Webinar - Jan 28 2026 - Fundamentals 101 - Getting Started

(0:00 - 0:12) All right, thank you all for joining this afternoon. I appreciate it. So, this is going to be the first of, I think, quite a few webinars that we’re going to have here in the near future about fundamentals.

(0:12 - 1:58) Things are quickly evolving and changing with the program. So, I think that for that reason, there will be, you know, some redos on some of these. But today, I really wanted to spend some time more or less talking about getting the system set up.

So, we’re going to look at some configuration best practices and how to set the system up the first time. I know a lot of you have already done this and have been running with the program for several months. Some of you are brand new.

So, you’re welcome to, you know, listen to this and chime in if you have any, you know, opinions or experiences that you’d like to share. We’ll then talk about how to set up customers and properties first. We’ll also look at how the notes are structured.

And then, we’ll go into schedules just as an intro and set up like a basic weekly home visit schedule. The next webinar is actually going to get into a lot more detail on schedules. We’ll talk about different intervals and how to interweave schedules and so on.

So, that’ll be coming up, I believe, in about three weeks or so. So, make sure to sign up for that if you haven’t already. So, I’m just going to use this simple agenda here kind of as my guide as we walk through.

And I thought we’d do most of this online live with the application. So, we’re going to go through the setup and talk about the way the system is set up and how it’s configured. And, you know, go through some of the different options that you may have found or that you, you know, have used or so on.

So, I’m logged into my system. You should be able to see that okay. We’re going to concentrate over here where it says settings.

(1:59 - 2:13) So, if I click on my settings link, you’ll see that this takes me into my settings screen. And we’ve got five sub options here across the top. So, if you’re new with the program, you’ll notice that the main menu options go down to the left side of the screen.

(2:14 - 3:39) And the sub menus go across the top. So, whatever you click on here, you’ll get some options across here. So, when we first come into here, this is your basic company info as far as company name, company address, etc.

This will allow you to update or change your logo file if you need to localize your currency for some reason, you know, like if you’re outside of the U.S. and want to standardize it on a U format or something, you can do that. All of you have also tried the webinars page because you’ve signed up for today’s session. So, that’s great.

You’ve got that handled. And you can also update and change your password, you know, right here on this particular screen. When you first get the system, one of the things that you’re going to be taken to automatically is this project plan page.

I think many of you here have already gone through a bunch of these. But the idea is this gives you all of the steps to follow in order to get the system fully configured and up and running. So, it’s highly recommended that you follow those.

It’ll show you which step you’re on. Take a look at the step. You’ve got a link which will take you to a video or a help document or so on.

And once you’ve completed that particular item, mark it complete here. And the system will automatically bring you to your next step. So, it’s really quite simple just to follow this and do all of the steps to get up and running.

(3:40 - 11:21) We’re going to go through a few of those right now just as part of our system setup steps. I’m going to flip into the integrations tab because this is one of the most important. This is where you can tie together your different external systems so that they all work with Home Watch IT.

So, the very first one listed here is your reporting system. So, I think most of you on this call have Monitor QA. That is our standard, our default reporting system.

Home Watch IT also supports Safety Culture. So, if you’re using the Safety Culture or iAuditor program, you’re able to integrate that here. So, you have the choice of either or.

It only allows you to pick one reporting system in order to synchronize all of the schedules and templates and so on accordingly. If you decide that you want to switch between the systems, let us know and that’s a couple of steps that we’ll have to take on the back end in order to make that happen. Accounting system, if you are signed up to use QuickBooks or Zoho, you go to the accounting system link and that’ll allow you then to make the connection.

There’s also, mine’s already connected to QuickBooks, but if you go in the very first time, there will also be links here to sign up for these different packages. So, if you don’t have a QuickBooks account or a Zoho account yet, just use those links to sign up and then you can make the connection and so on. Once you’re connected, the system will synchronize all of the billing items from the accounting system.

