Transcription
Hey guys, James here with Waterford Business Solutions. And with us focusing primarily on working with the trades contractors, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, general contractors, everything in that kind of area, we work a lot with very industry-specific software. And while we know many, many software out there, one of the ones that we work very closely with and have a ton of clients using is Service Titan.
Service Titan is a great software from the perspective of everything that it can provide to you, all the information that you can get out of it, the details that are there, etc., etc. Um, they are probably unbeatable if you've got the staff to run it. But at the same time, it is a massive beast of software with a lot of setup, a lot of information, and a lot of things that many of our clients just don't utilize, don't understand, don't get to.
So, we've done a lot of videos in the past talking about the integration, talking about setting up Service Titan, how Service Titan works with accounting and QuickBooks, etc. But we wanted to do a video this month speaking specifically about all the different reports in Service Titan, at least the ones that we think are big ones that you need to pay attention to, and what they are for and how they work.
So, we've come up with a list here of about 10 different, um, sections of reports, 10 different types of reports, and what each kind of report area kind of helps you with, what it goes over, um, along with reports in that area that you should be looking at and what it's going to tell you, and then most importantly, what reports each position in your company should kind of be keeping an eye on and paying attention to. So definitely recommend that if you're using Service Titan, looking at using Service Titan, go ahead and buckle in, join us for this. This will probably be a decently long video. We'll see when I finish talking. But like I said, there's probably going to be about 30 different reports that we're about to go over here. I'm going to do my best to go over it all. But join us for this. >> [bell] >>
Now, before we really jump in here, if you're using Service Titan and having issues, or honestly, more importantly, if you're considering switching to Service Titan or in the process of switching to Service Titan and need help with getting the integration set up, understanding the integration, please, please, please reach out to us. We see time and time again that people rely on Service Titan to set up the integration for them. And the integration with QuickBooks, the integration with their accounting platform always causes issues. And once it starts causing issues, it's so much more difficult to fix. So, if you're looking to get into everything, if you're looking to move to Service Titan and you want to make sure you've got accurate financials, please feel free to reach out to us. We're happy to do kind of a quick overview with you, free consult there to kind of talk about everything and see how we can help you and what you need and even answer a lot of questions that you may have. Absolutely free and at no cost to you before you move into fully utilizing Service Titan. Give us a call here at 864-351-0852 or shoot us an email at info@waterfordbusiness.com to go ahead and set that up today.
Now, getting into the reports, like I said, we're going to kind of cover 10 major areas of reporting in Service Titan and what it's going to look like. So, I'm going to start with basically essential bookkeeping and accounting reports. These are all to kind of track your financial health, understand where the business is standing, and more than anything, identify billing issues within the program. Keep in mind, Service Titan is a dispatch program. They're not an accounting program. While you can kind of go through Service Titan and put in some expenses and kind of track job profitability, it's not a full accounting program. So, none of these reports are going to replace using a QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, Xero, Sage platform to physically 100% track your accounting. What these reports are going to help you do is ensure that the information going to that accounting platform is all there and is accurate.
The first one to look at is going to be the TSYS report. If you're using Service Titan's credit card processor, they're going to have this report, and it's going to basically help you understand when credit card transactions were deposited, how much the transaction fees were, um, what transactions were deposited on which date, everything like that. So, if you're ever having an issue with matching up transactions, matching up fees, seeing what your fees are, everything like that, TSYS is going to be the big, big thing there. So, definitely an important factor to kind of take a look at there.
Accounts receivable is another big factor. We always want to make sure, like we talked about a few weeks ago, that your reports in your accounting system are correct. And one of those reports is the accounts receivable report. So we want to make sure that accounts receivable report in Service Titan matches your accounts receivable report in your accounting platform. This is letting you know what customers owe you money, what invoices are open, etc. And you have to look at this to make sure that you are staying on top of collections, staying on top of cash flow and everything there.
The other big report that you need to look at is the pending export report. This is going to, if you've got a direct integration set up with QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop, it's going to identify any issues with exporting. So, if you ever try to export to your accounting platform and it returns an error, this is the report that you want to pull up because it's going to go ahead and tell you exactly why an export failed to push over and what you need to fix within that export, within the payment, within the invoice, what may be causing the issue and what you need to fix to get it to go over. So, this is a super important report to look at to ensure that all the exports are going over to your accounting platform.
