Webinar - Feb 17 2026 - Scheduling Done Right - Tasks and Reports
(0:02 - 2:00) Good afternoon. So this is kind of a going to be an interesting and exciting presentation. I know that several of you on the call have already taken advantage of tasks, and so we’re going to be talking a little bit about what tasks are, how schedules are set up, what reports are, what’s different, and I think it’s a bunch of really important basic knowledge to really make the fundamental system work well for you.
So just to jump in here, introduction. If any of you, if this is your first webinar with us, usually spend about the first 20 to 25 minutes going through the topic. Then after that, we will have a Q&A afterwards where you’re welcome to ask questions not only on the topic that we discussed tonight, but any topic in general about fundamentals so that we can cover that information.
So that’s really kind of your opportunity to get those questions out. Starting off with reports and tasks, I made a slide that I actually put a copy of this in the email that was sent out last week to introduce the whole idea of tasks, but just to walk through the difference here. Basically, you can think of them as exactly the same, except a task does not have a report.
So they both will allow you to put them on the schedule, so you have a schedulable event. They both will allow you to enter in a billing item and be able to bill for them. They both will show up on your daily lists, not only on the desktop on the pending, but also on your mobile phone when you bring up, what do you have to do today? What’s your pending items? They both can be emailed to the client.
(2:01 - 3:00) However, there’s a slight difference there. As I said, the primary difference is the reports have a report attached, either from Monitor QA or Safety Culture, whereas a task doesn’t. So when would you use one versus the other? So typically, anything that you want to have a report and document, such as a home visit, driving the car, meeting a vendor to do some tasks that you want to document with a report, you would use a report.
Any other event you need on the schedule or to bill for that you don’t need a report, such as maybe going out to the home to take their trash cans in from the curb, or to pick up some mail or packages that were left at the property and forward those. You don’t necessarily need to do a report, so you would do them as a task. Works the same way, you just don’t have to do a actual report from Monitor QA or Safety Culture.
(3:02 - 5:03) Then the other difference that is itemized on here is the emails. With a report, the email is typically sent immediately on completion, depending on how you have your settings set. With a task, it is not sent immediately upon completion.
And the reason for that, it’s on purpose. Typically with a task, you don’t need to use a generic, hey, we’ve completed your task today email. That makes no sense for the customer.
But you can go into the task, edit the email as you sent, and then hit the send button. So you can say, Dear Mr. Smith, yes, we’ve picked up your packages and taken them to the post office and forwarded them. So you can send that final task off.
If you are using the customer app, your customers typically will get a notification from the app that the report has been completed. And the same thing with a task, they will get an automatic notification that the task has been completed, and it will just pull the description in from the task itself and send that to the client. So if your task is set up to say something like take the trash cans in from the curb, as soon as you complete that task, that notification will go out to the app.
So you don’t have to email. The notification is handled automatically and pulls that data in. So that is the difference between reports and tasks.
So now what we’ll do is we’ll take a look at schedules. And I do want to talk about how we can do recurring at various intervals, because I have had several questions about how to set up complex requirements for a particular customer and how to do those with the different schedules. So we’ll kind of cover that right now.
All right. You should see my dashboard here. I am logged into my fundamentals company.
(5:04 - 6:13) I can go to my schedules list, and I can see a list of all of the existing schedules I have. Now, you’ll notice that everything I have on here today is actually set up as a report. And the it’s going to use my home visit template, my service record template, et cetera.
If this is set up as a task, it will actually have the word task here. So you can easily tell the difference. So let’s set up a couple different scenarios.
I’m going to go in here to my plus to add a new schedule. I’m going to pick, let’s pick the Watsons just so we can keep everything separate. I don’t have anything in there for Watson currently.
So this will allow me now to set up from scratch and allow you to show, allow me to show you that. So the first thing we’ll do is we’re going to set up a weekly home visit. So whatever you put in here is what will show up as the title of the report.
(6:14 - 6:57) It will also show up on the invoice line by default. So you can call it weekly home visit. You can call it, you know, Watson residents, weekly home visit, Watson residents, you know, home visit, whatever you put in here is fine.
Just know that this shows up as the report title. So if you put something a little more descriptive, it is easier to spot when you’re in your monitor QA or safety culture system as far as the report goes. So this is going to be a report because it’s a home visit.
So we’re going to want to do a report each and every week. We’ll pick which template we want to use. In this case, I’m just going to use my home visit template.
(6:59 - 7:28) I can assign this to whoever my employee is that I want to do it. Now I will set up the start date. So the start date is actually very important because this does several things.
This first off not only identifies when you’re going to start the visit, but it also identifies what day of the week you’re going to be doing this visit on. So in this case, let’s say that this particular home we’re going to be doing every Thursday. So I’m going to start it on February 19th.
(7:30 - 7:40) And I can pick a time or I can just accept the standard 10 a.m. that it brings up. That’s up to you. Typically home visits don’t require a specific time, but you know, you can accept the default.
(7:41 - 9:35) So this is now set up to start on Thursday the 19th. You’ll see it. It’s, it knows it’s going to be on Thursdays because it shows you that right here.
