Setting up Services and Pricing Bands
Services are the core of serviceminder.io's scheduling and workflow. Every proposal, invoice and appointment you will create must have a Service associated with it. The name you give a service is what will show up when you're scheduling or creating a proposal. It is used in all of the email communications, so it needs to be descriptive of the type of work you're going to be doing.
You can create as many services as you want but it's a good idea to create as few as possible to describe your activities clearly to your clients and to minimize the angst of selecting the service while on the phone with the client.
Step 1: Click on Control Panel on the bottom left hand side of the home page
Step 2: Once inside the control panel, click on “Services” (the screwdriver icon) in the 2nd section from the top
Step 3: As you should all see, the services section is already populated with your main services, all you need to do is set up the pricing bands for those services (which we will get into in a moment).
If you plan to add additional services in your territory, which you plan to offer to customers as a standalone product, you will click on the “add” button. If you have products that you plan to add on to customers proposals, but never sell as a standalone product, those are handled in the “parts and add-ons” section we will cover shortly.
Adding a New Service
Name: The name of your service. You want to make sure this is short, but descriptive
Active: In order for you to be able to send proposals or schedule appointments, for this service, this box must be checked
Description: A long more detailed explanation of the service you will be providing. For instance, “Traditional Barrier Treatment. Appointments occur every 3 weeks on a 21-day recurring schedule
Color: If you want to be able to easily differentiate your services while looking at the calendar screen, it’s a good idea to select a unique color for each service
Taxable?: Check this box if the service will have tax added to the sales price
Queued?: This box should remain unchecked
Self-Service?: This should remain unchecked (used by other brands for customers requesting estimates). This would allow customers to purchase and schedule their own service calls.
Track Rework?: In order to track retreatments, for the service, this box must be checked (for services like tick treatments or bifen granular winter protection plans it would be unchecked)
Seasonal?: Check this box if the service will only be sold during a certain time of the year, leave it unchecked if you plan to offer the service year-round
Scheduling Mode:
-Normal- MS does not use this scheduling mode
-Fixed Location- MS does not use this scheduling mode
-Route Schedule- Select this if your service will be 1 appt and done (event treatment)
-Subscription- (default) This will be a service that repeats until your season end date
-Recurring- This setting is for a service that will recur in perpetuity until the customer cancels
Proposal Invoicing Mode: We invoice on proposal accept
Open Time Granularity: Appointment slot size (not used by mosquito squad, as we do not guarantee appt times)
Service Role: Who will be providing this service? Your applicators are “service” agents, so this should always be set to “service”
Accounting Class: This is handled on the client side (based on where the customer lives) so this box should remain unchecked
Brand Revenue Category: Select which revenue category this service will populate in
Finish Action?: When will the service be completed? For our services, this should be set to “finish appointment”
Auto-Invoice: If you want to allow customers to auto-pay for this service one appointment at a time, this box should be checked.
Auto Invoice Offset: The # of days before an apt. to create the invoice and charge the payment
Appt Lead Time: Lead time for offering appointments to new customers. We usually don’t guarantee appointment windows, so it isn’t necessary to enter anything here
Drivetime Warning: Enter in a # of minutes, and the system will warn you if a drivetime between appts. Exceeds it
Income Account: This should match the name of the revenue category in Quickbooks you want this service’s revenue to populate in (if you see this feature, which most of you shouldn’t, you never need to interact with it)
Messaging: This section is for sending confirmation text messages to your customers (1-way texting is included in your monthly fee). In order for them to respond to your text message apt confirmations, you would need to purchase the “two-way texting” feature
Base Price: This should remain blank. Our service is priced depending on property size.
Base Duration: How many minutes does it take to set-up and break down “home base” at each apt (your trucks)
Unit Duration: leave blank, this section does not apply to our brand
Duration Quantity: leave blank, duration will be entered by your applicators on an apt by apt basis
Duration in Man Hours: this box should stay unchecked
Override Duration from: this should be set to “treatment time”, this way the system will begin to learn how long each individual appt takes, based on your applicators starting and closing out jobs, and your routing will continue to get more efficient
Populate Quantity From: this should be set to “treatment size”
Part Solutions: This should remain unchecked
Unit Price: We don’t charge based on amount of product used, so this should stay blank
Unit of Measure: Type in the word “acres” in this box
Capacity Demand: this box should also remain blank
Override Demand from: We price our services based on the size of the customers property, so you’ll want to select “treatment size” here
Minimum Charge: There is no need to enter anything in this box, the 0-.26 acre pricing band replaces the need to enter a minimum charge
Skills – Barrier: When setting up your service agents (applicators) you have the ability to create and assign them “skills”. Then if you create a service that requires one of these special skills, you would select the skills required to provide this service. That way, only service agents with the skills to do the job would be routed to those appts.
Follow-up Service: This should remain blank.
Recommended Interval: How often do service dates for this service repeat? Example: enter 21 for traditional
Queue Date?: This is not used by our brand and can stay blank, for now. If you did set a date here, all of your customers with this service will show in your queue on the date you set. You would then schedule them until you cleared your queue.
Auto-schedule Followup?: This should remain unchecked.
Season Start/Expiration: Leave these both blank. This functionality is handled when you create your route schedules (1st topic of next week’s training)
Total Visits: How many appointments constitutes a full season of this service?
Create Appts: it is not important what you set here. This function is handled on the route schedule setup.
Align Day of the Week: These should remain set to “No” and “Scheduled” day of the week unless you want your customers who purchase this service to always have their appts on, or near, the same day of the week
Carry Forward Add ons?: This should be unchecked. This is for brands where all of the service is not completed in a single appointment
Invoice Mode: The default is “per appointment”
Pro-Rating: If you want the system to automatically determine how many treatments are left in the season and send accurate proposals to your customers, make sure this box is checked. Otherwise, the system will quote your customers the base price regardless of # of treatments left.
Once you have completed all of these items, click the “add” button in the bottom right hand corner to finish creating your new service.
Now that we’ve created a new service, we need to set the price for it. Once you finalize adding a service, additional options become available when you re-enter that service via the “edit” button to the left of the service name.
Now that we are back in the Barrier Treatment, you will see that the Pricing Bands feature has appeared under the “pricing and duration” menu:
Each of you should see default pricing bands already set up for the Barrier Treatment service. All you need to do is set your pricing for each band. When we click on the “edit” button on one of the pricing bands, it will take us to this screen:
Because we set the unit of measurement for this service as “acres” this pricing band is for a zero to .25 acre property. Please note, the “at least” figure is everything above that number including that number, and the “less than” number includes everything beneath that figure excluding that number.
Price: what will this service cost for this property size?
Formula: This does not apply to our brand and can remain blank
Duration: What is the estimated time to complete a treatment for this property size?
Capacity Demand: Approx. how many gallons of product (or tick tubes) will it take to do a treatment this size?
Ignore Quantity: this box should be checked. We don’t charge based on the amount of finished product used.
Overage Mode: This should be unchecked, we don’t charge extra for using more than the expected product to finish a treatment
Now just click the “save” button on the right-hand side and you’ve completed the pricing band for that service, for that property size. Now you just need to now go in and do the same thing for all of your services and pricing bands (property sizes).