02/06/24 - Webinar - Contracts and Customer Info

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All right. So good afternoon, everyone. I appreciate you joining.

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Tonight, this afternoon, we're going to talk a little bit about the preferences screen and all of the different options that are available in both the New Starter Kit as well as the Bain Home Watch IT business management system. There's a lot of options, especially in the business management system, and I get a lot of questions about, you know, gee, it would be nice to be able to do this and do that. And the reality is, most of the time, it already does that.

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So there is a document out in the Help Center which goes through all of the different fields and what they do, but I thought it would be great to have a discussion around all of the options. That way, I can answer specific questions you might have as we go through. So we're going to touch first on the New Starter Kit, some of the new features that are in there as far as being able to send the reports automatically and so on.

Then we'll get into the Home Watch business management system. And last, we'll do our usual Q&A session. I would like to just leave the questions open throughout the duration because there's enough content, enough different preferences and options that we're going to be talking about that, you know, if you have a question, please feel free to interrupt right at that point so we can talk about it as we go through.

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I think that'll make more sense than trying to hold it off till the end. So having said that, we have one more scheduled webinar in July, which I'm going to try to do something a little different and call it Open Mic Night. And rather than even have a topic of presentation, or if I do, it'll be a very short one, we're just going to leave it as an open Q&A night.

A lot of the feedback I get from clients who participate is that the Q&A is really the best part, being able to hear how others are using the system and what they're doing with it and the questions they have and, you know, things that they never even thought about. So we're going to try to do a whole session just with Q&A and see how that goes. I've got a couple topics that I'd like to schedule.

(2:14 - 7:26)

I do base the scheduling of those and which comes next based on feedback. And, you know, give me your feedback. Tell me which one of these are more important to you, or if there's other topics that aren't listed that you want to have covered, and we'll make sure that we do those in upcoming webinars.

So moving on, you know, I published kind of a long post on the NHWA's Connect messaging platform. Seems that there's been a little bit of confusion going on about the whole announcement of supporting Monitor QA. And so I really wanted to point out that Monitor QA is not in any way a replacement for iAuditor.

In other words, iAuditor is not going away. You're going to now have the option to use either or both. If you look at, you know, these particular slides, you've seen this model before, which talks about the different parts of a HomeWatch business.

If you haven't seen this before, let me just describe. Your HomeWatch business typically has three main components. You've got the reporting, which is your home visitation.

You've got your accounting, which is usually your QuickBooks. And then you have your operations, which is going to be all of the scheduling and overall management. With the business management system, it's always been set up this way.

It just is now you'll see in the reporting side that you have the option of using both iAuditor, Safety Culture, or Monitor QA. And I've had several clients that have switched already and are using Monitor QA, and they're very happy with it. And I have many more clients that are still on iAuditor and, of course, are very happy with it.

There will not be, you know, any forced direction either way. It's going to be a matter of what software you like better and works best for your particular use case. And there are some cases where one will work better than the other.

It's just a matter of, you know, we can discuss that and come to that decision. Starting in February, I've modeled the starter kit with the same construct, the same three components, QuickBooks, reporting, and your operations. In the past, the customer information app was a standalone.

It didn't talk to anything, didn't integrate. It was just a way to store information about the customer and be able to access it if you went out to the property. The reporting software, which at the time was iAuditor, was, again, standalone and there was no integration between them.

Now with the new starter kit and some of the capabilities that Monitor QA has built into the package for me, I have put in some different integrations so that when you put data into the customer information app, it will automatically feed Monitor QA. It'll automatically load all of the customers, their addresses, their GPS locations, etc., directly into the system and will even load that information into QuickBooks for you. Currently, it's a one-way synchronization.

In other words, if you make any entries or changes, always do them in the customer information app and then those changes will flow to the other systems. It's hoped that some features that Monitor QA are going to add to the system for me will allow me then to make that a bi-directional synchronization in the future, maybe later this year, but right now just do your entries in the customer information app and they will flow through. So now you can see the difference and where we're going with that.

So having said that, we'll move on to the Starter Kits HomeWatch Customer Info app and talk about the different preference options that you have within that application. So right now there really is only one option that you have when you're setting up the system and that's being able to automatically send reports via email or via text message. What this means is as soon as you hit the complete button on the report, the system, as you know, emails it to you but it will also turn around and email it directly to your client at the same time.

So you don't have to forward the email, you don't have to go in and manually compose anything or download attachments and resend them. The system will manage that for you. I'll show you how that setup will switch over to the system.

Now I'm loaded. I have the customer information app here loaded in my browser window. It'll work the same if you're using it on your phone device.

I'm just going to do it here for the sake of this particular presentation. So this is the normal view that you'll have, you know, with all of your properties listed and you'll notice that up here in the upper left we have three dashes which brings up a menu of different capabilities, different options. As I mentioned, email setup is really the only preference, only option here currently, but it's quite easy if you hit the email setup.

(7:27 - 9:23)

This will bring up on the screen for you the way that the system is set up currently. So what you'll notice here is I have mine set to automatically email. I have it turned on and I have, you know, various other constructs here.

Let me actually go into edit mode and we'll walk through each of these individually. So I'm going to click down here on the bottom with my pencil icon to take me into edit mode. So the first one is pretty obvious, you know, auto email reports yes or no.