It’ll synchronize all of your customers and it’ll synchronize all of your invoices back and forth two-way between the accounting and Home Watch IT. What that means is that if you make changes to your invoice, for example, over in QuickBooks, those changes will get pushed back here to Home Watch IT so that it will always match up with your system. Email domain, if you have a .com address for your particular business, you’re able to verify and put your email domain in here.

What that means is when you send emails through the system, they will then appear to be coming from your domain. If you don’t have a domain or you don’t configure it here, and when I say don’t have a domain, for example, you use myhomewatchatgmail.com, your emails will go to your customers as coming from homewatchit.deport. So, you know, that’s the standard. That’s what I think most of my clients use is that particular one, but if you wanted them to come from your personal business domain, you’re able to put that information here.

And there’s a couple steps the system will walk through, but you’ll put the domain in, it’ll tell you, it’ll send you an email with some items that you need to add to your DNS server, and then you verify it, and then when it’s all said and good, you’ll have green like this, and it’ll show that you’re there. The calendar integration, if you want your schedule, which would be all of your reports, to be fed to some kind of external calendar, either in Outlook or Gmail or whatever the case might be, this particular link will do that, and this is what’s called an ICS calendar link. And depending on what program you’re using, it’ll either call it an ICS link calendar, it’ll call it like a web calendar, I think is what Outlook calls it, but basically just this particular link here, which you can copy by clicking this little icon, and just take that particular link and put it into your program, and then it will sync your calendar directly from HomeWatch IT to your device calendar.

And lastly is the customer app. So if you want your customers to be able to log into the app that’s available to them, you can turn that on here, and you can also configure whether you want to allow it to use in-app communications. I’m going to do another video on the app at a later time, but basically if you give your customers access to the app, they can download the app from the App Store or Google Play, it gives them access to all of their reports, all of their basic information, all of their invoices, they’re able to, you know, give you in-residence information that’s coming in, so all of that is available to them straight through the app.

And if you have the in-app communications turned on, they’ll also be able to communicate with you, and there is a little screen that appears very similar to when you use like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, it’ll have little bubbles on both sides, and you’re able to communicate back and forth directly from the app to your system, which would show up right here under communications. And then you can also communicate from your mobile HomeWatch IT app to them, so you can communicate from both places and they will communicate through their app. The next option that we’ll look at here is our report options.

So when you go in here, this will allow you to automatically email the reports on completion, and what happens is as soon as you finish the report, within about two seconds, it’s already out in email form to your client. There might be cases where you don’t turn this on for automatic, and that’s if you would like to be able to send the emails manually after you complete the report. Perhaps you might want to tailor the email message, for example, and there’s ways to do that, and that’s covered in the documentation, and we’ll go through that in a future webinar as well, but just know that you have those options.

And then the last sub-menu item here is the account, and this will show your account information that we have on file for you. If you need to change your address, for example, or something, you can do that right here. Your payment information is located right here.

If you need to update your payment info, a new credit card, a new bank account, change it from credit card to ACH, whatever the case may be, you can do that with this button. And then lastly, this shows the users that you have in your system. So you’re able to add or delete users straight in the app on your own, and when you have a particular user, you can also assign the level that they have.

So this is all defined in the help. I won’t go through that in this particular call, but you can define if they have admin rights, if they’re only able to view the data and not be able to modify it, if they have access to enter billing items, or even if you don’t want them to see any of the rates while they’re in the app. So you have full access here for all of your different users.

All right, so that is basically the setup page, and I actually went one too far. So this is the system setup. It’s actually pretty simple, but there is a lot of documentation that covers each of those items in detail.

So if you do need help setting up, just let us know. Next, we’re going to move into customers and properties and the notes structure. So we’re going to actually start looking at the notes structure because I think that that’s pretty important.

Over here on your menu, you’ve got lists. So if we click on lists, this actually brings up three different submenu items. So the first are my report templates.

