to that. So what we'll do is we'll talk a little bit about the workflow when you're editing or working with templates in Monitor QA. We'll talk about how to get to the editing screen to make changes. We'll go through and make a few changes and discuss what those changes look like, and then we'll talk about publishing them, and then we'll finish up with our usual Q&A office hours section. So first thing I wanted to do was talk about the actual workflow of the template. So starting off with the darkest here, the 04, which is a published template. These are the templates that you use on your day-to-day process when you're doing an inspection at a home or a concierge visit or an auto drive, whatever the template may be for. So published templates is really your end goal. So what you will do to actually get there is first you'll make a copy of the template to edit. You cannot edit a published template. You can only edit a copy of a template, and the reason that it does that is really just to keep a live version that can be actively used in the field while you make some different changes and edits, and you don't necessarily impact anybody that's working on them until such time you're finished with your edits and you publish that template. So that's, you know, the reason for that. So once you make the copy, you will then make all of your changes to the copy. Once your changes are done and complete, then you will take that and publish that template, and it takes you back full circle to now have a published template. So the workflow works the same on whether you're editing an existing template and just making changes to it or whether you want to create an entirely new template and publish that. We'll talk about both cases. So let's jump right into our demo.(2:27 - 4:17)First, how do we get to the template and edit it? So two different ways. If you're on the Pro package, you can get to the template. Well, you can always get to the template by logging in directly to monitor QA. However, there's definitely an easier way to get there. If you're on Pro, you can go to your monitor QA template maintenance page. To get there, you would go to your preferences screen, which you get by clicking the three dots on your admin tile. Go to preferences, go into your monitor QA section, and you have your manage templates link right here. By going into that, they will open up all of the templates that you have connected to the system that exist in monitor QA. You'll notice next to each template in the edit column, there's a little pencil icon here, and you can click on that to go edit the template. So let's say we're going to edit home visit number two. So we'll just click on our pencil on that line. That will then in turn open up monitor QA directly to that home visit number two template. And here we are. And now at this point, we can start making our edits and so on. Same idea with, let me put this back to our Pro, same idea with the fundamentals package. You can go over to your lists screen, which then defaults to the report templates. And again, if you want to make edits to home visit number two, all you have to do is go into that item and you have a button that says edit template. So if you click on that, same thing, it will take you straight to your template within monitor QA so that you can edit.(4:19 - 7:42)All right, so that's how we get there. Now you'll recall that the first step that you had was to make a copy. So there's two ways you could do this. If you just want to edit this particular template home visit two and make changes in it and then save it back as home visit two, that's very easy. You would come over here and say edit template. If you actually want to make a copy of it, you do have to get out, go back to your template list, which you can go to right here under checklists, under templates. You can go to that particular item and then say copy. This will then allow you to copy that template to whatever you want to name it. Maybe you want to change one and call it condo visit number two, or maybe it's a particular template for a very large property. So it's for the Smith house because they have a huge property and you want a custom template for that. Most of the time, you're not necessarily going to want to copy. You're just going to want to make changes to an existing template. So that'll, we'll go back and do that. So right now I'm back at that same screen, right? The home visit number two, what we'll do is we'll say, we want to edit the template and it's going to ask us, okay, we are going to edit, so we need to create a copy. So it will create a draft copy for you by clicking the button. Now you have that copy and you can make whatever edits you need. You'll notice that now I can click into anything and change it as I need, as I want. So while we're here on the setup screen, we'll start there. There's a couple pieces of data just to share with you. One of them that's important is the historical trends. You may have noticed if you have a particular question on the template that fails more than one time in a row, the system will tell you, hey, this has failed the last two times, last three times, whatever it is. And that's based on whatever setting you put in here. The default is the last 60 days. So it'll tell you, hey, this has failed, you know, perhaps the last eight times if you're on weekly visits. But you can shorten that period to say, you know, maybe just the last audit, the last two audits, you know, last 30 days, whatever other period you want. By default, it'll be 60 days. Other important items down below are signature, if you want to require a signature on the template. This is turned on by default on most of the templates. If you don't feel like you need the signature, you can turn that off here. Public access by default is an item that you always want to have turned on. If you ever have a situation where a client is clicking on the link to look at the report, and it comes up and makes them want to log on to Monitor QA, it's because you have this turned off. Again, it's turned on by default on all the HomeWatch IT templates. But if you were to create a new one from scratch, you need to make sure this is turned on.