When you first get the system it'll be set to no, that's the default. However, it's quite easy for you to change that to yes and then the system will automatically email the clients when you complete the report. The reply email is going to be a spot where you can put in the email address for your company so that if a client replies to the email you send with the report, it's going to go to this address.

Emails are sent from a homewatchit.report address, but it will, even though it will say that email address, it will show your company name as the sender. The reason for that has to do with spam regulations and rules, so I have to do it that way. It can't be sent from your account directly, it has to be sent from that account, but it will have your company's name on it as the sender and it will have this email address as the reply.

So if they do reply to it, it's going to go to you and not to HomeWatch IT. The next field is a BCC field or blind CC, blind carbon copy. Can I ask a clarifying question? This would allow you to automatically copy yourself or any address on the email as well, so it's going to go to the customer as the two, but it's also going to be copied to whatever address you put in here.

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And it's optional, you don't have to use it, I just have it turned on in my demo. Then you have the subject of the email and the actual template of the email body. So you'll see it's quite simple, there is one variable that you can put in as far as capability and that's this entity dot first name.

If you put this in, it will automatically replace that variable with your client's first name when you do the send. Otherwise, it's just going to copy the text that you have here, so you can put, you know, however you want to attach it, best regards, put, you know, your name, your company's name, whatever you want to. And then the email or the, I'm sorry, the report will be attached to the email as a PDF.

And then the last option here is the text message. So you have the option of sending a customer the report via email or text, and I'll show you how to differentiate that in a moment, but this is a quick little template here for the text message. As you know, you want to keep those messages short, so you can see I have a one-liner here, and then the system will automatically put a link to the report in the text message.

Since we can't attach files to text messages, it's going to be sent via link, but that will get set up in here automatically. So once you're done with that, you'll hit save, it'll sync the system, and you should come back to your property screen, or I'm sorry, to your email screen. We'll go back to the properties here.

Now to differentiate between an email and a text, it's very easy. I'm going to open up the HOFs here. What you'll see down below is right below this owner's email address, you have a prompt that says send the report via text.

(11:13 - 11:55)

Let me open this up in edit mode so it's very obvious. Right below the owner's email, you have this box send via text. Easy.

If it's a yes, the customer will get their report with a text message. If it's a no, which is the default, the customer will get their email, I'm sorry, their report via email. So this differentiates yes or no.

So you don't have to send via text, you can leave everybody as no, they'll all get emails. However, if you want to differentiate, put some of them as text to set that up as a yes. Okay, that's it for the starter kit.

(11:56 - 15:21)

At this point, let me come back to the presentation. Can I ask a question? Yes, please. Yeah, Gary, about the reply email address, I believe label was, you said if they reply to it, it's going to come to our business email, but the from address is going to be HomeWatch IT.

Did you say that? The from address will be info at homewatchit.report. But it would list your name as the from name, the sender name. So even though the from email address is coming from HomeWatch IT, it's going to still say from, you know, Vermont, Vermont HomeWatch. Okay.

Okay. And then reply to would be, of course, to you that way, if they do reply to the email, you'll get it. Yep.

Great. Thank you. Okay.

Good question, though. All right, and then we'll move on to the business management system. I actually really didn't prepare any slides for that, because I thought we'd go straight into the system and just talk about the preferences in detail.

So I'm going to switch back over to my other screen again. All right. So we're in the business management system.

Everybody should know that to get to the preferences screen, you click the three dots here on the admin tile and go to preferences. Excuse me, Gary. Yes.

Did you say you had a document that went through all of the preferences? Yes. Where is that document? If you go into the Help Center and search on preferences, should come up. Okay.

All right. Thank you. All right.

So in the preferences screen, we have this set up into a few different sections just to make it easy. I'm going to cover each section in detail just, you know, so that we can go through that. So the first one, most important, are your reporting options.

We open that section. First question is which reporting app are we using? So we can set it to monitor QA or safety culture. Let me just flip this back to my safety culture setting, just for the sake of the second box.

Then the next option is are we going to add the report email to activities? What this means is when you send the email out to the client, it's also going to store it in the customer's activity log. And if you've ever looked at the activity log, that's on the bottom of the customer screen, where it has all the details about ins and outs, work orders. This would also store the report email in that log so that you have a history of it.

The next option is to update the work orders starting and end times from the report. Gary, can I just ask something? Yes. What you're saying here about email to activities, can you just differentiate if the yes is a default, automatic default, on these as you're going through them? Sure, that's great, I will do that.

So the default on the first one is no. Okay, thank you. Okay, so if you want to turn that on, you need to turn that on.

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Excuse me. The next option, updating the work order start and end times from the report. What this means, if you think about it, your work orders are probably set to start at, you know, 10 a.m. and at 10.30, and that is the starting and ending time that it will show on your work order screen whenever you go.

By turning this option on, it will actually take the starting time and the ending time from the report that you did and update the work order to show those times. So if you got into the home and started the report at 11.04 a.m. and finished the report at 11.31 a.m., that would now be the starting and ending times of the work order, and it would update those automatically. This one also, the default setting is no, but you can turn that on.