(11:22 - 12:30) So these are the templates that we have in use out of Monitor QA or Safety Culture that sync directly to the system and can be used for any reports that you generate. Item codes are the billable items that sync over from your accounting system. And so these are the ones that you’re going to use to identify what you’re going to bill your client for.

You’re going to bill, for example, home watch visits and so on right here through the system, and these all sync over from your accounting system. But if we go over to the notes prompts, this is where you can define what data you’d like to store for each property. So the notes are set up in two areas.

They’re set up first of all in the categories, which you can think of as your main topics of the notes that you want to store about a HVAC is a big one. Within each of these categories, you then have the different note description items. So for HVAC, we have the overall HVAC settings, when the filters were changed, is the system controlled by the owner, and what are the air filter sizes.

(12:31 - 13:21) So what I’d like to point out is that using this, you’re able to modify any of these items. You’re able to add additional items. For example, if you need to add something new under HVAC, you just hit the plus and do so.

You can edit the name. You can delete an item if you’d like. It will not let you delete an item that’s in use.

So keep that in mind. If you’re using it, you don’t want to delete it. And lastly, you can rearrange these.

So you can grab a hold of these items with these two dots and then be able to change the sequence that you’d like the items to be in. And that will then impact every property so that every property will have all of these items available to you. So I would recommend that you look through these.

(13:21 - 13:39) And if there’s other topics that you want to add or other questions, if I click on water, if there’s other water items that you might want to add, do so. The system is fully flexible and allows you to use those. Where those are used is in your customer’s property screen.

(13:40 - 14:26) So if I click over here under properties on my main menu, this will now take me to my properties list. And by default, these are all of my active customers. You can click in on any customer by clicking the arrow, or you can add a new customer by hitting the plus.

So let’s go ahead and add a new customer as our walkthrough for the demo today. I’m going to hit the plus. And right here under the customer name, I’m going to give that a name.

So I’m going to say this is Joe and Susan Watson. And then you can give it the first name. So let’s just put in the primary as Joe in this case.

(14:26 - 15:21) And we’ll add Susan as a secondary. So we’ll say Joe Watson. Here we can put in the phone number and the email address for Joe.

Now you need to add the address. So we’ll tap here to search for the address. When we do that, this will now bring up a Google search bar at the top.

So unfortunately, Google puts it at the top. I have no way to bring it down and put it lower. But it’s at the top.

I know some of you have a hard time spotting that the first time it happened. But what we’ll do is we’ll put this in here. And I’m going to type in an address.

The system will look it up through Google. I have my options. I can then pick it.

(15:22 - 15:26) It’ll fill it in for me. And that’s great. So now I’ll say create customer.

(15:27 - 15:48) This will now create the customer and set it up for me. And now I can edit the details of the property. So I’ve got my address here.

And the first time I save this, it will update my GPS. But if I want to force it, I can hit the little lookup. And that’ll actually put the map icon directly on the map for me and look up my latitude and longitude automatically.

(15:49 - 20:39) If you have a photo, you can click the link here to upload a photo. If there’s any routing information you want to put in, you can do that as well. Over here, you have your contacts.

So by default, we set Joe up as the primary. So it created him in here as the first contact. I’m going to leave that alone.

I’m going to add Susan as the secondary. So I’m going to put in Susan Watson. And it will, by default, give it the full name here.

You can change this to whatever you want. This is susanwatson at gmail.com. And 702-634. Now, these are the important buttons here.

The first one identifies, is this a property contact? Is this one of the owners? Is this somebody that’s important that you want to contact if there’s an issue with the property? The next is, should this person receive the reports when you do your inspection reports or any other type of reports? So you can have, if you think about this, you can have multiple people on an account receive reports. So for example, Joe is set to receive reports, and now Susan is. So whenever you start out a report, it’s going to go out to each one individually.

Accounting contact, we don’t want to turn this on because Joe is already here as the accounting contact. You’ll see the QuickBooks logo. That shows you that he is the one that syncs to accounting.

