Back 2 Basics: ServiceTitan Dashboards 101

Why use ServiceTitan Dashboards?

Rohr says the main goal of every business is to increase enterprise value, and that means making money through sales, profits, and cash—the three primary key performance indicators (KPIs) for a service business. 

“We need to know if the company is increasing in value or decreasing, and Dashboards give us additional data to the main KPIs,” Rohr says.

And that additional data can help show you what buttons to turn on to change the behaviors that affect those main KPIs and keep the business on track for increasing enterprise value.

“We want to make better, faster, more profitable decisions,” Rohr explains. “The key is that your frontline team members are the ones engaging in behaviors that are having the biggest impact on the enterprise value of the company.

“So, we want them to have current, accurate, relevant information at the ready, so they can match up their behaviors with the effect those behaviors are having,” she adds. “The frontline really needs to know the score. They need to know their part in the overall game. Dashboards are a great way to share relevant information with your team, so they can play the game for real.”

Building trust through transparency with your team inspires accountability, and knowing the score leads to playing a greater game of business.

“We give our employees these verbal goals, but we're not giving them a way to track them, and then they don't understand what they're supposed to be doing to improve their work at the company,” Burgess says. “These Dashboards are a great way to do that. 

“The Dashboards aren’t just for owners, they're not just for department managers. You can make these for every role,” she adds. “That will help them to understand how they're doing, what they can do to improve, and they'll be happier and willing to do more things for you.”

What are KPIs and where do I find them?

Businesses keep score by monitoring the most important KPIs that help move the needle for the organization. The main KPIs—sales, profits, and cash—can be found in your accounting system via the balance sheet and profit-and-loss statement. Other KPIs, such as your CSR and technician performance, call booking rates, and conversion rates, can be found in your ServiceTitan data.

“We encourage you to look at ServiceTitan and your accounting system—whether it’s QuickBooks, Intacct, or whatever you're using—as one system,” Rohr explains. “Some of the data will be found in ServiceTitan, and the main KPIs (sales, profits, and cash), the balance sheet, and the profit and loss, those are in the accounting program.

“Your Dashboards are going to inform, and support, and export to, in some cases, to your accounting program, but you won't get the same KPIs from both systems. You need to look at both of the systems together,” she says.

KPIs are the metrics directly tied to overall performance of the company, as well as the performance of individual roles in your shop, Burgess says, and businesses should track KPIs consistently.

“Some people get a little bit too crazy with these. You don't need a million KPIs to track, just pick the ones that are important for you,” Burgess says. 

It’s also important to be strategic when setting up your business units, job types, and tags in ServiceTitan.

“Those will affect the information that’s being shown in your Dashboards and in all of your reports,” Burgess says. “It's also important to go back through them once in a while and make sure they still make sense for the current state of your company.”

Rohr agrees. “Because you know what? It's like the back of the truck, it gets messy if you don't pay attention,” she says.

A great example of a messy experience occurred during a ride-along with a service tech. The tech made a great presentation to the customer, Rohr says, but then chose a random task as the customer’s option because it was the right price.

“He was actually picking his tasks from his pricebook based on what he thought the price would be,” Rohr says. “So, you want to ask, ask, ask—and audit that flow of information from the front lines all the way through ServiceTitan, to your accounting system, to make sure that what you're looking at makes sense.”

Then, you can use the information to change the behavior through coaching and training.

“I've sat in a lot of meetings where the information from “the cheeses,” from the big wigs to the team members, were things like, ‘We need more sales’ or ‘We need to control expenses.’ That's really not useful information, I think we all know that already,” Rohr says. “This detailed information with a few KPIs is helpful. Is it an average-ticket problem? Is it a close-rate problem? What are the sub KPIs that we can track?”

Based on ServiceTitan data and research, the best KPIs to track consistently come from your Service, Install, and Sales business units, as well as by specific roles.

Rohr recommends reading the book, “The Great Game of Business,” by Jack Stack, where “open-book management” is the buzz phrase for sharing relevant information with your team. 