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It's actually a pretty nice setting when it's working, when it's used. The next one is auto-send reports at the end of the day. Again, this default is no.

By turning this one on, it will email the reports automatically at roughly six o'clock, so any of the reports that you completed since the last time it auto-emailed will get sent out to your clients. Note that any emails that you have sent out individually won't get duplicated, so the nice thing is here if you have customers that you want to email specifically, like maybe if there's an issue or you want to personalize the email, you can send those out individually as you usually do, and if this is set to yes, then any of the ones that you didn't email will go out automatically. So it's kind of by exception.

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You can email some individually and the rest will get the email automatically. The next option really only applies to some of my larger clients where they have like estate managers. In the customer property screen, you have the ability to assign a customer to a person.

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If you do that and you have this set to yes, that assigned to person will get cc'd on the report email. So it's going to go to the customer, cc'd to the assigned to person, and it's going to show us from, you know, whoever you have set up as the sender, either that's the general admin or perhaps if you have your route technician sending directly, then they would be the from. So this one, not commonly used, but can come in handy if you have estate managers that you want to copy.

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Hey Gary, this is Joe. Can I ask a question? Yes. Back on the update work order start end times, is that also update dates? Yes.

Thank you. Yeah. The actual date and time will come from the report and update the work order.

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Thank you. We'll move on to the next section. I'm going to do the safety culture settings instead of the monitor QA, primarily because monitor QA only has one little option there right now.

So no reason to cover that. So with regard to safety culture, if you're using that, syncing actions to HomeWatch IT issues. If you turn this on, what that means, and we covered this in detail a couple of webinars ago, and you might want to go back and review that.

But that means that if you put an action on a report, it will automatically come back and create an issue in the HomeWatch IT and the business management system. And it's a bi-directional sync so that you can update the status. You can add additional notes, change titles, be able to close it.

And you can close it either from iAuditor or from HomeWatch IT, and it will manage on both directions. The next option, creating an action with an issue is created is actually set to no. And this one is not changeable yet.

This is for future use. So you cannot change that. And by the way, the sync actions also has default no.

This red box, most of the time you will not see that. However, if what's called the API key, and this is a programming term which allows HomeWatch IT to talk to your iAuditor account. If that key needs to be rejuvenated, you can put in your username, password, and say submit, and it will go out and grab that key and put it in.

You normally won't see that because it's not, you know, not an issue for you. It's all set up. And if you're using the system on a daily basis, you don't need to worry about it.

And then the last option here is a link I think most of you are familiar with that allows you to go into the template maintenance for the safety culture templates. So you can add any new templates to the system or update how you want the template to be populated when you create your report. I'll move on to the next section, which is work order options.

If you are sending work orders to a vendor, you can pick the format to use. This is going to be a default HomeWatch IT vendor format. The only time you would ever change this is if you worked with me to create a different format for work orders.

Email template to notify user. There is another webinar we have on email templates. So if you're not familiar with those, you might want to pick that one up.

But if you want to assign an email, your user automatically when you do a work order, on the work order screen, there's a button that says save an email. That is the email template it will use that's here in this box. Sorry, I really didn't say that well.

(21:08 - 22:19)

In the email, try again. In the work order screen, you can do save and email the user. So it will send an email directly out to the technician that they have a new work order.

And it will use this email template to fill in the body of that work order. And you can pull that up. This actually is going to change, I'm going to say sometime in the next four to six months, in that the method app on your phone is going to be enhanced to allow for push notifications.

So rather than the email template, you'll be able to actually push that notification directly out to your route technician straight through the app. So it won't have to go through email at all. This one works hand in hand with the first one.

This is the email template to notify vendors. And this is the work order format. So this is going to be on the email.

And the top one is going to be the format of the PDF. And the last one is the template to use for reminding you about issue follow ups. I don't see many of you changing these, if at all, these are set up as default.

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But they're here if you ever need to. So easy one to skip over. Portal.

I'm going to cover this really briefly, because most of this is covered in detail in the portal information. But if you are using the customer portal, this allows you to say yes or no, I'm going to use communications through the portal, different email templates on how to notify the client and notify the internal folks when those communications are happening. Do you want to notify the admin by email as well as just put something up on the dashboard? And do you want to display worker attachments out in the portal? This one is kind of important, because if you attach documents to the work order, those will then be visible to your customer on the portal if you have this box set to yes.

(23:14 - 23:59)

This can be really handy if you want to attach things like let's say vendor bills, different pictures, anything else on the work order. Now the customer can go into the portal, go to that work order and pull up those attachments. You don't have to send them to them.

They can go in and self-service themselves and get the attachments. However, keep in mind that if you make the attachments viewable to your client, they will see all attachments. So if you attach a vendor bill to that work order, but it's not a bill that you want the client to see because you're billing them separately and managing this more as a subcontractor, then be careful, because if you do say yes and you attach that, your customer would see that.

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And the last option is whether or not you want to use the upsell feature when doing in-residence items to try to sell additional services to your client. Moving on to the accounting options section. This won't be changed too often.

First one is what accounting system you are using. Normally this is going to be set for you, listing one of the QBO options, whether it be, you know, Simple Start, Essentials or Plus or Desktop. The next option has to do with prepayments.