So when you go to accounting, it’s going to show up as Joe Watson, as far as the contact user for that property. If you flip this on for Susan, it would make her the accounting contact, and it would remove it from Joe. You can only have one contact for accounting.

Should this person also receive the invoices? So even if they’re not an accounting contact, you can say, yes, I want her to also receive copies of the invoices when you email them out at the end of the month. And this does assume that you’re sending your emails from HomeWatch IT, and then it will honor this switch. If you send them from your accounting system, it’s not necessarily going to honor this, so you need it from the HomeWatch IT.

And then the last switch is, should this person have access to the customer app? So since this is, you know, Susan, it’s the owner’s spouse, we’re going to say yes. And we’ll save that, and now we have Susan in there. Now you can continue using this the same way to add any other contacts for the property.

So for example, I’m going to say we have, you know, our pool service, and we know that the guy’s name that runs the pool services is Dave Herrera. And I’m using that because he is actually a pool guy that we have used. And here you can call it, you know, whatever the name of the company is, for example.

So the contact name could be the company name, in this case, when it is a company that you’re dealing with. And we don’t need an email address for him, but we definitely want to have a phone number. In this case, he’s not a property contact.

He doesn’t receive reports. He’s not going to receive invoices. We don’t want him to have access to the app, so we leave all of those off.

He’s just in here as a service provider that we want to have listed on our contacts screen. So you can use this and add all of the service providers for each property. You can use this for any other contacts.

So if the owners have, you know, a son or daughter or a trusted neighbor or whatever the case might be, add all of those in here, and that way you have everything available to you all the time when you are accessing the app. I’m going to move on to security. So security allows you to put in anything security related.

So for example, if you have an ID number on the key, you can put that in here. If there’s a gate code to the neighborhood, if there’s a lockbox or a garage door code, you know, we can say that we have to hit that, and then we have to hit the left arrow. The alarm information for disarming, we might have to hit that key and then the arm button.

And to disarm, we just hit the code. Who the alarm provider is, phone number, password, if you have it, and any alarm notes. I’m going to go ahead and just save all that since we’ve gone through part of this.

(20:39 - 21:12) Now we’re going to move into our notes section. So the notes, you’ll notice these are the notes categories that we looked at a minute ago when we were looking at the notes section. So we can edit those by clicking edit notes, and then it allows you to pick whatever category you’d like to edit.

So let’s start out with access. And I just have one bucket here for access. So for access notes, I’m going to say access through garage side door, because we have the garage code.

(21:13 - 21:38) So if I save that, now we have that note in here. I can continue to add additional notes. So for example, if I come down here under water, notice this brings up all of the items that we looked at a minute ago on water.

You don’t have to fill all of them in, but you can fill in whatever you need. So we’re going to say turn off at each visit. So we’ll know the water leaves.

(21:38 - 22:16) We can leave that in off position every visit. And in this case, the main is inside garage on left. And that’s it.

We don’t necessarily need anything else here. So I’m going to go ahead and save that. And now we have water notes, and so on.

And you can continue to edit the notes and add whatever other information you need in here so that everything that you need to know about a particular property is stored here in the notes section. We’ll move on now to the reports. So the reports, you can define a default reporting template for the property.

(22:17 - 22:50) I’m going to show you a way that I prefer, but you could do it here if you want. This is automatically turned on, and we’re going to send the report by email. If you’d like to also send the report by text, you know, instead of email or in addition to email, you can turn these switches on and off.

And after we’ve done reports for the customer, those all would show up in this particular box section here as a list. And then last, we have the billing. So this is the important part, because we know that this particular property, you know, we’re going to bill $60 per visit.

(22:51 - 23:06) We can pick our HomeWatch item ID. And I know that my HomeWatch items start with HW, so I’m going to pick it with HomeWatch Weekly. And we can pick our terms that we need to use.