(7:43 - 8:38)PDF results doesn't really matter, because you are always sending links with the, you know, through HomeWatch IT of the reports. So this setting really does nothing. You can put in, you know, estimated time or so on, not important. The last item on here is something that was just released in the last update that they pushed out on the app, and this is the ability to add a watermark to the photos. So you can turn this on, and this will allow you then to put basically a timestamp directly on the photo itself, and it will also put a notation as to whether or not you took that with a camera, if you pulled it in from your gallery, and it will put all of that notation directly into the photo as a watermark. So that's a new item that you might want to turn on if you feel like you need that.(8:40 - 9:55)We go to the next tab here, which is the Build tab, and this is where we can now make changes to the template. So by going into the build, we see the sections of the report. So my template that I'm editing has four sections, the Home Exterior, Interior, Additional Services, and Departure. Within each section, you can have multiple questions and even subsections, and you'll see it identifies here how many subsections and how many questions you have within each of these sections. If you need to rename a section, it's as easy as coming here, clicking on the pencil, and typing over it. If you want to add a new section, you can click here on plus section, and this will add a new section. If you want to reorganize them, you can come over here to the left side, and you'll see it brings up these little dots, and you can grab hold of those dots and basically just drag or drop to reorganize the sections however you want. If we go into a section, and let's go into our interior because this has a variety of different questions in it. We'll go into the interior, and this has all of the different questions that I have for my interior.(9:56 - 12:03)Now, there's a lot of little settings that you can put here or there, but let's talk about some of the important ones. First off, you have the same little six dots here that you can use if you want to drag and drop and move your questions around. If you need to make changes to a particular question, all you have to do is click on that item, and it will now bring up for you the details behind that question. So at the top, it's the statement that's going to be made on the report, such as check the thermostat for proper settings and operation. Down below here is how you're going to respond to this particular question. The default is this checklist item, which you've all used, which is, you know, the little green plus or the red X. If you want different items, you can click this drop down, and this will show you the different types of responses that you can have for a particular question. So it can say pass, failed. It can say yes, no. You can put a number on there, you know, the checklist we talked about. Text answer drop down. Temperature and slider, don't worry about those right now. Those are actually a little bit more limited and used more for, like, if you're doing a check in a restaurant and you have to check the temperature of the the walk-in freezer and stuff like that. So you don't need to worry about those. But to go through these in more detail, yes, no is very nice in that yes, no comes up, and it also has a default setting right here to tell you it's going to be yes or no. And yes is the, you know, the green answer, and no is the negative answer. If your question is worded in such a way that you want yes to be the red answer, you know, like, was there damage caused by the storm? In that case, if the answer is yes, you want that to be in red. So you can check the box here to make the yes the failed response, and you'll notice now it will be the one that's in red as opposed to the no. So it's very easy to change that.(12:06 - 15:22)Number basically allows you to put in any kind of number between a range, and you can set the range here. So this then allows you to put a number in with a slide bar. So that can be useful for temperatures. I personally prefer using the text answer for my temperatures so that I can put in a little bit more of verbal response, like it was 78 in the house, it was 80 in the guest house, and it was 95 in the garage. And you can put all of those in if you have a text answer. I'm going to put this back to, well, let me talk about drop down. Sorry. Drop down allows you to set multiple choices for a particular question. So check thermostat for proper settings and operation. Let's say instead of that being just a yes, no checklist, you might want to say everything is set properly. You might want to have another response that says temperature required adjustment. You can add another response that says thermostat not functioning. And so this now will give you a drop down so that you can pick from these different responses. So instead of just having a plus, you can pick from these. Typically, if you're using the standard HomeWatch IT template, you'll see that function on the mail collection so that you have different choices. But you can use the drop down and add as many choices as you want for any of those items. Right now, there isn't a way to color code those. Even if you check this as the failed response, it'll bark it red here, but it's not going to color code on the report. It's just going to put the text. This is a feature that is coming from Monitor QA. So if you do have a lot of these choices, you'll be able to color code those in the future so that they show up on the report in red or green. Let me put this back to checklist. Now, you can also set this up that you can require that they sign a particular item. I don't know why you want to sign an item. Just sign the end of the report. You can mark it as critical, in which case, if it fails, you have to pick up an action plan. Again, probably not really needed for a HomeWatch business. What is something you may want to use is this conditional logic. So let's say that on the thermostat, you always want them to put a picture of the thermostat so that you have a exactly how it was set and that everything was functioning properly. So with conditional logic, this allows you now to do that. So what you can come down here and say, if the item is answered, then require a photo. You can also change this to say, if the item is answered, require a corrective action. You can also say, this one doesn't give you a lot of varieties, but if it's yes or no, the responses here will say, if the item is no, then require a photo.