If you are using prepayments, this is how you would like the prepayments to be offset. In other words, they would offset all charges that you make for a client or only the home visits, which would be the occurrences. This is covered in detail in the prepayment setup guide because it's an important decision you have to make on how you want to manage those.

If you are using QuickBooks Plus or higher, you can set up a class code to be used. This is getting pretty deep in the accounting side, so I'm not going to go into what that means here, but if you are using classes, you can identify a class code for your HomeWatch. Using the QuickBooks locations feature.

And oh my gosh, it's been so long since I've used that, I don't even recall. Oh yes, I'm sorry. That's the locations is similar to class.

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So if you have multiple locations, this would turn that on and off. I think I only have one client right now that has multiple locations and they use this feature. The next ones are handy and I think used very frequently, and this has to do with credit card markup fees.

So QuickBooks does not have any kind of way to add markup if your client pays with a credit card. So we've added it into the HomeWatch IT system to manage it for you automatically. If you want the system to add credit card markup, it's easy.

You set up a service code in QuickBooks, which you would then pick in this dropdown. You would put the percentage rate that you want for the markup right here, and then you have the option to either add that markup percentage to all customers when you bill, or only the customers that you flag that will have the surcharge added. If you pick this one, only customers with surcharge added, they also will not be able to pay you with a credit card.

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They'll only be able to pay you with ACH. So this is a nice feature because you can restrict customers that pay you with a credit card to only be able to pay you with a credit card with the surcharge added. So these three go hand in hand for managing your credit card options.

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Next, we get into the report email configuration. This is pretty standard. It's which email report we're going to use for email, I'm sorry, which email template we're going to use for emailing your reports, the subject, and the body of the report.

If you need to modify this for any reason, you can easily do it right here. You've got different tools available, like you can bold the text, you can change colors, you can add your logo, whatever you need to do to markup. There is another video out there as well about email templates that will give you a lot of details.

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But this is specifically your report email. If you want to edit any other email templates, you can always click this button and it'll take you straight to the template editor where you can edit them. Next are the admin settings.

When you generate work orders that have no end date, you probably have noticed that they typically generate and continuously generate a year out, horizon-wise. That's based upon this particular option here, which is defaulted at 12 months. So it will always create those no end date work orders 12 months ahead, and it generates them every Monday.

So every Monday morning, it goes out and generates the next week's worth, so we're all that have a 12-month horizon. If for some reason you want to make that horizon bigger or smaller, you can adjust this. What that will do then is it will also update the planning, the forecasting screen.

So if you wanted to plan further out ahead, you can go to, say, 16 months, and now you'd have a 16-month window of your forecast when you do your planning. The route list. When your route techs log into their application and bring up their route list for the day, this dictates how they're going to see and what they're going to see on that route list.

The default is previous dates. What this means is it will show work orders for that route technician only for today, whether they're completed or open, or any previous dates that have not been completed. So it will continue to roll forward the previous dates, just like it does on the admin, and put all those on the list.

(29:55 - 32:54)

All users will show all work orders for all users on the screen at one time. So if you're smaller or you have your route techs that always share and do, you know, load regardless of who it's assigned to, you can use the all users feature. All users by route is the same thing, except it's going to sort by their customer's assigned route code.

Default is actually not even a default anymore. That's just going to show the current user and only what's open on current day. So previous dates is pretty much the default going forward.

If you want to include activities on the route tech list, you can do that. This would be useful if you put in an activity, let's say for company meetings, or any other schedulable event that's not necessarily a work order, but just an item you want on the calendar. You can say include activities, and that will give you basically the previous dates and include activities for the current day on it.

And then the last is sorted by the best route calculated. This one's not used too often in that if you're using the best route calculation, this will sort the list by that. I think it's more common now to take the best route calculation and reassign all the work orders by new times based on the calculated route, in which case then the previous date works well.

So really a lot of options here. I would say 90% of the time you're going to use the previous dates option. It just makes the most sense.

Time tracking is a feature that allows you to put in the actual time spent on every work order and every line. The time tracking can be used for two purposes. It can be used just for reporting, so you can analyze for example how much time you're spending on let's say home visits, because you build home visits let's say by a flat fee of $60, but you don't know if you're spending 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour and a half, you know, at that home.

This allows you to track and analyze that feature. And then that's kind of option one. Option two takes the time and not only takes what's entered, but also synchronizes it to your QuickBooks timesheet.

So if you're paying your employees based on timesheets in QuickBooks, this would then fill that in automatically for you. Don't change these options until you've reviewed the setup guide for them, because there are a couple steps that you have to do to make sure that it's properly linked to QuickBooks and you have your employees configured so they point to an entity in QuickBooks. If you turn this on without making that setup option or that setup happen, you're going to get an error message.

(32:55 - 34:42)

And it's not an error message I can catch, so you're just going to get a red error message. Internal code switch, that just turns everything on and off that I manage. The primary admin is a useful feature and an important feature in that this identifies who is basically sending out all the emails.

That's the primary purpose of it. So let's say you've got multiple route technicians that are sending out the reports when they're completed. There is an option to, and by default, even though you have different route techs all sending out the emails, they're all going to show as coming from a single email address, which would be the primary admin.