“One of the things they do, they focus on one KPI per department, per quarter, or maybe for the year, and try to move that statistic,” Rohr says. “So, you don't need a million KPIs, but what you recognize, you energize.

“If you focus on a KPI, then you can change some behaviors, do some training, role playing, practice with different words, and see what the impact is on the score,” she adds. “Track it consistently, and see if it's staying static, or if it's going up, or if different people have radically different scores. That's where you start.”

Of the KPIs recommended above, Rohr says close rates and average job sales are the two most critical tasks she pays attention to with her Zoom Drain business. For the install department, she looks at job costing KPIs to compare the number of hours bid compared to the number of hours completed.

On a company level, the main KPIs to pay attention to come from your accounting system.

“Sales and profits are going to be on the profit and loss, cash is going to be on the balance sheet, and the relationship between the balance sheet and the profit and loss can also be expressed in a statement of cash flows,” Rohr explains.

The balance sheet and profit and loss are the two big “cheeses” when it comes to reports, Rohr says, and you may need to audit your business units, job types, and pricebook to make sure the information you set up in ServiceTitan is flowing in the right direction.

On the balance sheet, you want to look at the cash, accounts receivable, liabilities, and equity sections daily or weekly. On the profit and loss, pay attention to sales and cost of goods sold by department, all the way through to the gross margin/gross profit level.

“ServiceTitan is designed to use business units to populate ‘classes’ in QuickBooks Online and ‘departments’ in Intacct to give you a nice look at what each department is delivering in terms of sales, gross profit, and gross profit margins,” Rohr says. 

On the ServiceTitan side, completed revenue should equal sales in QuickBooks. 

“Completed revenue is the number coming from your completed invoices and sales are coming from your sold estimates,” Burgess explains. “If you’re ever concerned that those numbers don’t match on your ServiceTitan Dashboard, it just might be a date discrepancy. If you make a sale on the 31st of the month, and the install happens on the 5th, the numbers won’t match.”

Also, the AR number in your ServiceTitan Dashboard should match the number in your accounting program. 

“With inventory and materials, it depends on what modules you have connected,” Rohr says. “With sales tax, I recommend keeping all of the details in ServiceTitan, then lump-summing the total over to your balance sheet so you don’t try to recreate every detail in your accounting program.”

To follow along as Burgess gives step-by-step instructions for setting up and customizing Dashboards in ServiceTitan, watch the full webinar now.

How to use KPIs and Dashboards to make better, more profitable decisions

“So, on the daily, this is where Dashboards can be really helpful,” Rohr says.  

Determine KPIs per position, then put up a big screen in your tech area, conduct tech meetings in front of it, and encourage the entire team to look at those stats throughout the day.

“You want to connect the behaviors with the score as quickly as possible,” Rohr says. “If we only talk about KPIs with our frontline team, they don’t remember what Tuesday three weeks ago was like. They’re not connecting their behaviors with that score. 

“On the daily, and throughout the day, you want to look at those KPIs per position, focusing on the techs, the call-takers, and the dispatchers,” she says. 

On the weekly, conduct a financial meeting to review the numbers on your balance sheet and your profit and loss statement. Confirm the information you’re seeing is accurate by matching your ServiceTitan data to your accounting program.

“That weekly financial meeting gives you a chance to verify the information, and look at those few numbers that make all the difference on the balance sheet and the profit and loss,” Rohr says.

Then, close your books each month after verifying all data related to your assets, liabilities, equities, sales, and expenses. 

“We know the numbers are right, then we’re going to close that month and move on to the next.

That way, the sand doesn’t shift beneath you,” Rohr says.

Just keep in mind, while your business units, categories, and job types inform your Dashboards, you don’t need to use all of them. Keep it as simple as possible and try to align your accounting and your Dashboards with the people on your organizational chart. 

“And bottom line, get your team in on the game,” Rohr advises. “Your frontline will fix everything if you let them know the score and you tie the behaviors to the score.”

>>Ready to dig deeper into Dashboards? Learn more with this help article or through the ServiceTitan Customer Resource Hub.