10 ServiceTitan Tips to Fine-Tune Your Business for Spring

1. Office Timesheets

To streamline operations and keep payroll flowing smoothly, Office Timesheets is basically a time clock for your office employees.

“You can run payroll both for your office side and your technician side through Service Titan,” Kohberger says. “This ties really well with the payroll sign-off features, and I highly recommend using the payroll sign-off if you haven't implemented that.”

The best thing about Office Timesheets? Employees in the office no longer forget to clock in, Gonzales says.

“As soon as you sign in to Service Titan, if you have Office Timesheets loaded and ready to go, it will remind your office staff to say, ‘Hey, did you clock-in? Did you get this done?’ So it's no more of, ‘Oh, I forgot to clock in, can you adjust my time card?’” she explains.

Office Timesheets can also be used to track meal breaks, event check-ins, and training sessions. If you’re not using this feature, just ask your customer success manager to enable it.

2. Pricebook (the core one)

In the original ServiceTitan Pricebook, you can make price adjustments to multiple things at once with bulk editing.

“You don't have to export your Pricebook to do most bulk edits,” Kohberger says. “If I just need to change the description for 10 or 20 of these things all at once, you can do all of that right within the Pricebook itself.”

“So, I don't have to export my Pricebook in Excel and then reimport it anymore, Richard?” Gonzales asks.

“You do not,” he says. “And you want to minimize that as much as possible, right? Otherwise, you’ll run into import errors. If you get one period off somewhere, it's not going to import. Plus, now you have to worry about the iterations of your Pricebook.”

Bulk editing allows you to make multiple changes at once, such as adjusting your pricing for services by percentages or a flat-dollar amount.

“This is not only going to save efficiency, but it's going to make sure everything's updated quickly and you're not running into those issues when you export and import from Excel,” Gonzales says.

>>Watch Blue Collar Nerd’s video on How to Bulk Edit Your ServiceTitan Pricebook.

Another cool Pricebook feature, Dynamic Pricing, will be released later this year. You set the rules, then the Pricebook prices assigned to those rules automatically follow them. The rules can be applied to material markups, surcharges, billable hours, after-hours pricing, and more.

“Dynamic Pricing is a huge step in making your Pricebook a lot more automated,” Kohberger says, adding that it’s currently in the closed beta stage for release.

“I'm stoked. I can't wait to do this,” Gonzales says.

3. Payment Collections and Automated Refunds

Payment collections and automated refunds are two separate features, but you must be using payment collections in ServiceTitan before you can deploy automated refunds.

“If you've run a business, at some point you're going to be issuing refunds, it's just part of it. It happens,” Kohberger says. “Automated refunds makes that process a whole lot easier.”

When using the feature, you’ll be prompted to choose from a list of refund reasons. Was it a customer complaint on a job? Was it a billing error? Did you take a deposit, but the job got canceled? 

Select the reason, then you can decide whether to refund specific invoice items or a specific amount based on dollars or percentages. Finally, choose a method of refund payment, such as cutting a check or paying by credit card.

“Then it takes care of everything automatically,” Kohberger says. “You don't have to manually make any adjustment invoices or worry about things in your accounting not being right.”

Gonzales says your Accounts Receivable team will “appreciate the heck out of this.”

“On each refund, I think we’re saving anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, just because of all the other steps you used to have to do,” she says.

4. Purchasing Module

Companies use the Purchasing Module as a centralized hub for tracking all purchase orders, allowing them to easily see which POs have been sent, received, partially received, or remain pending.  

“It’s just a place to keep track of everything, but it also gives you the opportunity to keep your job costing more accurate, because you're able to tie purchase orders to jobs,” Kohberger explains. “Any cost associated with that PO is now associated with that job.”

POs can be emailed straight out of ServiceTitan, either by your technicians in the field or the office staff, and the Purchasing Module manages non-job POs just as easily as POs tied to jobs.

“Just being able to do a PO on a job from the office and from the field at the same time, you don't have to wait for somebody to send a ticket back,” Gonzales says. “It's a lifesaver. We love it.”

Another reason to use the Purchasing Module, Kohberger says, is because it unlocks another ServiceTitan feature: Payables.

5. Payables

Just like the Purchasing Module tracks all purchase orders, the Payables module generates bills for those POs, tracks the status of each bill in one central hub, and allows whoever approves bills for payment to sign off remotely. 

This core ServiceTitan feature also offers companies the opportunity to earn 1% cash back on payments submitted through Payables. When you choose to pay through the module, ServiceTitan contacts the vendor and offers them a virtual credit card.

