Webinar - May 20, 2025 - An Introduction to the Fundamentals Package Beta

(0:00 - 0:15)Thank you all for joining this afternoon. This is going to be kind of an interesting little introduction here. Starter kit has for the most part been in existence in the same format since 2017.(0:17 - 1:33)2023 I added a number of enhancements that took advantage of some things that Monitor QA allowed and then last year added some, you know, synchronization to QuickBooks and invoices and so on. But this is really kind of the next step. What happened is the starter kit basically became too popular. It was written for smaller companies and it was written to, you know, handle a decent number of those. What I never expected was to have about 140 different HomeWatch companies on just the v24 version of the starter kit and about almost 20,000 reports in there. And so I knew I had to make some changes and correct that. So what I've done is completely rewritten this from the back end forward. I'm going to show you a couple pictures here. And basically it's no longer going to be a starter kit. It's now going to be a fundamentals package. So we're going to have two offerings, the fundamentals package and the pro package. So the fundamentals is going to be a simpler, easier to use version for the smaller company.(1:33 - 3:57)And then the pro package will continue to be available for larger companies that have more diverse needs that need the extra capabilities that that program has. I have a lot of people right now, even on the pro package who tell me it's too much. It's got too much for them. They don't need something that complex. They need to do reports, schedules, generate invoices and be done. And so fundamentals right now is basically going to provide that. So just a quick intro, like QuickBooks, it's going to have two different applications. It's going to have a desktop application as well as a mobile app. The desktop app will basically do everything that you need to do in the office. The mobile app will do everything that you need to do out in the field. So there are certain things that will not be done in the field, but will only be available in the office, such as generating invoices. The scheduling is going to be a little bit more simplistic. You're going to be able to schedule reports daily, weekly, monthly, in any interval of daily, weekly or monthly. It's also been designed to have what I'm calling auto-correcting reports. What that means is let's say you schedule a Smith home visit every week on Tuesday, but this week you do it on Wednesday. What the system will do then is it will create next week's report on Wednesday. There's nothing to stop you from doing it on Tuesday, a day early, in which case it will then make the following weeks back on Tuesday. So it'll basically correct itself automatically depending on whenever you do the report. So you don't have to worry about switching dates or changes. You just have to do the report and it'll adjust itself. Invoice generation, similar to v24, this is going to have a very robust invoice generation, which is going to sync with QuickBooks, Zoho Books, and Zoho Invoice. So with QuickBooks and Zoho Books, this is a two-way integration now. So that means you can make changes in both HomeWatch IT and in the accounting system and it will sync those back and forth. Zoho Invoice doesn't have that capability as it's a very simple entry-level product.(3:57 - 7:11)If you're not familiar with it, Zoho Invoice is a free invoicing program that we integrate with the Fundamentals Package so that you can generate your invoices, send them out with Zoho Invoice, receive your online payments, do your bank deposits, etc., all within that program. And it's free as long as you limit yourself to 500 invoices per year. If you have more than that, you can move up to Zoho Books, which allows you, I think, 1,000 on their free plan, or you can move to QuickBooks. And all of those work fine with the system. The new Fundamentals Package will also sync and integrate with both Safety Culture and Monitor QA. So this allows you to use whatever reporting system you currently have or whichever one you prefer, and all of those are integrated into the HomeWatch IT app. So all of this will give you more growth, more integration, and more flexibility. But where it really shines is with the architecture that was built. So as I mentioned, I needed to make it more scalable because there are larger companies and companies with many more clients that are running on the starter kit right now than were ever anticipated. I have a couple clients that have over 80 customers, and so it just is a little bit overwhelming. So what has been done is we have designed a primary database, which is going to hold all of the information for all of the companies. This is the one that you will interact with if you're working on your computer screen, and you'll see that in a moment. At the same time, on your mobile device, whether it be a phone or a tablet, there is a miniature version of the database running. And these two are in sync at all times whenever you have internet connection to the mobile database. If you lose connection, your mobile continues to run on its local copy of the data, and when you get internet connectivity back, it will then synchronize everything back to the primary database. So this will give you the ability now to work fully online or offline from your mobile device and not have to worry about areas with weak or poor or no phone signal or during times when we have some blackouts or bad storms or what have you, you're going to be able to continue to work with your mobile database directly on your phone. So with that, I'm going to pop over to my screen, and right here I am logged into my desktop app. So this is going to bring up for me a little bit of a dashboard. You can see I've got a map view. You know, you can click on the map view to bring up whoever the client is. You can click on them to go straight to them. You can see you've got a little bit of statistics here about the system, and all of this is built in the dashboard. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start kind of at the back and work my way forward. I'm going to show you first the settings.(7:12 - 10:47)So when I click in the settings, this is where you can set up your company name, logo, all of this information. You can set up the report options, so you can turn on the capability to automatically email the reports out to your clients, as well as set up what the body of the email, the title of the email, etc., look like or the body of the text message. This is a simple template. When this goes out to your client, it actually gets put into a much prettier template. It'll have your logo on it. It'll have a little button that says click here to view your report that they can click on, and that'll open up the report link, and all of that is tied together in a nice graphical format with whatever verbiage you put in here. Text message can't be quite as pretty, but basically it'll have whatever message you have here, plus your company name, plus a link to the report. So keep it very simple for a text message. Integrations is going to give you a single place to put the different integrations that we have. Currently, we've got the reporting system and the accounting system. I'm investigating a couple other items, and feedback, because this is beta, feedback is always appreciated, but I have this particular system connected to Monitor QA, and from an accounting standpoint, I'm hooked up to QuickBooks. If I click here on my account tab, what you used to log into the HomeWatch IT dashboard or the HomeWatch IT portal for, you can now bring up directly here in this application. So all of your account billing information with HomeWatch IT, you have your payment info. If you need to update your payment info, you can do that right here. You've got the users that are set up on the system. In the near future, you'll be able to add or change or delete users yourself right here on this screen as well. And for those of you that are familiar with the project plan format that you used to get through the HomeWatch IT portal, now it's right here in the app. So you can go to your plan, you can look at the steps that you have to complete in order to get up and running, mark those complete when you're done, and then the system will automatically update and show you your next step. If I look at my lists screen, I've got three different types of lists. I've got my report templates, so everything from your reporting system, in my case Monitor QA, my item codes, this all came from QuickBooks, so this is everything that I'm going to be able to bill for within the system, and my notes prompts. Let's go back to the report templates for a second, and then I will show you what the notes prompts mean. So report templates, these are my templates that have synced right out of Monitor QA. I can go in and click here to go into the details of that if I want to, for example, change the name or change how this particular item is going to bill whenever I use this template. But I think one really nice feature that you will appreciate is the ability right here to edit the template. So if you need to make changes to this home visit template, you can click here where it says edit. The system will automatically take you directly to that template, even though it is in Monitor QA, and you'll be able to make whatever edits you need in the template right here. Once you're done, you've saved it, you can come back to the system and it will sync that over.(10:48 - 11:59)Notes prompts, I think, is kind of exciting. With the starter kit in the past, you had a bunch of different notes that were available for you to put information about each of the facets of that particular property. So for example, what are the air conditioning settings? What are the water notes? What are the auto notes? You know, you recall you have those settings. Now you have an unlimited number of configurable notes, categories, and prompts that you can set up. So you're going to get it out of the box with these, I believe it's nine or ten categories. And then within each category, for example, if I click here for HVAC, you can then set up what are the different types of notes that you want to store for your HVAC. You'll also notice all over we have these little drag bars. So if you decide that you want to change the order, all you have to do is drag and drop those around and it will rearrange them according to however you did that. Water, for example, if I'll click on water, you can see we can set up all kinds of different notes.