(23:07 - 23:20) Now, terms are very important for QuickBooks. QuickBooks will not allow you to sync an invoice with it unless terms are defined. So keep that in mind that you want to have terms turned on here.

(23:21 - 23:43) Now, back on the integration tab, when we went to integrations and looked at the accounting, there was also a default terms. So if you set your default terms there, and then you forget to set it here, the default will take over. So it’ll still sync to QuickBooks, and you won’t lose your invoice, but it will, you know, sync using those default terms.

(23:43 - 24:29) And then you can even specify, you know, concierge and emergency rates by client. So if you have different rates by client, put all of those in right here as well. We’ll save that.

So now our information is there. If we go back to our main properties list, here is the Watsons that we just entered. And we can go back into it, and we’ll see all of the information is here that we entered.

Okay, so it’s all available to us. Now, we’re going to touch last on a little intro here to schedules. So I’m going to go to my schedules item on the menu.

(24:30 - 24:43) And this will bring up all of the existing schedules I have for each client. Now, granted, we’re not going to have one for the Watsons because, you know, they’re brand new. So if I hit my plus, this will allow me to add a new schedule.

(24:44 - 25:02) So I’ll start by going into my customer and pick the Watsons. Report title is important because this is what’s going to show up when you go into your reporting system as far as the name of the report. Now, you can just leave it generic, just call it home visit.

(25:02 - 30:20) I like to make it something a little bit more description. So I might want to say something like, you know, Watson residence home visit, or Watson weekly home visit, or something like that. It’s up to you, whatever you put in here.

You know, it’s very flexible, and you can put anything that you’d like. Now, you’ll recall back on the property, there was a place to select which report template to use. And I said, there’s another way that I like to do it.

I like to do it right here in the schedule. And the reason for that is, if you have multiple schedules per customer, and we’re going to talk about that in the next webinar, but then you can assign a different template for each one of those schedules. In this case, I’m going to use just my standard home visit template.

So this is the report template it will bring up for this customer every time it does a schedule. Start date, I’m going to start this report on Monday. So I’m going to come here and pick Monday the second.

Hit OK. And the system will default to 10am. You can change it to any time you want.

Time really isn’t that important on the weekly home visits, because you just need to get them done anytime during that day. But time is important when you want to schedule something, like a plumber, you might want to put in a specific time to go meet that person. So you can just default, leave it at 10, or you can change it to whatever you’d like.

Hit OK. So now this knows it’s going to start on the second. By default, it’s going to say every Wednesday, and it shows me it’s going to repeat on Mondays, because the second was on Monday.

So let’s say that in this case, you want to do the Watson’s every other Monday. Well, that’s easy. You leave this as weekly.

And under report every, you just change to. So this is now going to repeat every two weeks. So if we do it on the second, the next home visit would be on the 16th.

And the next one would then be on the, well, February 30th, but you know what I mean, it’d be March 2nd, I guess. So this allows you then to do a biweekly. And it works the same way for any of the frequencies, daily, weekly, monthly, or one time.

One time, of course, does not repeat. It’s one time. But you can do daily, and you can repeat it every X number of days.

So if you want to do just like every 15 days, or every five days, whatever the case may be, you can do that. Keep in mind, daily can be any number. I have a client that has a schedule out there to do a septic tank service, and they want to do it every three years.

So he picked daily, and then he said, repeat every, whatever it was, 1053 days. And so it will then reschedule that visit every three years. But they all work the same.

I mean, monthly, you could come in here and say you want to do it every 36 months. And that would also give you every three years. I’m going to put this back to weekly, and I’m going to leave it as every week.

Auditor hint is a place where you can put a note that will appear on that particular report when you go out to it that week. So if there’s some kind of note that you need to make, but you can say water plants on the side of sliding door. Now that’s going to repeat every single time, and that’s a good reminder.

Last is the billing item. So you’ll recall that we picked the weekly one earlier, but I can pick that here, and our billing rate. So we could leave it as default, which is what we have on the property, but you can also specify kind of a different billing rate right here.