Moving off of your bookkeeping and accounting reports, we're going to move into performance and efficiency reports. This is really just understanding how well your team and business are performing. What business units are doing the best sales? What employees are doing the best sales, etc., etc. So, the three main reports we want to look at here is going to be your technician performance report. This is going to help you understand close rates, billable efficiency, how much hours they're working versus how many of those hours are billable, conversions, how many customers they are converting, excuse me, converting to a membership plan. That way, you lock a customer in with you. So really important here and definitely something you want to be pulling, I would say, at least quarterly so you can track technician performance and set up coaching with technicians if they're falling below standards that you've set.
The other area is going to be business unit performance. Now, this isn't detailed. We're not getting into the weeds of what's the labor in this unit, what's the material cost in the unit, the advertising in this unit, etc. That's all going to be again done in your accounting platform through class tracking generally speaking to understand gross profitability and net profitability of these units. But this report will help you have a high-level understanding of the revenue and performance metrics by each class, business unit, or department that you have within your Service Titan. So it really helps you kind of see everything there.
The other thing is going to be the daily huddle report. This is a great report to pull kind of first thing in the morning for the daily team meeting to kind of get an idea of completed jobs that are done, the rates at which we're converting jobs, number of times we're having to go back out to visit the same job site. This is a quick, easy report to pull so that you can go over kind of those key metrics there with your team during your morning meetings if you do those on a regular basis.
Moving on to kind of financial and operational reports. This is kind of helping you understand profitability and job-level financials. Now, again, this isn't going to be a 100% accurate. Service Titan, when they're talking about job costing and job profitability, they're using a lot of assumptions. They're generally not using your direct payroll expenses, benefit expenses, everything like that. You're having to kind of put in the material. It may not be all the material if someone forgot to put it in. It's not going to have true overhead going on with everything unless you just update that religiously within the system.
The first one to look at here is going to be the job costing and revenue reporting. This is going to give you kind of an overview, decently good if you're putting in all this information into Service Titan, what the labor is for a job, what the material cost is for a job, other costs that might be job-related. But again, if you're not pulling accurate numbers or spending the time to put in accurate stuff from your actual accounting platform, this may not be a 100% accurate report. So, while this works to use, make sure if you're using this and relying on it that your office staff is entering this information correctly, diligently, and timely.
A bigger report in this area that I honestly prefer because it is a big thing that we have to work with a lot of clients on is going to be a WIP report or a works in progress report. Whenever we're dealing with large commercial clients or clients that are taking out, um, bonds, whenever we have to go through those renewals, the bond company wants a WIPs report. They want to know for these jobs that are taking 6, 12, 18, 24, 36 months, how much should we bid them at? How much have we billed out? What expenses did we expect to incur? What expenses have we incurred? Everything like that. If we're tracking all this correctly, this is a report that is going to be very beneficial, especially in providing that information to insurers, bond agencies, anything and everything like that, along with if you're looking to sell the company, it comes in handy there.
The other thing is going to be, and honestly the most accurate without a ton of extra data entry, is going to be your invoice and invoice items reports. This is going to let you drill into the invoice data and understand what items are selling, how often they're selling, pricing trends, whether the average sales price, everything like that on each and every item in your price book. So, if you see that you're not selling much of anything from, let's say, Carrier, maybe it just doesn't make sense for you to stock that stuff anymore and you'll just go to the supply house and get that. So, it lets you make sure that you're running the business with what you're selling and what you're stocking more efficiently.
Customer and membership reports is another key area to make sure that you're understanding your customer and conversion rates. This is helping you monitor customer behavior and really even more importantly, monitor your recurring revenue programs, your ESA agreements, membership agreements, RSAs, whatever you may call it, where they sign up and pay a monthly price or an annual price to keep you in their door. That's such a big thing that we want to make sure we're doing in the trades because it's really built-in revenue there. So, we've got to make sure that we're monitoring that. And this is the area it helps us.
