ServiceTitan Reporting: The Key to Operational Efficiency

ServiceTitan’s powerful reporting capabilities, when set up properly and used correctly, can help service businesses transform the way they operate. 

Adam Cronenberg, a ServiceTitan user since 2016, explores how ServiceTitan reporting helps him drive efficiency, save time, and streamline operations at Besser Garage Doors in Orange County, California, and Element Mist in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Cronenberg, a partner at both companies, shares his best practices for setting up reports that matter, automating workflows, and getting the most out of your data in the next episode of the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast—where we get expert advice from power users.

Ready to optimize your service business’ workflows? Let’s get started.

What is ServiceTitan reporting?

“ServiceTitan reporting allows you access to the incredible amount of information that’s stored within the ServiceTitan database,” Cronenberg says.

ServiceTitan Reports are broken down by pre-built or canned reports that you can use as is or modify to make your own, or you can build your own reports with your own custom data sets. You can also select categories of reports to be sent to specific business units, such as call metrics reporting to your call center staff, and schedule those reports at whatever cadence works best.

“There are a lot of permissions built around it, too, for data safety and security,” Cronenberg says. “It’s one of my favorite parts about the ServiceTitan software.”

Users view the reports directly in the ServiceTitan user interface to see fields with information, some with hyperlinks to click on for more information, such as a specific job report. Reports can be exported as a PDF or Excel file to allow sorting and manipulation of the data. 

Within the user interface, Cronenberg says you can also drag and move the columns around to add different KPIs or change the order, as well as copy a report by clicking on the duplicate button. Once you format a report and start using it, you can save it so it pops up that way every time.

“You can schedule these reports to come to your inbox, so you don't have to remember to log into the system to run the report,” he adds. “You can say, ‘Hey, I'd like to look at this once a week. Please send it to me or my team at this time, on this date, for this set of data, and you can kind of set it and forget it.”

And recent enhancements to ServiceTitan reporting allow users to schedule reports by business unit, which automatically captures any new employees onboarded to that specific team and schedules that report to be sent to their inbox.

Where new ServiceTitan reporting users should start

To get comfortable with ServiceTitan reporting, Cronenberg suggests, “just go in and play around.” But first, check with your software administrator to make sure you have the right permissions turned on to see your reports.

Once you do, see what reports are available and what information you can glean about your business. Try changing the order, changing the dates, changing the format, or adding and removing a KPI. But don’t save any of those changes to avoid messing anything up.

“Just get used to seeing it and by tinkering,” Cronenberg says. “I like to call it my ‘ServiceTitan tinker time,’ where you just get some quiet time and you look at reporting. You can start to get a really good sense of the level of information that’s available.”

One common report is the Daily Huddle Report. “This is a great snapshot that a lot of business owners look at on a nightly basis,” Cronenberg explains. “What happened across my business today? How are we trending? What’s our pace?”

When you find a report you want to dig into further, you can duplicate the report, give it a new name (like “test”), and add the category. You can also play around with reporting in your Next environment.

Basic pre-built reports that owners might use include:

• Call bookings

• Jobs status

• Inventory stock levels

• Accounts receivable reconciliation

• Matching invoice batching with ServiceTitan payments

Or you can scroll through all of the pre-built ServiceTitan reports to see which ones might be most helpful for your particular business.

Addressing workflow discrepancies with custom reports

Cronenberg uses reports combined with Alerts to create workflows for his teams and to make sure certain actions are happening when they’re supposed to.

At Besser Garage Doors, for example, they send an Alert for a job tag called “door won’t close,” and Cronenberg can pull up reports with that tag. Oftentimes, the company receives customer calls like this after installing a brand new garage door or a brand new motor, and typically it’s because the customer placed something in the garage that’s blocking the little safety sensors.

By having the customer check the sensors first and quickly resolve the issue, Besser saves time, money, and hassle for both the customer and the company.

“For us, I don't have to roll a truck out there and block up a time slot,” Cronenberg adds.

He also uses an Exceptions report to make sure his techs are complying with the arrival windows communicated to customers. For customers with a 7 a.m.-noon arrival window, Cronenberg sends a report to his dispatchers at 10 a.m. showing which jobs are booked during that window and how many are marked as arrived, dispatched, or completed.

This 10 a.m. report directs the dispatcher to reach out to those customers who are still waiting to let them know their tech may be running behind, but still plans to visit their home.

“A lot of times I see companies and dispatchers, and they're just scrolling the dispatch board trying to find this information. The information you're scrolling to try to find is in the report,” Cronenberg says.

Once the dispatcher or CSRs notify the customer about the late arrival, they add a tag to the job to indicate the customer received an update. Then, Cronenberg sends himself another report at 10:30 to see what actions the dispatcher took.

“Those queues of reports really help drive efficiencies in your operation,” Cronenberg says. “It's a very overlooked aspect of the efficiency gain, the ROI that ServiceTitan gives you on that efficiency gain.”

You can also apply filters to the reports to only show the relevant information to the person or team you’re sending it to. For instance, you might want to send the same report to different departments, but only show them the data from their own department. 

“We send a scheduled report every single week to our technicians in the field before our weekly meeting,” Cronenberg says. “It goes out at like 4 in the morning on the day of our meeting, and it says, ‘Here are the checks and cash that we're expecting you to turn in today. Please find them before you come into the office.’”

You can also send a report en masse to your technicians that explains best practices for what to include on an invoice, for example. Cronenberg uses reporting to show him what was sold that day and what materials, equipment, and other costs are associated with that job. 

“We can scan through 100 jobs in a fairly short order and look at that job-by-job because of the report, versus having to click in and review 100 invoices manually,” he adds.

Reading through the reports also helps you see how ServiceTitan is supposed to operate. If your reporting shows something is off, it may be that the team isn’t following the proper workflow or something isn’t set up correctly. In either case, coaching may be needed.

“Let's talk about the proper way to process these jobs so we get the desired outcome in the report, because in any system, and ServiceTitan is no different, bad information in means bad information out,” Cronenberg says.

Adopting an efficiency mindset and handling your team’s FAQs

Inventory accuracy can also be difficult to track, so Cronenberg created a report with the customer’s name, job date, and materials used, and schedules that report to be sent to his technicians in each business unit at the end of each day. It basically says, “Here are the materials we have recorded in the system that came off your truck yesterday.”

“Ultimately, the technician is responsible for their materials,” Cronenberg says. “They're the ones receiving all the PO's or transfers to their inventory location. They're the ones who are invoicing the customer with all the materials on it. When we do an inventory count of their vehicle, they're the ones responsible for it. So, we try to give them all the tools to be able to manage and control that.

“Not every guy looks at it all the time, but those that really do, they never have problems with inventory,” he adds.

To help your team adopt an efficiency mindset, Cronenberg suggests checking out, “2 Second Lean” by Paul Akers, a book recommended to him by Tommy Mello, owner and operator of A1 Garage Door Service and The Home Service Expert. In the book, Akers gives his team 15 minutes every day to work on a process improvement.

“His goal is for them to find any concept or any process where they think they can shave just two seconds,” Cronenberg explains. “Over time, those 2-second improvements really add up to be a huge time savings.”

Start thinking about drop-down menus to save your dispatcher or CSRs time when scheduling a job, or train your techs to use pre-built estimate templates with multiple options. Saving time on daily processes like these will add up over time, and help your company become more streamlined and efficient.

“I've made it more efficient, more streamlined. The same people can be more productive, and there's that efficiency gain,” Cronenberg says.

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