If this were a concierge visit, you could pick concierge debilling item, bill $100 or $200, whatever the case might be. All right. One thing that I didn’t look at and talk about was this end date.

So by leaving this checked, which is the default, the system is going to repeat this schedule every week, every Monday, basically until I turn it off. If you know that this is only going to be from February until, let’s say, the end of June, you could uncheck this, and then you’d be able to put in the date that the service should end. And then it will automatically stop generating reports after that date, and then if you need to restart it, you can come in and change the start date and the end date again, and that would take care of it.

Once this is filled in, we just say add schedule, and you’ll notice now it’s all filled in here. It generates the next report in the background, so you don’t necessarily see it immediately, but if we click here, this will refresh it, and you’ll see it assigned it on the second, like I told it, and it’s in here from second, no end date, and it’s weekly. If you need to edit this for any reason, like I didn’t assign it and I should have, I can pick who I want to assign it to and say update, and now this will regenerate and create the report and assign it and make the changes that I asked it to do.

(30:23 - 31:10) How can we prove this report is out there? I’m going to click here on my reports menu item, and I’m just going to cover this real briefly, because this is beyond today’s topic, but my pending reports shows all of the reports that are scheduled to be done, and you’ll notice here on February 2nd, I have that particular report. Now I can go in here, and you know, I can say forward the letter from SSA, because this is only going to impact this one report on the second. When the system generates the next report on the ninth, it will only have what was on my schedule, so I will say save, and that’s basically done.

(31:13 - 32:49) All right, that is it for today’s agenda. I have some time set up for Q&A here. Some of you, I know this isn’t the first webinar you’ve attended.

This is the norm, is we do about 20 to 30 minutes walking through a particular topic and then have another, you know, 20 to 30 minutes of Q&A, which is open to all of you, and it can be about any topic, not just the ones that, you know, pertain to today’s, you know, presentation, but it can be any of them or any question in general about the software. I’m happy to answer any of those. I’ve turned on the mics for everybody.

If you have a question, please, you know, unmute and feel free to ask, and we can go through your question and look at the software if necessary, and I’d like to, you know, answer your questions. I’d be first. All right.

Hi there. This is Teresa. How are you? I added a question on the question and answer thing, but I wanted to know, what is the default email domain that you have in that, that you had before, because I tried to change it to mine, and then I got confused, so I said, I want to go back, and I can’t to send the reports.

Yeah. Did you put one in, and it sent you the details, and now it’s unmuted? Yeah. Are you talking about? Yeah, like integrations.

(32:51 - 34:54) So, it had something in there, and I didn’t look, and then I put mine, my own in. Then I got this email, and I got confused on how to do it, because I’m not tech savvy, so now I just want to go back to the default, whatever that was that’s in the integrations. If you have not done the verify step, it’s going to continue to use the default, which is homewatchit.report. So, you don’t have to, you don’t have to change it back.

That’s not a problem. I did. I verified it, so I got this email, and I’m like, no way I can’t do this.

Just let me put it back. Well, no, if you had, if you didn’t do that step, the DNS step, then it won’t, you won’t be verified. If you, if you go to it right now, you’ll see this will be in red and say something like not verified.

Mine actually says my email domain name instead of whatever you have. So, is it hwit. This is the one I put.

This is one of my HomeWatch IT domains that I put in. It will, it will automatically come from homewatchit.report. No matter. The whole word homewatchit or just.

Yeah, homewatchit.report. Right. So, the whole word homewatchit.report. Now, keep in mind, even though it’s coming from that domain, whatever you have in here as you reply to, if a client hits reply on that email, this is where the reply will go. So, that should default to your email.

Whatever I have. I just, I just wanted to see if I could do it like coming, like a report coming from my name instead or my email. And then I got a little confused.

I said, forget it. This is ridiculous. I can’t do it.

And then I went back. It was already too late. It says my domain on there.

