Bulk add material to job

[mattbadke]

Has anyone come up with a novel way of bulk adding material from the warehouse directly to a job. We currently employ a system where we send the techs with a predefined packout, they tell us what they use and then we add it to the job. At the moment this is quite time consuming because you have to go into the invoice and click add material one by one for each SKU. If there was some way of bulk adding via a template or other means that would be awesome, but so far I haven't found any way to make that happen.

[dthompso4]

I would like to see that as well and edit, select, and delete. There are times when the materials transfer over to the invoice for anticipated materials, and then the scope of work may change. It can be timely deleting one by one when they no longer apply. 

[AmberC]

@mattbadke The two mentioned suggestions are the best I could think of too! I voted for the idea though. 🙂

[rstare]

Other options is to create a "kit" task, which has these linked. Then you can add the kit to the estimate/invoice so that it adds these items, rather than having to attached to each equipment/service individually.  If prefer doing the equipment/service links you can export the PB to excel and once you have a "kit" that applies to multiple different equipment/services you can go to the linking tab in excel and copy that list, you'll just have to supply the equipment/service id.

[mattbadke]

I've submitted an idea to have a downloadable template for bulk adding materials to a job. Go here to vote on it https://servicetitan-community.ideas.aha.io/ideas/COMMUNITY-I-1217.

[michael21]

Hi @mattbadke. If you have a standard pack out for a job, add it as materials and equipment on the task.  That will automatically charge the material to the job.  Then remove what they didn't use and return it to stock.  Following steps:

1. On price book, go to task, (or equipment) that will have the standard list of materials.  When displaying the task, click on the equipment or material option to be provided with a screen that will allow you to list the products in the standard list.

2. When booking a job containing a task or equipment item with added products, if you don't know which truck or warehouse the equipment is to come from, don't put any technician assignments until after the job is booked.  This will prevent the system from assuming that the material is to be supplied from the truck that the technician is assigned to.

3. To actually add used materials, select each used item and identify the source.  You can do that by clicking on the red pencil on the invoice and changing the warehouse at the bottom of the material/equipment screen.  To do it even faster, click on the error at the top of the screen to get a list of items charged and mass-change the warehouse there.  For items that are not used, click the X to remove them, or if you are on the screen listing all of the items, change the quantity to 0.

Hope this helps.

[mattbadke]

Hi @michael21 ,

Thank you so much for your reply. I actually started out using this method but the problem we ran into is the variability in what they are actually using on jobs. For jobs where they use the majority of the materials in the packout this works really well, but for jobs where they end up using less than half the packout, it ends up being more work to remove all the items they didn't use than just adding the few they did. The real time suck comes when they use 30%-40% of the supplies because its still not worth adding the task but it takes a while adding the materials. I wish ST would add the ability to download a template and just upload it with items to be attached to the job, much the same way they do for transfers and adjustments. Even a sort of internal PO/transfer where you could just add a list of materials to be "transferred" directly to the job would be handy. Admittedly I think we probably need to re-evaluate whether we're overloading our packouts in the first place.

Once again thanks for your input, I do think this method is solid just not quite right for our purposes.

Cheers,

Matt B CPA

[michael21]

Hi @mattbadke.  The idea of a template for adding materials is a good one, I would suggest that you add it to the ideas section and then  post a reference to it here so that people seeing this can upvote it.  Also, if you do use the method above, you don't really have to remove he unused quantity, just set it to zero on the list screen.  Anyway, I'll watch for your ideas post cause I do think some sort of multi-item update to a job would be helpful.