So if you've got three different people sending emails, it's still going to show them all coming from the primary admin, the office address, so your customers will always see things coming from one address instead of multiple people. That's the primary purpose for this. You can set an option so that the email will appear to come from the person sending it.

And if you have kind of an estate manager type of setup, you may want that so that some emails come from John and some come from Bill. That's doable. That's actually an internal setting code that I would put in for you, turns that one on and off.

So you would let me know if you need that. Snow notes description in Handyman. You may have noticed on your customer profile screen and on your route tech, there is a notes field that says either storm notes or it could say snow notes.

(34:43 - 35:07)

You can change the description of that description field here, and that would then change it everywhere. So my Florida clients are going to have storm notes. My Northern clients, Midwestern clients are going to have snow notes.

It's the same field, it's just a description. Handyman is the same type of thing. It's going to say Handyman by default.

(35:07 - 38:01)

But let's say you're in Florida, you don't care about the Handyman, but boy, you really want to specify the HVAC guy. You can just change this description here, and that will change the description on the contact list so that Handyman will then read HVAC, and you can start using it for that purpose. And the last option, which is a fairly new one that was added, is the time sensitive in-residence.

Most of you use the in-residence processing where you can put in your customer is going to be in town from a date to a date, and then it manages all the work orders between those dates. I have some clients that needed to actually make it sensitive to the time of day. So if the client comes in at 3 p.m., they didn't necessarily want to cancel a work order that was scheduled for 9 a.m., or vice versa when they leave.

So setting this to time sensitive will actually require you to now start putting in the time that your customers come and go, and then it will only cancel work orders between that window based on the time. So not going to be highly used, but again, in a state management type of scenario, this could be handy if you're going to be in the property on the same day your client's coming in, but perhaps at an earlier time. And then the last section, very easy one, are the service dates.

So if you are using the service dates with your system and tracking those, this allows you to change any of the date descriptions, or you can add additional dates by clicking the add lines and just typing those in, and then hitting save when done. So you can have an unlimited number of different dates that you want to track in the system and manage those here. Not yet on that one.

That's essentially it on the preferences screen. There's a lot of different options. I covered them briefly.

There's more details as well in the write-up. If any of these options seem like they would be useful to you, but you're not 100% clear on which way is the best, email me or call me, and we can work through those items with, you know, together and make sure that we set your system up so that it works the best way for your business. There's a lot here.

And, you know, I try to make the system as flexible as possible because everybody does their business just a little bit differently. So it is important to have the options. I don't want to lock you in.

So keep that in mind that there's things here that you probably didn't even know existed. A question, Gary? Yes. So again, I'm using the integrated starter kit.

(38:02 - 38:19)

I would not have any need to go into method. Is that correct? That's correct. You wouldn't even have it at this point.

Okay, good. When you're ready to, you know, move on and, you know, upgrade to the business management system, then yes, you would have this whole system. Okay, got it.

(38:23 - 40:13)

I won't flip back to the presentation slide because we're at the Q&A. So I'm just going to open it up now. Please feel free to ask any additional questions about either the topic that we talked about or any other topic that you might like to discuss further.

I'd be happy to work through those with you. I've got the system up. I can bring it up and demo any particular questions you may have.

I have a question. So I'm just, as you know, I'm just launching my business. I have simulated, you know, home inspections and, you know, set up locations and so on and so forth using, you know, using a customer info app and monitor QA.

However, you know, I don't have customers yet. So it is, should I not worry about trying to simulate sending an invoice or is that intuitive enough so that I can wait until I have a real customer where I need to actually bill them and send them an invoice through QuickBooks and learn that on the fly? I wouldn't necessarily do any invoicing until you have a customer invoice. I mean, it's easy enough to go in and delete it out of QuickBooks, but it's so easy to do an invoice that I wouldn't bother with that.

And keep in mind that with the starter kit, you are going into QuickBooks and manually creating the invoice anyway. So it makes it that much easier. You go in, go to the, you know, Mr. Smith, weekly home visit, four weeks, you know, times 50 bucks, and then that'll generate the invoice.

(40:13 - 40:17)

So it's really pretty easy to do. Great. Thank you.

(40:25 - 40:40)

John, where's your question? Surely you have one. You always do. I was actually kind of shocked to see AppSheet.

(40:42 - 41:09)

Were you? You know, I had no idea. I had not looked at your starter kit at all. Never looked at any video, had no idea what it really was.

And I have been creating some minor apps with AppSheet. Ah, okay. So you are familiar with that application? Yes.

(41:09 - 41:40)

Yeah. So I use AppSheet on the front end. And then I do have a lot of different systems on the backend that are handling the integration points.

So the, you know, it drives the front end and makes the really nice looking user interface and, you know, the edits and so on. And then as soon as you save, I do a lot of extra stuff on the backend to manage the integration with, you know, monitor QA and with QuickBooks. So, but yeah, it's a great application for, you know, simple applications.

(41:40 - 41:44)

So you're using the bots and actions. Yes. A lot of those.

(41:44 - 41:48)

And web hooks, no doubt. Absolutely. Yeah.

(41:48 - 41:50)

Yeah. Okay. That's pretty cool.

(41:51 - 42:18)

Yeah. Just curious, since you are using AppSheet for the starter kit, at least, why not use the ability of AppSheet to have a checklist and a report? Yeah. I actually did experiment with that way back when, when I say that it was probably six years ago.