So, I want to just put it back. Yeah. If you want it to send from your domain, I can always help you with the DNS.

Don’t worry about that. I couldn’t understand. I don’t have no idea what that is.

Yeah. Is your email account, is it managed by somebody? And that’s why I didn’t want to be bothered. So, I was like, you know what, let me just put it back.

(34:55 - 35:43) So, it’s homewatchit, the whole word, right? homewatchit.report. Yeah. But like I said, you don’t have to worry about it. But if your domain, like I know several of you use Glenn at homewatchmarketing, for example.

If you have Glenn at homewatchmarketing manage your domain, just send him that email. He knows what to do. That’s a good idea.

All right. Thank you. So, yeah.

So, if you have, yeah, if that’s what you’re using, send it to him. He’ll put it in, update it. And then once he’s done, you do have to come back to here and there’ll be a button that says verify the domain.

In fact, if we go to the help, I can just show you exactly what that is here. So, under setting up, report email settings. Oops, that’s not what I wanted.

(35:44 - 35:55) Is it? No, that’s just the report email itself. Here we go. Sending emails from your own domain.

(35:57 - 36:29) So, see, yours is going to say this. He’s going to say not verified in red. But once you’ve put in that, and let’s say Glenn or whoever is doing your IT updates it, then you’ll come back here and you’ll click on verify domain.

And if they did everything properly, then it will flip to green like mine. And I don’t have the green example, but it’ll flip to green like here and say it’s verified. And then at that point, your client emails will be coming from your domain.

(36:30 - 36:50) Yeah, but if I put it back the way it was, I don’t have to worry about all that, right? I could just put it back. Yeah, you don’t have to worry about it. All right.

Thank you. Yeah, the system will, you know, ignore what you put in until it’s verified. Another question if nobody else does.

(36:50 - 37:12) Go ahead. How do we, how do we edit the item? Edit the items list? Oh, yeah, item codes. That’s polls.

So, you can go under lists. And then there’s the thing. And this will allow you to edit any of the codes by clicking on it.

(37:13 - 38:40) Now, you can’t add new codes. The new codes need to come from accounting. And the reason is because each code has to have an income account assigned.

And, you know, the accounting system has made certain requirements. But once you’ve entered in that code, and it comes here, you are able to modify, you know, the ID and the description and the rate. So, you know, if I want to start charging 750 for nine volt batteries, I can change the rate here and save that.

And now that rate is saved. And that rate is also syncing over to QuickBooks in the background. I code the same as like an invoice number, because I make my own invoice number.

And I see there’s a whole bunch of weird ones. And I just wanted to keep it the way I know it. But I think I screwed myself up.

The accounting system assigns invoice numbers. So, whatever you’re doing in the accounting is what it will assign you. Like, for instance, if my client is Jack Smith, I put JS-001.

Then if it’s Mary Smith, it’s MS-001. Like, that’s how I’m doing the invoice, like numbers. Is that wrong? Should I not put invoice numbers? No, there’s nothing wrong with that.

You just need to put in each one manually then after it’s created, which, you know, if you’ve got 10 customers, that’s not a big deal. If you have 50 customers, that’s a big deal. But otherwise, it’s auto-generated? Otherwise, it’s auto-generated, yes.

Okay. Thank you very much. And that’s generated by the accounting.

(38:43 - 38:45) I have a question, Gary. It’s Debbie. Hi, Debbie.

(38:46 - 39:05) Can we switch the time to 24-hour time? Oh, absolutely. I think you dropped off right at the beginning when I talked about that. But here, under settings… We couldn’t hear you.

Sorry. Okay. Under settings and under localization, you’re able to flip this however you want.

(39:07 - 40:27) So, let’s see. For Portugal, I think you use this setup, right? Yeah, EU and 24-hour time is what they prefer. Yeah.

So, if you do it with this, then you’ll get the 24-hour time. Great. Well, I don’t know that that’s the problem.