By default, it’s set up to be every week. So I’ve had questions about, well, how do you do every other week? Really easy. All you have to do is change the repeat every to two.
So this is now going to repeat every two weeks on Thursday. So in other words, it’ll go on the 19th and then it’ll go two weeks later. So that first Thursday in March and so on.
All of the different occurrence intervals, with the exception of one time, work the same way. There’s daily, there’s weekly, and there’s monthly. And we’ll get into that a little bit more detail when we do some complex scheduling.
Now the Watson’s are set up with no end date, which is the default. If they are just leaving for a set period of time, you know, maybe they’re doing a cruise or just doing some snowboarding, you can uncheck this no end date and actually calculate and put an end date out there. So in this case, maybe they’re going to be gone until the end of April.
So I’ll just pick the end of April. The day of the week doesn’t matter. That’s just coincidentally happens to be a Thursday, but I could have picked any day after, and it would stop on the Thursday immediately before whatever date I pick up just because of it being here every Thursday.
Let me also put this back. So this is set up as far as the recurrence goes. And then on this side, we have a little bit of information about the schedule that we can put in.
So the first is this auditor hint. Anything you put in here, any notation will show up as a note on monitor QA. And if you’re using safety culture, it will show up just as a note on the HomeWatch IT app when you open it up.
(9:35 - 10:03) So if there’s something special that needs to be done every time you go out and do a visit, you can put that note in here. Now we’ll get to billing item. We covered this a little bit more detail on the invoicing webinar that we did.
So I won’t necessarily get into that too much detail here, but you would pick what item you want to bill and how much you’re going to bill for each visit. At this point, this is all said and done. We can just hit add schedule.
(10:04 - 14:03) And now that’s added. And if we come down here, I lied. I did have a home visit already set up for them.
This is the one we just did, right, from February till April. And this is one that was there previously. Let’s get rid of that one.
It’s kind of past due anyway. So let’s just go in here and delete it and delete it. Okay.
So now we do have a clean one. We have the one that we just created. So the other question I get is, well, how do we make this more complex now? Let’s say that we drive the car once a month.
Well, in this case, we can just put a note on there on the, you know, in that auditor hint to drive the car the first week of the month or the first visit of the month. Or we can actually set up a separate schedule to track that and allow us to do a report for the car drive itself. So let’s say that for the Watsons, we’re doing it every week on Thursday as we set up.
But we do want to set up our car drive to be that first Thursday, you know, of the month. So we’ll just go in here and, you know, Watsons. I’m going to say, you know, drive car every fourth visit.
Now, could this be a report or a task? It could be either. If you leave it as a report, you must pick a template, you know, like maybe service record or if you have a car drive template or whatever. But if you just want this to be a reminder to drive the car while you’re out at the home, you can set that up as a task.
All right. So now we have this set up to drive the car every fourth visit. I set up as a task.
You’ll notice as soon as I choose task, the actual template line goes away because there is no template for a task. We’ll assign that to the same person. And what we’re going to do is we know this is every Thursday.
So we’re going to start on March 5th and we’ll leave it at 10 o’clock. But this is going to repeat every four weeks. So I’m going to put that in this way.
End date, because we have the other one ending in April, we should definitely end this one in April as well. And for the hint, maybe we say, you know, drive car around the block. And for our item, we’re going to pick our car drive and we charge them $25 to drive the car.
Now we’ll add the schedule. So now you’ll see here for Watson, we’ve got the weekly home visit, weekly, and we have driving the car every fourth visit, which is a task. And that’s set up to recur every four weeks.
You can continue to add additional schedules for any interval or any other item that you want to have a reminder of. What does that mean? Let’s say, for example, we also have a deal with the Watsons to change their air filters. I’m going to set it up as a task because we don’t need to do a report on it.
We’ll leave the assignment the same. And I’m going to have that start as well on that first Thursday in March. And in this case, we can say this will repeat every, you know, I can do every three months or I can do every, you know, 13 weeks.
Every 13 weeks would be once a quarter. So that actually would be the best. And again, I could put the end date or I can just leave it as no end date.
(14:03 - 14:12) So what this will do now is this will set up a task to change the air filters. It’s going to happen every quarter, you know, on a Thursday. So it’ll line up with our home visits.
(14:14 - 14:36) And you can put in whatever hint you need here. You know, there’s, you know, four filters that are 20 by 30. And the item we can put in, I think I have filters.
Yep, I do. So we have replaced air filters. And in this case, to replace all four of them with charges, we’re going to do $100.
(14:37 - 15:40) So I will say add schedule. And now you’ll see we have yet another task. So you can continue to build up these schedules.
And these will then automatically create the items for you on your ongoing list. And we can verify that by looking at our reports and tasks screen. And here’s our pending.
We’ve got some old stuff here. So let’s just scroll down for the Watsons. And you’ll see here’s that home visit on the 19th.
And then you’ll see that on March 5th, we have change air filters and drive car every fourth visits. Now, these are tasks. And this is a report.
But they function exactly the same way here on this particular screen. What that means is as soon as you complete the report for this one, it will automatically create the next occurrence of that. In other words, it will create the next home visit one week later, so on the 26th of February.