The first area is going to be the customer reports. It's going to help you kind of filter your customers by location tags that you've put in, any type of recent activity that you've done so that you can retarget them with marketing or retention or anything like that. This lets you, if you want to put out a mailing campaign for this specific zip code, we could pull this report. If you tag customers based off of they have this type of unit or something like that, we can pull reports. So, lots of different information we can pull out of here.
And then more importantly, customer retention reports. This helps you track your loyalty and understand the repeat business that you are getting because the most important thing to a company is recurring and returning customers. You can pay $500 to acquire a customer all day long as long as that customer is consistently coming back to you because that acquisition cost in the long run cuts down a lot. But if you're paying $500 to acquire that customer and you're only doing one service call for them and you're only getting $200 for that service call, you've just lost money. We've got the labor, we've got the materials, and you've got that, you've probably lost well over $600 on that customer because of how much it costs you to acquire that customer. So understanding your customers' return rates and everything like that and understanding their lifetime value is a big thing.
But the most important report in this section is really going to be the membership reports. Monitoring how many sales you're doing, what those renewals are, what cancellations you're getting, figuring out why you're getting cancellations, making sure that you're getting those renewals done, etc., etc., all super important and essential for that recurring revenue. That helps you retain customers better. It also gives you a better value for your company. Recurring revenue counts a lot further than anything else.
Then we get into your inventory and marketing reports. This helps you make sure that you're managing stock levels correctly and evaluate marketing effectiveness. There's really only two reports here that we're going to talk about, and we're going to kind of limit reports down a little bit from here. But the inventory management report that helps you if you're tracking inventory, and again, it's all about making sure whoever is in charge of this is doing it in Service Titan. But if you're tracking inventory in Service Titan, it helps you understand the parts that are used, what your current inventory levels are, what you need to reorder, and everything like that so that you aren't overstocked, but you also aren't running out of materials so that you've got to run to the supply house and waste time. If you're tracking inventory and more importantly using Service Titan to do this, this should be something that your warehouse manager is looking at probably at least every other day, if not more, to put in proper reorders there.
Marketing performance reports are going to be another big thing to make sure that you're getting the proper ROI out of your marketing, making sure that you're understanding campaign results, where your bookings are coming from, what lead sources, what the cost per acquisition is, so that we can make sure that we're making money off of everything. If you're investing $10,000 in advertising, what the return on investment of that is, because if we're investing $10,000, we want to be making a hundred to $200,000 minimum out of that investment. So, super important to make sure that we're following all of that.
Call booking reports, excuse me, call and booking reports is where we want to track and make sure that we're understanding what your CSRs are doing and how they're performing on converting calls. You've got the call booking rate report. It just tells you how many calls are turning into actual jobs. That way you can monitor by CSR how they're doing with conversions, how many jobs each one's booking, and if you see someone falling behind, you can work with them for coaching, work with them for how they're talking with potential clients and everything there to make sure that they're getting better results on that. And then call conversion analysis that lets you kind of understand missed opportunities and/or issues with call handling so that you can make sure that not only your CSRs are doing a good job but figure out if there's deficiencies in your company standards and where those deficiencies lie so that you can prevent that going forward.
Scheduling and dispatching reports. This is helping you understand your operational efficiency and making sure that you're not wasting a ton of time running jobs. Your dispatch performance report. That's going to help you evaluate on-time arrival of your technicians, job completion rates, travel time of technicians to make sure that that is all showing up correctly, your technicians are performing correctly, and honestly, more importantly, making sure that, um, you're keeping the company standard up. If you tell a client that you're going to be here at this time, you want to make sure that you're doing that. You want to make sure you're completing jobs and not having to return to jobs. So, this is another area that it helps you understand. And then your schedule efficiency reports help you to make sure that your routes are optimized and/or fill gaps with scheduling or anything that you've got there, identify those gaps and making sure that we're not having technicians run halfway across town back and forth to get jobs done. That way we have higher job completion rates, we can complete more jobs in a day, we've got lower travel time, etc., etc. there.
Sales and estimate reports allow you to kind of gauge the health of your sales funnel. The estimates created versus sold lets you know your estimate closing rate. This is a huge thing that we want to make sure we're tracking for KPIs because we want to make sure that you've got a decent sold rate or conversion rate of, hey, I sent this estimate and we want X percentage to be converted into actual jobs. So super important to understand that along with average ticket size. This helps you to understand upsell performance and job profitability by both each and every technician and by business units. So that you can understand, are the technicians or is the salesperson out there upselling the client, getting that extra money in, and providing some more revenue for you, or do we need to do coaching? Do we need to change pricing or tactics or something like that?
