Issues with Recurring Service Events

[haleyg94]

Hello,

I've noticed some small flaws with Recurring Service Events in ServiceTitan over the past few months that have led to major issues with our record keeping and eaten up hours of my time to fix. I'm sharing here in the hopes that some of this feedback can help the product development team to fix the issues, but also because I think that these are things that can be avoided by setting things up properly and correcting some misinformation given during the training and implementation phase. 

1. A couple months ago, we realized that Recurring Service Events were disappearing from our Follow Up list when the corresponding membership expired. In theory, this makes sense -- if the service isn't scheduled during the contract period, then it should expire. However, as a courtesy to our customers, we prefer to reach out again before we dismiss the service (especially since most of these customers are renewing their agreements anyway). During training, I specifically asked whether a Recurring Service Event would disappear when the Membership expired or the date of the event passed, and was told it wouldn't disappear but would live in the Follow Up list until it was manually dismissed. This is not the case. I ended up having to go back through every Membership to confirm we completed all of the services we owed. It took forever.  Ideas to solve this issue:

• Make sure the training team is aware that Recurring Service Events will disappear if the Membership expires so that ServiceTitan users are not misinformed and can proactively handle the expiring services before they disappear from Follow Up list.
• Add an option that we can turn on to prevent Recurring Service Events from being dismissed or disappearing automatically, so that these services can only disappear from the Follow Up list if we manually remove them.

2. We have been noticing recently that every once in a while a Recurring Service Event that we know we've already scheduled or completed will still appear in the Follow Up list. Obviously, we don't want this to happen, because it risks either wasting resources to complete the service twice or looking unprofessional by calling a customer to schedule a service that's already been done. I took a deeper dive into the situation today to figure out what was going on, and realized that there are two issues at play. 

1. We automatically add a labor task that is supposed to appear on the invoice when the job is generated. It turns out that when things were set up, the labor task was added both to the Job Type and  the Recurring Service Type. Therefore, the task appears on the invoice two times. This wouldn't be a huge deal, except...
2. When an office user or technician manually deletes one of the duplicated tasks, it causes the Recurring Service Event to be marked incomplete! It turns out that the system thinks that the Recurring Service Event is complete not based on the completion of the Job it's tied to (which would be more intuitive), but the specific task within the invoice. On some level, this makes sense, I suppose -- if you didn't complete the task, then the service is theoretically incomplete, right? Except -- that's not how things usually work in practice! Almost never do we send someone out for a maintenance visit and not then need to go out again to complete that visit. It's such a rare occurrence that I'd much rather have to manually go in and mark the visit as incomplete, because I'd almost never have to deal with that situation anyway. If no change is going to be made, then it should at least be made clear during the implementation phase when users are setting up Memberships that the Recurring Service Event is tied to the task, and that you shouldn't add the same task to both the job type and the Recurring Service type.

Hopefully our experiences will help other users avoid these issues and headaches in the future.

[celiachurch01]

1. I believe there is a configuration that will prevent recurring services from being removed from the membership after its expiration. I'd reach out to your CSM, or the CSM team, to get more information on this. This may be a configuration that can be turned on by the Live Chat support team but I'm not positive on that.

2. Is it possible to create an additional job type for your recurring service events? It sounds like you may have a task linked to the job type that automatically populates anytime the job type is used. You may be able to create an additional job type that does not have this service task linked, but still set the recurring service's billing template to add the necessary service task(s) to the invoice when booking the event.

Not sure if any of this is helpful but hopefully it is!

[JohnM]

Recurring service events also disappear if a job is created for one of those events and that job gets cancelled. The recurring even does not reset. The system things the even is complete. 

[celiachurch01]

If you edit the individual membership you can delete the recurring service, click save, edit the membership again, and add the recurring service back and often times this will reset things. I know that this is not the ideal workaround, but I have done this many times in the past to correct mistakes such as my CSR team dismissing services incorrectly.