(15:41 - 16:28) And then when you complete the next one, it would then create the next home visit occurrence, which would line up and be on the 5th of March. Those are completed by completing the actual report in Monitor QA or Safety Culture. Tasks need to be completed either from the app or here in the desktop.
Since I’m just using the desktop, I’m going to click on my change air filters. And you’ll see it brings up here with tasks, you know, gives all the information I need. And I can just say mark this complete.
Works the same way on your phone. You click into the task and there’s a big button that says mark complete. When you do, that will then mark this complete.
(16:29 - 16:52) If the customer is using the app, it will then bring that up automatically as far as complete, and then it will create the next occurrence. So you remember this was every 13 weeks. So that shows us then that the next time that we have to change the air filters is going to be on May 19th.
(16:53 - 17:55) So that is all lined up there. That is the difference between the tasks and the reports. Now, that also works the same way if you create an individual item.
So let’s say that we are going to the Watson’s this week on Thursday, but they just sent over a message and said, hey, when you’re at the home, would you please pick up the mail this one week and forward it to us? Well, we have this home visit already scheduled. We could go in and just put a note on it, but we want to charge the customer a charge for that particular service. So what we can do is just come in here and by adding it here on the reports and tasks screen, this creates it just once.
The schedule screen allows you to create it so that it repeats automatically. So keep that in mind that you can create it as a just once item right here. So let’s go to Watson.
(17:57 - 18:22) And we can say pick up and forward mail. And we’ll just set it up as a task because we don’t need to do a report on it. So we’ll assign that to the person going out.
We’re going to set this up for this Thursday. Now, in this case, it’s kind of bringing up my current time. So I’m going to just go ahead and set this to 10 o’clock in the morning just so it lines up with everything else.
(18:22 - 18:31) Say OK. Here we can put in that note. So forward mail to Arizona address.
(18:33 - 18:49) And then we’ll put in here the charges that we do for mail. And in this case, because we’re going to forward it, we’re actually going to charge $25, which includes our postage. So now we’ve set up this task as a one-time item.
(18:50 - 20:09) Hit create the task. And that will then show up here on the schedule. Let’s just hit the pinning button so it refreshes it.
And you see here we go, pick up and forward mail. So now when we go out to the house, we have that item. And we have the home visit set up for this week on Thursday.
So it’s a fairly simple process to set these up, either to repeat or to be a one-time item. You can manage the billing. You can manage the scheduling, everything on these individual screens.
And they all show up right on your list. And they’re also fully available to you right from your phone so that you have all of that information out in the field and can use it as needed. Flick back.
So we did the recurrences. We did the overlapping to do our complex requirements. We’re pretty much done with today’s agenda.
So that’s scheduling reports and tasks and using them. What I’m going to do at this point is open up the phones, the audio, and we’ll go into the Q&A session. We’ll start with if anybody has any questions on the material that we had today.
(20:10 - 20:12) DEBBIE POWELL. Kerry, I have a question. It’s Debbie.
(20:12 - 22:11) KERRY SAUTNER. Hi, Debbie. DEBBIE POWELL.
Since our billing’s not working, maybe this is a silly question. But every time you issue a task, does it issue a separate invoice or does it add it to an existing invoice? How does that work? Like, are they going to get three different invoices for those three different tasks or will it all just add on to one invoice? KERRY SAUTNER. It’s always on one invoice.
I would recommend looking at the invoicing webinar because it’ll go into a lot more detail. What will happen is every time you do something, whether it be a report or a task, it’s going to basically add it here under billing items. And think of this as your shopping cart.
It basically throws those items in the shopping cart. Then at the end of the month, when you’re ready to generate the invoice, it will put all of these charges on that single invoice and send over. And by the way, the invoicing, I’m working on that Portugal invoice for you right now.
And that should be, I’d say, yours by the end of this week. So, that’s… DEBBIE POWELL. That would be awesome.
Thank you. KERRY SAUTNER. Sure thing.
Okay. Did that answer the question, though? DEBBIE POWELL. It did.
Thank you very much. KERRY SAUTNER. All right.
Perfect. Let me see. Here’s what we did today, the change error filters.
Because we marked that task complete, it automatically threw that charge out here so that when we invoice the Watsons, it will charge them that $100. Then I want to just say thank you, everyone, for attending. DEBBIE POWELL.
My pleasure. KERRY SAUTNER. And again, please send over ideas for additional webinars.
I want to make sure that these are targeted toward your needs and your requirements so that any advice or any guidance you give me on what you need is always appreciated. All right. On that note, everybody have a good rest of your day.
Thanks again for attending, and we appreciate you as a customer. DEBBIE POWELL. We love it.
Thank you. Have a good night. KERRY SAUTNER.
Thank you. DEBBIE POWELL. Bye-bye.
(22:12 - 22:12) KERRY SAUTNER. Thank you.
Other notes: If you desire to schedule “Semi Monthly”, basically like the 1st and the 15th of each month, you can do that by creating two schedule: One is Monthly recurring schedule repeating on the 1st of each month and the second is also a Monthly recurring schedule repeating on the 15th of each month.