(42:19 - 42:58)

It was way back when iAuditor was having some of the other trouble way early on. And it just wasn't flexible enough for me, you know, being able to rearrange things. You know, yes, it can be done, but your checklist would be very static.

And with, you know, the two apps I have right now, it's a lot more flexible, you know, dragging and dropping, being able to change things, having different types of solutions. It's doable, but it just didn't give me the flexibility that I wanted and the ability to have you all be able to modify the templates easily. Right.

(42:59 - 43:04)

Rather than banging on the spreadsheet in the background. Exactly. Correct.

(43:04 - 43:18)

Yeah. Question related to the integrated starter kit. If, I forget exactly what the setting was called.

(43:18 - 43:58)

I think it was like auto send report or something like that. If, so mine is set to that. If it wasn't, if that was turned off, once I hit submit or complete whatever that button is, does it save it locally to the iPad? And then I would start an email and attach it.

Is that how that would work? Yeah. Yeah. You, you'll always receive the immediate email that you received from Monitor QA directly to you that says, hey, you've completed your report and here it is.

(43:59 - 44:15)

So you can use the attachment there and forward it or copy and paste it or whatever you want to do at that point. It's really up to you. The, just turning that option on or off, just turns off the automatic trigger where it sends the email off to your client.

(44:16 - 47:21)

So that's just really all that does. Okay. Several of my users have it on, several of them have it off.

Gary, have you, you probably had considered and it's probably been requested, but is there a possibility of putting together a user group email so that if we have questions, we can reach out to one another and, and ask them? I know that for me, sometimes when I see the questions, there's questions I didn't even know I had, but then I find answers. And so just wondering if that's a possibility for us to communicate with each other. Sure.

In fact, I'll just kind of open it up. Those of you that are on the call or, you know, some of my more involved clients, what type of forum would work best for that kind of communication? Because, you know, not everybody uses Facebook or likes Facebook. Not everybody wants to log into some kind of forum website.

You know, do you want to use a, you know, WhatsApp chat? Not everybody wants to load WhatsApp on their phone. So you get into this whole dilemma of, you know, what, what forum do we use? And I'm open to ideas, absolutely, because it'd be nice to have some of those questions out there because I do get sometimes the same question asked, you know, multiple times a week by different people. And I would think if, you know, those are out in a forum type of situation, you know, people can refer back.

Like you said, you're reading other questions other people have, and that's how you can learn different capabilities as well. Right. Could you have your own community group within Connect, Gary? That's what I was going to ask.

Or even a Google group. On the NHW Connect, I would say that's a good idea. However, I do have probably a third of my clients who are not NHWA members.

And so it would immediately, you know, exclude them. So that's, you know, I would be a little bit hesitant on that. I would be open to doing it on NHWA Connect so that everybody that is a member would have that as an avenue.

So that's a good one. But it would be nice to also have something else that's open to everybody. Google group is an option.

I know that, gosh, they even still support that. I'll take it away and give you some thought. If anybody else has any ideas, you know, share those.

Linda, I mean, if you can think of, you know, what type of forum would work for you, let me know. And maybe we can put something like that together. I think it's a good idea.

(47:26 - 48:18)

Thumbs up. I know, I turned my mute on. So, you know, there's even, I don't know how many people use Teams.

But, you know, that's always an option to be able to set up a user group with Teams and have it available. And I don't know, there's so many that, you know, who knows. But the easiness of a, the simplicity of a Google group allows you to go in and, you know, you're getting those emails and then you can also search on emails and, you know, find things.

True. So, that's the only reason I said that. I'm actually not even a Google fan, but I know that Google groups work.

(48:20 - 48:40)

Let me look into that, because I also want to make it secure as well, so that, you know, if you do share things, you don't have to worry about it being public. Right, right. So, to the other people that are on the call, are there any other newbies out there? And we've been a newbie for about a year, and we're still trying to launch.

(48:42 - 49:47)

I would certainly, I'm Charlie from Vermont Home Watch. I would absolutely describe myself as a newbie. You know, my business has launched.

You know, I have a website. I have a social media presence. I am now networking with realtors.

I don't have any customers yet. I haven't actually even presented to a customer yet, even though I'm ready. I'm ready.

I've got a binder, presentation binder. I've got car magnets on the car, you know. So, yeah, just, I mean, definitely in the networking stage, yeah.

And are you going to be doing inspections, home inspections? Home watch inspections, yes. Okay. As opposed to concierge, you mean? Um, well, I guess that's, I mean, that those are the terms you can use.

I think we do a little bit of both, so. Okay. Yeah, right now, I'm just going to focus on home watch inspections.

(49:49 - 50:45)

Yeah, Linda, I'd also like to talk to you offline and find out a little bit more about the, you know, delay and launch, as you put it. See what we can do to help get you over that last hump. I know you had a lot of planning and the QuickBooks move and all of that stuff, so slowed you down.

I had a lot of work, but let's see what we can do. Our property managers are ready, so we've had some, you know, we've set up some templates and we've done a lot of inspections with the templates, you know, just trying to get that right and working with people. But I think that, you know, we're very, very close to saying, okay, this is the switch and these are the videos that we want people to watch just to get them started and be able to, you know, move forward with at least the inspection part of everything.