(11:59 - 17:20)So it's up to you. You can be as detailed or as concise as you want and set up whatever notes prompts you need. Where you'll see these used, of course, is on the properties. So I'm going to click over here on my properties item and this will bring up for me a list of the different customers I have. I can then click on a particular customer like Mr. Brower and this will now take me into the details of his property. So the first thing you'll notice is it's a little bit different in that we've separated out the context from the customer information. So what it says here in customer name, I have mine set up to be, you know, Bill and Susan Brower, but this can be anything you want to use to actually name the customer. It can be the address. It can be some kind of code or ID. It doesn't matter. This is your nomenclature for the customer name. It has nothing to do with the context. Now you can have as many contexts as you want for a particular property. In this case, I just have homeowner items and I'll show you what those mean in a minute, but you can also add service providers, the landscaper, the pool man, the, you know, housekeeper, whatever service providers you need. And what's nice is you can control which of these contacts is actually the one that's going to sync between, in my case, QuickBooks and HomeWatch IT. So you can set up one of these to be the QuickBooks contact. So in my case, QuickBooks is going to read Bill and Susan Brower with this email address and phone number, but yet I have these other contacts available. For each contact, you're able to configure the email address and phone number, mention if it's a property contact, if they need to receive reports or not, and you can send the reports to as many contacts as you need for a particular property, whether it's the accounting contact, and you can only have one accounting contact per property. And you'll see if I were coming here and change this now to say Bill and save this, the system will immediately change my QuickBooks sync so that it's Bill rather than the two of them. In this case, I want the two of them to be my accounting contact. So I'm going to change that back and save it, and it now makes that my QuickBooks contact. You've got a place for the photo, the map location. We'll go to the security tab. This is pretty similar to what you have in the starter kit right now as far as alarm codes, passwords, alarm notes, lockbox, et cetera. Where it deviates a lot, we go into those notes, and you'll remember those notes prompts we looked at. So what you'll see here now is this brings up any of those prompts that I have filled in for that particular property. So you can see exactly all of the details that I have, and I can scroll down and, you know, you'll see everything filled in. If you need to edit any of those notes, you can just click the edit button and you'll be able to type them right in on top. You can track the reports that have gone out or are coming up for a particular customer. You can set up a default report template and how you want to send the report to the customer. Is it via email or via text message or both? And then billing allows you to track, you know, how much we're going to charge for every rate, what their ID is, terms, et cetera. And I'll show you a little bit more about billing in a moment. If we go to the reports tab, this will show you reports that have been completed and reports that are upcoming. And I'll go into this in more detail when we get to the mobile app. Schedule allows you to set up a schedule for each and every customer. So if I click on an existing one here, you'll see that for Brower, this is the template home visit. Our report title is going to be a weekly home visit. We started it on March 17th every week on Monday with no end date. If you have monitor QA, you can put an auditor hint in here that's going to show up on your monitor QA report. If you have safety culture, this is just a note that you can have on your phone that will show up. And then every time we do a report for them, you know, for the Browers, weekly visit, it's going to basically put in this billing code with this rate in their file so that we can do a bill. By putting in those billing entries, every time you complete a report, the system will track that you have gone and done a home visit report, and it will track the amount that you set up for that particular visit. Then when all of the, and you can add these items remotely in the field from the phone, you can edit them here, you can add them here, but all of these get accumulated when you're ready to do the invoice. So we click on invoicing. You'll see that currently I have some existing invoices.(17:20 - 19:53)And again, these will sync back and forth with QuickBooks. You can look at the details behind each invoice by clicking on it and see exactly, you know, what that item entails. I can also click on generate invoices, and this is where it now takes all of those billing entries, tells me what I have accumulated by customer. I can then pick my invoice date and which customers I want to invoice, hit the button, and it would automatically generate the invoices for me and sync those over to the accounting system, whichever one you have. So it keeps it nice and simple and very handy. So having shown that, I'm going to flip over to my phone and show you how this looks from the mobile standpoint. So I am logged into the app. Right now, my app is showing me I am online because I have a green cloud with a check mark. If I go offline, this will turn to a red cloud, and you'll know that there is no connectivity. When it is syncing between the primary database and your phone database, these arrows will flash, showing you that data is moving up and back. Down below, I have my menu items. I have my properties, my reports, my schedules, my