Warranty and recall reports along with equipment reports helps to ensure quality and control and long-term service planning. This lets you kind of understand how often you're going out to warranty specific things, how often we have a recall rate or how often technicians are having to go back and understand what equipment's installed and where. Warranty job reports lets you identify a pattern of callbacks. So, if you're installing a specific brand of equipment and you're seeing a lot of callbacks, this report will let you see that. And maybe it comes down to a situation of, "Wow, this brand is no longer good quality, our customers aren't going to be happy if we continue selling them this. And even though we've got warranty out on this and we're not having to, um, pay for the parts or anything like that because the manufacturer is doing it, well, long-term, if there's a ton of callbacks on it or equipment failures, the customer is probably not going to be happy. So you may want to decide to sell a different brand."
Recall rate reports allow you to spot service quality issues by tech and job type. So, if one technician is constantly getting called back out for jobs that they did, maybe we need to do some coaching. Maybe we need to work with that technician to better understand what they need to do and understand what is expected of them so that the customer gets the proper service the first time. Because if a customer is having to call multiple times, they're probably going to start looking someplace else.
Installed equipment reports. That's going to let you see what's installed, where it's installed, and when it was installed. That helps you when someone's calling in for service, you know exactly what's there so that you can make sure the technician has whatever materials they need. Or it also allows you to be like, "Hey, I see that two years ago we installed this. Does it make sense to go ahead and install a water purifier or does it make sense to go ahead and install this?" And this is why it's important. So, it helps you do some upsells there, too. And or pull some marketing reports here to be like, "Hey, you've got this water heater or you've got this HVAC unit by this brand. They just brought out this additional thing. They've had great results in it. Call us today to get a quote for us to add it to your system type thing."
Location-based and customer insights reports. Those are going to help you leverage geography and customer data to make smarter decisions. The biggest one here that I really like is going to be your revenue by zip code or region. This is going to help you go ahead and target underperforming areas. Let you go ahead and maybe advertise there a little bit more. Or if it's underperforming and you don't like what it's looking like, you can just pull all your advertising and refocus it in an area that is providing more information to you. You also have your customer density report here. This helps you identify growth opportunities and marketing sweet spots. If you've got a ton of customers in one specific area of a zip code, maybe we need to do a mailing campaign to that specific neighborhood to be like, "Hey, we service a lot of people in your neighborhood. Give us a call today for a free tune-up or give us a call to get your foot in the door so that you can get more people in that same neighborhood so that it's closer, less drive time, and you can pack more jobs into one day."
So that's the 10 different report areas that we see a lot of importance with and more importantly the reports in those areas that can help you a lot. I know this is a ton of information. Go back and rewatch this video several times, but the one area that we want you to pay attention to too is what each area kind of helps people with. So your owners, they need to make sure that they're looking at the profitability, the accounts receivable, and the job costing. Whereas your managers, they need to be looking more at the technician performance, the sales going on, and the scheduling. CSRs and dispatching should be looking at their call booking rates, their daily huddles, the dispatch efficiency to make sure that everything is tight and clean there. And then your marketers should be pulling those customer reports, marketing ROIs, and geographic data so that they can better market to your customers there.
[bell] I told you that was a lot of information and going to be a lot of information. There's so many different reports in here. But as you can see, each one has very specific needs, very specific reasons, and definitely something to make sure that you are working with and paying attention to. So definitely something to keep in mind.
With all of that being said, if you need better understanding of Service Titan and how it works, stay with us here on YouTube. Cost you nothing. Like and subscribe to our channel. We put out regular Service Titan informational videos to help you better understand what's going on there. So definitely make sure you like, subscribe, turn on notifications. We'll help you with Service Titan, but we'll help you with so many different other areas. And if you're currently using Service Titan and wondering if you're using it the most efficient or having issues with it with accounting, feel free to reach out to us here at Waterford Business Solutions either by calling us at 864-351-0852 or shooting us an email at info@waterfordbusiness.com and we'll be happy to work with you and help you.