(50:48 - 51:54)

So, thank you. Sure. Great.

Gary, can I ask a question on a different subject? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. You showed me something in the preferences that I was wondering about, and that is sometimes I need a reminder, something I need to do for a homeowner that isn't necessarily billable or I don't necessarily need a report for, but I need to be at that homeowner's house today or tomorrow.

Let's just say take the trash cans out because it's trash day, you know, whether I charge for it or not. I had been just putting it on a Google calendar, which works, but it would boomerang around in the method and give me an activity with no name. Right.

Which was kind of annoying. Right. Yeah, you have your, if you have that Google sync on, you put it in the same calendar as the work orders.

(51:54 - 53:10)

Yes. That's what it will do. Yeah.

Then I just, then you were, as you're going through the preferences, I realized I did not have, what's the box here? Oh, I'm in the wrong place. Include activities on a route list. Okay.

So, I was actually creating some activities seeing, oh, maybe this is how I need to work it. Create an activity. It shows up on the route list to do, and it didn't show up.

Well, I just now realized that I didn't have the box ticked. Yep. And by ticking that, this one right here, that will now include the activities in your route list.

Yes. So, that's one way you can do it. Definitely put the activities there.

It'll show up on your list and nobody will see them except you. So, that's fine. My opinion is why not put it in as a work order and let the customer see that you did do that task, even though it shows up with a zero cost on it, because you gave it to them as a freebie, let them see it.

That's true too. And I have done that. I mean, it's your option.

(53:11 - 53:39)

I personally would bill them, but if you're not going to bill them, let them know you're doing the work for free for sure, so they can see that you're doing some extra tasks there. Well, I generally do bill them, but for something like that. I have created, and I've seen it in your videos, when you're getting creative with your route, or not route, getting creative with work orders.

(53:40 - 54:20)

Serious. Yeah. All right.

So, for instance, I have a couple of people I do a car start for. So, I created, and I only want it done every two weeks or a quarter. So, I create that second job just for the auto start, but I don't create a report for it.

I just mark it. I actually have a box in the actual checklist through iAuditor of whether did I start the car or not. So, I'll check that box, but I'll have that separate job to actually hit complete.

(54:22 - 54:41)

Perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the best way to manage that, especially when things like car starts don't line up, or they're not an every week event. Yes. So, I learned from you the 28-day track, and yeah.

(54:42 - 54:49)

Good. I think that's probably one of the most valuable webinars that we've done, is that Getting Creative with Series. Yes.

(54:50 - 55:29)

Which one is that? It's called Getting Creative with Series, because it really, really shows you how to set up the different schedules, and how they line up. And, you know, I mean, we took all kinds of different scenarios in the webinar. So, you know, we're doing a client every other week, but during monsoon season, we're doing them every week, and then we're doing a car drive once a month, and we matched them all up and did that during that webinar.

So, I think it's a very valuable one. I've got a lot of good feedback on that. John, I appreciate it.

(55:29 - 56:20)

I appreciate you bringing it up as well, because it's very valuable, I think, to everybody getting started with the scheduling within Method. Yeah, because once you get your run of the mill every two-week, bi-weekly visit, once you get that down, then a homeowner's going to throw at you, well, can you put vinegar in my AC unit? I only want it done every six weeks, or three months, or whatever. Then you have to think about that.

Well, okay, it really only works if you use the daily. So, how many days in between visits, you know, and they're all divisible by seven, right? Right. So, yeah, 28 days would be basically every two weeks.

(56:21 - 1:00:21)

What John is referring to, and it's covered in the detail in that webinar, is you know, let's say you're going out to the home weekly, but they want you to start the car once a month. Well, if you put in a work order that's monthly, it doesn't necessarily line up with the weekly one, because they're going to be on different days. So, what you do is you set the one up to repeat every 28 days.

So, essentially, it'll happen every, you know, fourth week, and it'll always line up so that you're out there visiting, doing the home visit, and you drive the car at the same time. And so, it's just a little trick that we talk about, and how to set those up. Quarterly.

A little trick with huge capabilities with it added to it. Yeah, I like that. Absolutely.

I think I already know the answer, Gary, but in your video, helpful video, you talk about being cautious with the work order instruction field, and really, you only have that field on an occurrence. You can't put it in for a series. Right.

So, my question about this was, one of my people said, now, darn it, I know a lot of these people have garage codes, and we can use that instead of the key, especially if we have to have another tech go to the home, but the tech with the key is 10 miles away. So, our alternate way of getting in is a garage code, but then you got to drill down into the notes, which, yes, and I put mine under security info, just like that. Yeah.

And yeah, that works, but I kind of wish it was in your face right on the route list, like a work order instruction would be, but that's just my thing, and I don't want you to reprogram the darn thing to make that happen. You know, that originally, you know, kind of worked that way. The problem is, with the work order instructions, you want those to be used for one-off reminders.

The client's coming in, you got to do this. You need to get that letter from the insurance company and forward it to them, or, you know, he asked you to do something specific. You know, the Wi-Fi camera isn't working, would you go look at it? So, the idea is to put that in as a one-off so that it appears in red, and work order instructions appear in red right here on the list, as well as on the detail screen.