(15:23 - 16:46)So you can change this in any way so that if it has an answer, it requires a photo. If it's an NA, it won't require a photo. There's also, and this is a new feature, this information item. So you can put in here, always make sure to add a photo for evidence. And this will pop up when you're doing the report. There's a little information box that you can click on, and this will give you or your employee a reminder of that particular item. If you get into the whole corrective actions item thing, you can set up different templates, select those as far as what you suggest for a corrective action. And basically what that means in this case, let's say that the thermostat failed, so the corrective action will be to call HVAC to repair. And you can put that in here. And then if you get a negative, that will then pop up. And it didn't save it because I don't have it in as a template. But if you have it as a template, you can put that in a suggestion, and then it will pop up and it will save it as an issue if you're running the Pro package. Let's cancel and get out of here. So that shows you, you know, all of the different settings that are available. You'll notice for the thermostat settings, I have these as text answers.(16:47 - 17:11)If I come to my additional services section, here's what I referred to about the mail set as a drop down. So if I click on that, you'll see it brings up these three choices, mail collected processed, mail collected, but all junk, no mail. If you want to add different choices, you can come in here and edit these, hit the plus to, you know, add additional choices in here.(17:11 - 19:51)You can, you know, rearrange them by, you know, basic cutting and pasting doesn't have little drag and drops, unfortunately. But you can put in whatever you want for your drop down questions here and have that used. So this is the primary setup when you're doing the build tab, allows you to make all of the changes to the questions. Preview allows you to sort of see what things look like. So you can see, okay, under exterior here, my questions, you know, it doesn't really let you do anything with them other than to see what they're going to look like on the finished report. What is important is this last tab that says report. And this is what sets up what your report itself will look like. So the first thing is you've got your title page. So most of the HomeWatch IT tablets default to what's called simplified. And that gives you a really nice format here with the name and the logo and so on. The other option is this full format, which gives you kind of a logo at the side with your company name and, you know, similar information in the middle, a little more of this graphics there. So if you like that appearance, you could use full. By default, they're all going to be unsimplified. Now, what do you want to show? Do you want to show when the report was started? And do you want to show when it was completed? A lot of times you might want to turn off the start time. And this is especially the case if you're using the scheduling within the fundamentals package. And if you do some early scheduling, let's say within the pro package, because it starts the report as soon as it's created, and that can be created automatically. So if you started it, you know, like the night before, or if you have it automatically create like the morning of, that start time is going to be a little wonky and not necessarily what you want. So my recommendation is just turning off that start time and leaving the completion time on there. When you complete the report really is the important thing. And that will always be an accurate timestamp from whenever you actually do complete the report. You can also turn the map on or off if you want to show it or don't want to show it. So that's up to you. You can change the color. So these little accent marks that it puts in here, you know, it automatically picks a color from your logo.(19:51 - 21:05)Sometimes it might pick the wrong color, like it may have picked the gray instead of the green, but you can come in here and you can change that. And you can also pick any other color that you want, or even put in the actual color value if you want it to match your marketing colors. Then down below are the export settings. So by default, when your client brings up the report, they have the ability to export it as a PDF. And you can control what you want as the default. Your client can also override this, but this is up to you. I would say a lot of times you don't want the NA answers. By default, most of the HomeWatch IT templates have this turned off. What this means with the NA is if they mark any question within the report NA, it will not appear on the customer's report. So this is a handy way to have questions that might pertain to, let's say, a pool or a wine cellar or something like that. And on a particular property where it doesn't count, just mark it NA, and it will not show up on the customer's report. You definitely want to include files on because if this is off, it will not include the photos.(21:05 - 21:19)And include details you want on because that gives you all of the questions. If you turn that off, you don't have any questions. So my recommendation is leave details on and definitely leave the files on, but turn off the NA.(21:21 - 21:39)Once you're finished editing and doing everything you want to with this template, you can save it here. This will save your edits so you can come back and make more. But if you're done with your edits, you can do a Save and Publish right here at this one point.(21:40 - 21:55)So we'll publish this. I'll hit the button here to confirm that it's published, and now this is live. Any reports that you create from here on out will now use this updated template with whatever question changes you make in it.(21:56 - 22:15)So this is now done and live and ready to go. At this point, we can close this, and you can go back to your fundamentals and close it and so on. Now, one little gotcha, if you even want to call it a gotcha, is let's say that you did want to make a copy.(22:16 - 22:32)So let me do this. I'm going to make a copy of my service record, and I'm going to make this a new template. Copy template, and you would copy it then to the new, it would basically create a copy that says copy of service record.(22:33 - 23:17)You can then go in and edit that, but keep in mind the first time you publish it, the system will sync that template to your HomeWatch IT system, whether it be Fundamentals Pro or V24, if you're still running the starter kit, and it will sync it with whatever the name was at the time you first published it. So it would come up and say copy of service record, and if you didn't change the name of that and then published it, that's the way it would appear when it syncs over to your system. It would show copy of service record instead of saying concierge visit or whatever you wanted to.