map, and my billable items. And those match up pretty much to what we looked at a minute on the desktop application, only they're written here for working offline and working on your phone. If I click, for example, back here on the browers, I can see all of the basics of their property with regard to security and context. I can bring up their notes by clicking show notes here, and this will now open up all of those notes that we looked at. So I have everything here that I need to know in the palm of my hand to service that property. I can look at their schedule. I can look at billing items for them. I can look at reports. I'm going to do this. I'm going to go to the greens, and I'm going to click on reports. So you'll see that we have a home visit that's due today that has not yet been started. I can click on that item to go into it, and I can make any adjustments if I need to. Or right from here, I can click open the report.(19:54 - 21:03)This will immediately open my reporting application, whether it's monitor QA or safety culture, and I can now conduct the inspection. And then when that's all said and done, all you have to do is swipe back, and you're back in the application. If you need to create a new report ad hoc, you can do so by clicking this button here. It's going to assume I'm going to do it for the green because I was on their account, but I can come in and pick any one of my other customers and create a report right here on the fly. Now, creating the report requires that you are online because in order for this app to talk to safety culture or monitor QA, it does have to be online to create that report. That doesn't mean you can't go create a report offline from the other app if you absolutely have to, and you don't have connectivity. I'm just showing you that you have that capability here to do that. I'm going to go in schedules so I can look at that. Reports, here's all my reports that I need to accomplish, and completed reports are also here.(21:03 - 24:21)If you're online, you can also go back to any of the completed reports, click the little button, and it will turn around and open up a report for you. And in this case, you can see I've got a safety culture report attached. So I was testing for both and you can see that it does work fine for both. Let me do this. I'm going to actually put my phone in airplane mode. Okay, so you know that I'm in airplane mode. You'll notice here's that red cloud which shows that I'm totally offline. Now if I go back to properties, it brings up all my properties. You don't get the photos when you're offline. This will probably be something that we add in the future, but right now you don't get the photos, but you get all of the information. So I can go into browsers, I can open up the notes, I can look at the notes, I can go in and look at their schedule, I can come back to the main screen and look at all of the reports, I can come in and say what are the completed reports. So you'll see that all of the data that you had available to you is all functional right here with being totally offline. I can come in and add additional billable charges if I want. Everything functions as if I were online. It's now back online and it's synchronized. Anything that I would have done in the mobile app is now here available to me on my dashboard. Are there any questions, comments? Keep in mind this is still considered beta. It's been running with 11 different companies right now for the past month and running pretty well. So there haven't been a whole lot of issues. Okay, John Bianco here. When are you rolling this out? When are we going to have the opportunity to use it? So I have, like I said, about 11 clients currently in beta but that doesn't mean that I can't have more. I am very open to adding additional clients so if you are interested in participating in that, just let me know and I will, you know, be able to convert your data over. Everything converts over if you're in v24 for sure, v23 does. The only thing that's a little bit off, if you want to even say that, is when you're in the notes areas because there are so many more, you know, notes capabilities here than in your existing one. It maps them over the best it can but you might want to go in and edit them and move things around a little bit, you know, if you can. But otherwise all of your data will port over automatically. If you already have QuickBooks or Zoho, we can make that connection as well and you can just continue running. It's actually a pretty seamless process to the conversion. Yeah, that was great. Just a quick second question, follow-up.(24:24 - 24:43)On the current app that I'm using, the notes prompts are already pre-loaded and I'm assuming it's going to be similar. There's already going to be a set of pre-loaded prompts for me to fill in. I don't have to go in there and put those prompts in myself.(24:43 - 25:15)No, no. You will get, if we go to the lists screen, you will get a basically a standard set like this. I tried to create, you know, and be a little bit flexible. We like vehicles and I, you know, put some different items. So you've got a nice starting point as far as, you know, the different prompts that you have. But you can always come in here and add both additional categories as well as additional notes for any one of the existing categories.