And the problem that we got into with some of my early clients is they did use that for just notes, you know, just different notes, turn the water off, this and that, and so on, that should be down in the property notes. The problem is, because they're just notes, now when the technician gets out there, they start ignoring them, because it's the same thing every week. And so, you know, I already know what it says.

Well, they missed the important part on there. So, that's one of the reasons why, yeah, it's no longer available at all on Sirius, because those should be in, like you were saying, John, in the notes section, and the work order instructions should be the ones that show up in red that really stand out and really point to you, hey, you got to do this special task today. I get it.

(1:00:21 - 1:00:43)

That's the reason it was done the way it is, because they got overlooked, and it causes more problems when you do that. You know, we're creatures of habit, you know. I mean, if you think about it, you know, when I did my home visits, and I'd go out to, you know, the Brower's house, you know, I didn't necessarily open it up to see what the alarm code was, I knew it in my head.

(1:00:43 - 1:02:03)

You know, I'd walk in, I'd punch it in and start doing it. And the problem with that is, you get to the point where you kind of glance around, everything looks as it usually does, and now you start missing things. So, you've got to make sure that even when you're doing the walk through, you do them differently.

You know, one of the NHWA's, you know, recommendations is you follow the wall. So, you come into the house, and maybe you go to the left, and you follow that wall through all the bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, all the way until you get back to the front. So, now you've, you know, walked it through.

And then the next time you do it, you go to the right and follow the wall. So, now you're not necessarily repeating it, and you're not going to miss things because, again, creature of habit, it's just the same old, same old. So, you purposely want to break it up and make it so that you are focused and can catch the little things, you know, before they become big things.

And that's essentially what our business is all about. So, creature of habit, having it all in red, and you start ignoring it. That's... Yeah.

I'm not asking for a feature addition or a change. I just, I get it. Okay.

(1:02:04 - 1:03:41)

So, John, I have a question for you. If you're using the safety culture, the eye auditor for the inspections, and you have, it sounds like you have more than one person other than yourself who's doing this, do they all have access to the codes that are in method? Is that something that they all have access to so that that information is there, or do you, how do you split that? Maybe that's the question. Well, I'll probably ask Gary to explain part of this, but in my scenario, I have full access.

I'm the admin. I have one other person who is using route tech, and he's a little bit limited. I think he sees route tech and maybe customers, Gary.

I can't remember now. That would be Brandon. I don't know for sure, but I guess to answer where you're going, Linda, is in your user file, you can control what the users can and cannot see and what they can and cannot do.

Now, this is actually pretty recent, but there's, you know, two items here where if you don't want them to see any of the alarm info or any of the lock notes info, you can hide those from the different technicians. So, you know, if you have kind of a general handyman, he doesn't need to see those things. You can click the buttons here, and they won't then be able to see those for those particular properties.

(1:03:41 - 1:05:34)

Well, ours is the opposite, but they do need to see them just because, you know, we have some teams that go out and take care of properties, and if something comes up, then, you know, they need to be able to get in. And for the summer, we are working on some of the teams allowing them to work for 10-hour days. So, that means that the teams are really important on those days, you know, that people are off.

But I was just curious if they're looking at their phone, if they're looking on their device, and they are going through the inspections on their phone, and oh, I need to get something, then they need to switch over to method, and they need to get that information. So, I was just curious how many people had all of that. That's how we do it.

We sometimes we have to bounce back and forth between I auditor and method. Yes. Yeah.

And I think that this is just a learning curve for me. I think that all of them can set up preferences that they can use individually so that they're mostly looking at their own properties, but if they need to look at somebody else's, they can. Correct.

Well, I have an 84-year-old gentleman who's been doing home watch since 2007, and up until about five months ago, it was all on paper, a paper checklist. Now, I handed him an iPad and I worked for him for three straight months, about three days a week, and the man hasn't even graduated from, actually, an improvement for him was a flip phone. So, you can imagine his struggle with an iPad.

(1:05:35 - 1:06:28)

Well, we worked together quite a bit, and now the way he works is he does not have the RouteTech app. He is only an I auditor user, which means that each morning, when I look at my work orders for the day and his name is Ken, I look at all of Ken's. I do the calculate the route.

So, I click all of Ken's. I do the route calculation, and then I fix it if I think it's wrong, and then I go through and send all those I auditory reports for Ken's day to his device. That's all he sees is those I auditor reports to complete.

(1:06:30 - 1:07:34)

There's no fooling around with method, and it works for him. It may not work for every case. That may not work in the situation for our handyman.

We've got two handyman on board, and obviously, they get thrown a lot of things to do, and that may be something that would work for them because they're not doing inspections. They literally are fixing things, but that's good. That's good information.

All right. Well, I appreciate that discussion. I think that was good, and the questions and so on.

I think we had a good one, and this is the reason why the next one is going to be open mic night because we went long today, and I think a full hour next time will be really good for everybody. Thanks, everyone, for the participation. I hope this was helpful.

It was, Gary. Thank you very much. I'll post this out in the next 24 hours.

(1:07:34 - 1:07:38)

Thanks, Gary. Thanks. Have a good evening.

All right. Thank you.