No, it’s not this. Gary, I have a question about billing. So, if we want to bill our customers at the beginning of each month, is there a way to do that to where it’s not billing them every time we go out for a home visit? The system automatically… I think you’re getting to this.

The system automatically stores a billing item for each home visit automatically. If you said, I only want to charge just a monthly fee, I assume that’s a flat fee, right? Yes. Honestly, the easiest way to do that is just in your accounting system, just put in a recurring invoice for the first month with that amount.

Otherwise, what you’d have to do here is you’d have to delete each one of those, add the one for the monthly charge, and then generate your invoices. And honestly, you’ve got the recurring invoice feature in your accounting. Just use that.

(40:28 - 43:15) Okay. So, when you’re adding the customer into the system, you just put the rate as zero so it doesn’t invoice them again? Yeah. You just wouldn’t pick anything.

Just don’t pick an item. Okay. You can put a rate in, but don’t put in the items code because if you have an items code, that’s what triggers for it to save the billable items.

Okay. I have a question along the same lines, Gary. It’s Debbie.

If you were to create an invoice for that to bill them monthly in the accounting software, would those invoices still show up here when they’re syncing in this system? Yes. So, the customer can see them in the database even though there’s not a report tied to it? That’s correct. Any invoices will show up here in the system and will be available to the client within the customer app.

And could we create a visit code, I guess? For an example, here in Portugal, we’re a little different than regular HomeWatch because we have more people that live here but travel a lot. So, what we’ve done is created a subscription service where they pay monthly and they get X amount of visits. So, I would do the recurring billing when I go out up to so many visits, I’m not going to bill them.

So, can I create a visit under the name of, let’s say, travel, whatever, and then put the rate as zero? So, when I use the report, I can use that one? Yes. Absolutely. Perfect.

Thank you. Absolutely. And the system will not generate a zero invoice, but if you have zero items and you have some billable item, it will put them all on the invoice together.

But if the total of the invoice is zero, it won’t generate. Okay. Perfect.

So, if I had added something on, like a concierge thing or watering their plants, it’ll bill them just for that, but not for the regular visit. Correct. If you click on here, you’ve got different lines.

So, it would show the home visit is zero and then it would have the concierge fee, you know, 50 euro or whatever it is and so on and list all that for you. Perfect. And can we add extra charges? And what was it? Add contacts.

Add. There was an area there where you had different things that you could pick. Can we add different things in there? I didn’t see the add button.

The add button is actually in the accounting system. Oh, okay. That’s why I didn’t see it.

You have to add it from the accounting system because requirements in the accounting for the income account and so on. So, you must add them from the accounting system. But once they’re added, you can edit the details here.

(43:16 - 44:32) Perfect. I have another question if no one else has one. Are we able to add a WhatsApp number under contact? Add a WhatsApp for… Like in the contact section, you know how we had their phone number.

So, here in Europe, a lot of people have a phone number, but they also have a WhatsApp and they would prefer to be contacted that way. But it’s good to have both. Isn’t the WhatsApp usually the phone number? No, you can have both because some people, for an example, might have a Portuguese cell phone and they use a North American WhatsApp number.

Yeah, because they’re American and they keep that phone too. I’ll look at adding an alternate phone number is probably what I’ll call it. That’d be fine.

Yeah, and then you can use that for whatever you need. Oh, that would be fantastic. Thank you.

Because even a lot of companies only use WhatsApp or they prefer that anyways. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

(44:35 - 45:39) I will make a note of that. Does anyone have any other questions? Because I do have one, but I don’t think it applies to anyone else. You’re going to get to your SAFT, aren’t you? Yeah.

Anyone else have any questions for tonight? Otherwise, what we’ll do is we close the call down and then Debbie will just talk about your situation. All right. Anyone else? Otherwise, if not, thank you for dialing in.

I hope this was helpful. Thank you. And the next one I know will be really good with the schedule.

So please sign up for that. And I just want to say thank you to all of you. I appreciate you.

Thank you.