(23:17 - 23:37)You can always go back and change it. If you are, for example, in the Pro package, all you have to do is click on the name and you can change the name here and save it. If you're in the Fundamentals, you don't necessarily have the ability to change the name.(23:38 - 23:59)It brings that forward from the template. However, you can re-sync your templates, and it will make sure that the names match in here with whatever is in Monitor QA. To do a re-sync, just go back to your settings screen, go under your integrations, reporting system, Monitor QA, and you have a button here that says re-sync.(24:00 - 24:18)So if you hit that, that'll go out, it'll re-sync, it's all done, and now whatever name changes you've made would appear here. All right, so that's everything I have to present today. I'm sure there's a few questions, so let me go ahead and open that up.(24:20 - 24:55)Gary, I have one question. With the yes and no that's green and red, have you ever thought about having the yellow in there as well as an option? Because I know that in reports, I sometimes, let's say, I've seen evidence of water, we've had it checked out, but they've not had it repainted, but I keep an eye on it there. So I just mark it as a warning just because we are keeping an eye on it.(24:55 - 25:52)But when they pull the report and I tell them, if there's an issue, I'm going to call them, but glance through for any warnings. But when they glance down the right-hand side, it just shows up as green and not the yellow. Have you ever thought about maybe adding in the yellow? Well, as I mentioned, they are going to edit the color coding, definitely on the dropdown, but I believe they're also going to allow you to change the color coding on the yes and no's and so on as well. I don't have the exact details on that, so don't hold me to that one, but it's a good question. Now, what you can do is actually create a corrective action, even though there's no action to be taken other than just follow up and monitor, monitoring it is your action. And then by putting that on the report, that will allow you to, you know, it'll show up on the report and show this is an item that you're still monitoring.(25:53 - 27:37)Let me go into a existing report here. So for example, you know, here the windows, you know, let's say there was a cracked window and you're going to monitor that. So what you can do is you can come down here to action and it'll say, what are we going to do? And we'll just say, monitor, you know, crack on front window, you know, to ensure, you know, or, you know, description, make sure it doesn't get bigger. You know, there's a due date, which, you know, that can probably be set way up to, you know, whenever the customer comes back, you know, I'll just put a year from now. You know, you don't necessarily need to assign it, but you can, you know, it's a low priority because it's just a monitor item. And then you can save that. And the system will then, but anyway, you would save that. And then this would continue to show up as open, you know, corrective actions. And that would then give you the ability to monitor that for the customer. Yep. So you see, here's the action right here. So this will continue to appear until such time that you mark it closed and it'll show up on the, you know, client's report as well. But you can create the action at any time by clicking action here, and then it'll bring up a screen on the mobile or, you know, like a, you know, side load, like here on the webpage. And then you can just create in what needs to be done for that particular item. And that will remain on here until it's completed.(27:38 - 30:22)But this will also now, when the report is completed, this will now create an issue in your pro package that you can follow up on. And so, you know, if the crack gets bigger, you've already got an issue. So you can, you know, now call somebody to come out and repair the glass, replace the glass around that issue. You know, you've done a lot of issues, so you know how to do that. But yes, that is a setting that you need to turn on to say, to automatically create an issue from the action when it's created. Okay. And then basically it would show up in the issues list in method. That's correct. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. Sure. Just so, you know, you went over this, this is the last point you covered. And that was when you make a copy of the template, and then you make your changes, and then you hit publish. Does that, if you don't change the name of the template, does that automatically replace the existing template that was there? You kind of went over it, but I missed it. Yes. If all you do is go in and say the, you know, do the edit step. Let's go into our library, audit templates. I'll go back into number two. If all you do is come in here and say, you know, edit here, create the draft, make some changes, and then publish it, it's the exact same report. And what I mean by that is I'll show you that if we go back and look at number two, you'll see here's the history. You know, here are the ones that were first, you know, edited and created. Here's the one I did, you know, a little earlier. Here's the one I just did right now. So it shows you exactly the history of each one that was created when it was edited. So if, for example, you made a bunch of edits and you published it, and you said, oh, geez, that's not what I wanted. You could actually come in here and delete just that live copy and come down here and make, you know, come back to this one and go back and edit it. So it has that version history. So you can always go back in time if you want to revert some changes that you made. Normally, though, if you just make a copy of it and then publish it, it stays the same. It keeps the same name. And just this one basically replaces this one, replaces this one, replaces this one. This is the one that's live and published.(30:24 - 30:37)Does that answer the question? The question, yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And this is being recorded, and this is going to be posted on the HWIT website under the webinars or videos? Yes, it will be. Yes.(30:37 - 30:43)Okay. Okay. Great. Thanks. All right. Everybody's just tired because it's that time of year.(30:44 - 30:59)So I wish you all the best through the rest of the season. We'll start the webinars up again in the fall, and you all have a good rest of your week. Thank you, Gary. Thanks, Gary. Thank you. Bye-bye.(30:59 - 31:00)Thanks, Gary. Thank you.