(25:16 - 25:46)Great, thanks. Hey Gary. Yes. This is Ron Cook calling. Hi Ron. We're talking. Is this program something that you see you'll be switching everyone over in the future? Everyone that's on starter kit, yes. For, you know, I know you're on the pro package. If you, and I've had a couple people tell me that this is more than enough for what they need.(25:46 - 27:15)You know, they don't need all of the other features of pro. So I do anticipate I'm going to have a few people that downgrade from pro to fundamentals. And that's not a problem. That's, you know, I want you to have the software that works best for your particular business. So to answer your question, no, anybody on pro, I don't expect them to move unless they really want to. But everybody on the starter kit, I do feel that eventually they do all need to move simply from a security standpoint, if nothing else. It's a much more secure database. You know, we remove the whole app sheet layer. It's all working directly through a very secure backend program that I have. And you've got that nice synchronization that, by the way, that's all encrypted. All of the synchronization, not only from the primary database to your computer and back and forth, but also all of this linkage back and forth between the primary database and your devices database is, if you have more than one, this is all fully encrypted as well. And there you go. I was working on the mute. I just wanted to say that, you know, you're doing a terrific job with the software system. I am one of the people using it and it does seem more user friendly. It seems faster. I like using it. I haven't had any problems yet.(27:16 - 29:40)Just wanted to give a shout out to you and say thanks. Very, very nice system. And thank you for all the updates. Really appreciate it. Well, I thank you for the feedback and, you know, please keep it coming. I don't know if you noticed the search bar up here. This is today's enhancement, but we are, you know, still making some tweaks. I mean, it's still, you know, in its growth phase here, but I appreciate your feedback. I think for the most part, there have not been any problems, maybe a couple of little display things, but nothing significant as far as like data processing or emails that don't go out or issues with QuickBooks. Everything there seems to be very smooth. Does this have any in-residence features? Coming. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's on my roadmap. I can't give you an exact date on that, but it's coming. I guess if in-residence, when that appears, I mean, I would consider this. Great. I'm not sure what I'm losing. The one big change that you need to be cautious of is when you look at your schedules. Okay. What the Fundamentals has that's different from the Pro package is what I call horizon scheduling. It's going to show you a list of what are the next reports coming up for your different clients. It doesn't have a calendar view where you can say, you know, what does June look like? You know, how busy are all my days of June? It's only going to show you the next upcoming visit for each particular client, for each particular schedule. So you can see, you know, a horizon of maybe a couple of weeks out, you know, for your bi-weekly people, but you're not going to be able to look at like what is June. So that is the one big difference. But again, it's made to be simple. It's not made to be nearly as, you know, complete as the Pro package. Got it. Thank you. Very well done. Thank you. Appreciate that.(29:42 - 30:23)No, this is for me. I'm so excited. I have a possible big job with a lot of condos coming my way. And so I need to upgrade from the starter package. But boy, like the other two just seemed like they were too much. I'm so excited for this. It's going to help integrate everything. I think it's going to be just perfect for my next step. Like it's just when I saw this, I just want to explain, I'm just so very excited. I never thought I'd be excited about software, but I am. So I'll email you. You're becoming one of us. You're geeking out on software. I am. It's horrid, but awesome.(30:24 - 30:43)All right. That's great. Now, just whenever you're ready to make that move, send over an email and we'll put it on the schedule and get it done. Yeah, we'll do it next week. I'll email you tomorrow. Any other questions before we call it an afternoon? Just say, great job, Gary, for what you're doing.(30:44 - 31:12)Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. All right. If that's it, if you do have anything that you think of later, just don't hesitate to reach out. By the way, built directly into the application, you'll see it says help. You can click on that. This will take you directly to a new help center strictly for fundamentals. So I'm keeping it separate from the Pro package.(31:12 - 31:54)And the nice thing is by doing it this way, the little help support person, which you'll see comes up and is named Sasha, she'll understand only fundamentals and be able to answer your questions properly. So not a ton of documentation out here yet, but that's going to be coming as the package matures and we do more, but definitely have all the details like how to set up, you know, how to integrate accounting, how to set up your, you know, your, your reporting system, what to do with your reports, email, here's your note descriptions and how to manage those. So all of that is built directly into the application here with the help.(31:56 - 32:06)All right, everyone. Thank you very much. Have a good rest of your week. And those of you on coming back Thursday, I'll talk to you then. Thank you, Gary. Have a good day.