“If the vendor accepts that virtual credit card as a form of payment, you get 1% cash back on that transaction,” Kohberger says. “Now, if they don't accept the virtual credit card, it's still okay. ServiceTitan is just going to offer them an ACH or some other form of payment.

“It’s still taken care of. You don't get it back to then deal with yourself, or anything like that. But you won't get the 1% cash back in that situation,” he adds.

Gonzales says free money is always good, but she was a bit skeptical at first.

“I wasn't sure about giving ServiceTitan access to my checking account. But that's not how it works,” Gonzales says. “They set up a completely separate account to pay all these bills. It's a separate account, like church and state.

“I love the fact that I can be anywhere and I can approve payment. I don't have to be physically in the office to sign the check, which means things get done so much quicker,” she adds. “We can also see when the check has been cut, if it's on its way, if they've received it, and if it's been deposited. It makes my job so much easier.”

>>Pay Bills, Track Vendor Credits, and Earn 1% Cash Back with ServiceTitan Payables!

6. Schedule Assistant

The Scheduling Assistant feature, set for general availability in the next ServiceTitan release, will help your CSRs and dispatchers easily determine which time slots are available to schedule that next job with automated intelligence. 

When set up correctly, this optional feature can even tell you which technician to assign to the job, based on their skillset, current location, and availability.

Say a customer calls in to report an air conditioner with leaking water. This type of job typically requires service within a two-day window, so the Scheduling Assistant quickly narrows the date range, finds available time slots, identifies technicians with the right HVAC skills for the job, and maps out the most efficient route.

“This makes sure that not all of that cognitive load is on just your dispatcher to figure all of that out. This gives them a nice menu to choose from,” Kohberger says.

7. Custom Dashboards

“This feature is really cool, super powerful,” Kohberger says. “And I think that's part of what keeps some people from using it. It's so powerful that perhaps it's overwhelming.”

Custom Dashboards run on the same engine as Reporting 2.0, he says, so make sure to dig into Reporting 2.0 first. But the main difference between the two is that Custom Dashboards can be much more visual, allowing you to easily create pie charts, line graphs, and other visual elements.

“You can put a whole lot of information in front of you at once and digest it,” Kohberger explains. “You can have multiple pieces of information from different report data sets, so you're able to essentially combine reports, see them all together.”

Some of the custom dashboard options include: business owner, sales coordinator, service manager, technical services representative, and others. Kohberger recommends using ServiceTitan’s prebuilt custom dashboards to get started.

“It's really powerful, and you can really get very custom with how you want your information to display. But the prebuilt ones are a great place to start,” Kohberger says.

>>Watch the Blue Collar Nerd’s video to learn more about Custom Dashboards.

8. Estimate Templates

With Estimate Templates, you can pre-build an entire proposal menu for your technicians to choose from, helping them save time and increase their average tickets. 

With good-better-and-best options clearly spelled out on every job, the tech taps one time and all of the information pre-populates in a polished and professional presentation for the customer. It pre-populates, but doesn’t lock anything in, allowing the tech to adjust as needed.

Not only does it help techs improve their performance, it also makes customers happy. For example, it helps to eliminate the issue of two techs quoting different prices for the same equipment to customers in the same neighborhood.

“Your customer experience will be consistent across all technicians,” Gonzales says.

Kohberger says shops who started using Estimate Templates in 2021 saw a 7.5% increase in revenue.

9. Google Local Services Integration

ServiceTitan’s integration with Google Local Services is another great way to grow revenue. To set it up, you need to tie your job types to the Google job types. And now, Google Local Services offers an instant booking feature that allows your customers to book jobs directly through the ad.

“You got to play the Google game. Google is the No. 1 way that people are finding your company,” Kohberger says.

“The other cool part about this is that the bookings, when they're submitted, they go straight to your call screen,” Gonzales says. “That way, all the customer information's going to automatically import.”

You can also set up alerts to notify you when leads come in, so you can take immediate action and avoid missing out on a potential new customer.

10. SMS for Recurring Services

Hot off the presses! ServiceTitan just released the new SMS for Recurring Services feature this month, which allows companies to automatically send maintenance reminders via text messaging to customers.

“No more having to 100% rely on your CSR outbounding calls to every single customer to get all of the maintenance appointments booked,” Kohberger says. “You set this up from the marketing tab in ServiceTitan. This is not a Marketing Pro exclusive.”

This feature not only prevents missed maintenance appointments, Gonzales says, but also helps to book more jobs.

“There's somebody who already booked 46 appointments from just this feature, and another one booked 74 jobs. Awesome!” Gonzales says. “Everybody is having so much success with this.”

>>Watch Blue Collar Nerd’s video on How To Set Up Automatic Recurring Service Reminder Texts to learn more.