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Touchless Accounting reduces friction, makes accounting less tedious at AirWorks

Pat McManamon
October 22nd, 2024
5 Min Read

Jessica Woodruff Smith did not hesitate when offered the chance to join early access testing for ServiceTitan’s Touchless Accounting Integration.

“This is a game changer,” Woodruff Smith said of the accounting innovation on the cloud-based software for the trades.

ServiceTitan’s integration offers a seamless way to populate accounting software, saves time, avoids errors and provides all the information a business needs.

“It really comes down to ease of use and reducing friction,” said Woodruff Smith, a ServiceTitan user since 2018, most recently at AirWorks Solutions.

Touchless Integration provides a near real-time record for financial impact because transactions entered in ServiceTitan are automatically generated to QuickBooks Online or Intacct. The integration eliminates the tedious process of batching, posting and exporting transactions to the accounting software.

“As soon as you do something, a journal entry pushes over to QuickBooks Online,” Woodruff Smith said. “If you fix it in ServiceTitan, that fix pushes over to QuickBooks Online and you can change things as much as you need to up until the accounting period is closed – as opposed to once you hit export it's done.”

Accounting within one software

Touchless Integration is ServiceTitan’s answer to requests for a full suite of capabilities to run accounting processes within one software, an improvement that avoids split workflow. Businesses spend less time going back and forth between ServiceTitan and an accounting software, and can trust the reliability of information entered. Touchless Integration offers cleaner accounting, instant payments and financial insight, and settles accounts faster. 

“It’s a giant game-changer,” Woodruff Smith said. “I don't have people telling me I exported too early. I have real-time information in QuickBooks. It takes a little getting used to because you don't have as much detail in QuickBooks, but once you get used to going to look for the detail in ServiceTitan, that doesn't matter. All I need in QuickBooks is my P&L. I don't need to see every bill or every invoice in QuickBooks.”

Woodruff Smith grew up with the trades. Her father owned an HVAC company, one she swore she would never work for. But when she was waiting tables at age 22, her Dad told her he needed help answering phones.

“And I never left,” she said. “Then when he sold his company in 2021, I worked for the company that bought it for a year or so, but it was corporate and I really like working for a small tight-knit company.”

She found that in AirWorks, an HVAC business owned by a husband and wife team in Ventura County, California. She joined as Process Manager in May of 2022, in part to help maximize ServiceTitan offerings. AirWorks was so flexible to her needs it allowed her to stay at her home in Massachusetts to work.

“I'm in charge of the accounting and also the processes, so I'm trying to make everything as good as it can be. Hence, jumping on the (early access testing) for the Touchless Integration,” she said.

That same month, Woodruff Smith became a Certified Administrator for ServiceTitan. A year earlier, she co-founded the Lady Titans, a group that advocates for and empowers women in the trades. As a guest with AirWorks co-owner Stephanie Allen on a 2023 Service Business Mastery podcast, Woodruff Smith explained her motivation to excel.

“I like to be the best at things,” she said. “When ServiceTitan first introduced their Titan Score leaderboard I needed to be at the top of it. I (tested) their Titan Advisor program and got to the top of that.”

She has helped AirWorks’ Titan Score rise to 219, an impressive achievement that shows how well she has integrated the software into AirWorks’ processes.

“Now I love the trades,” she said. “I could not imagine being in any other industry.”

‘Just all-around smoother’

She first heard about Touchless Integration at Pantheon 2023, ServiceTitan’s annual conference. One tangible benefit she finds is the ease of use in information exported from ServiceTitan to QuickBooks, which she said is “just all-around smoother.”

Where it used to take hours or days at the end of the month to reconcile errors, now it happens seamlessly. Once the adjustment is made to use ServiceTitan for account details (as opposed to QuickBooks), the application becomes intuitive.

“This shows me that ServiceTitan really wants to give people what they want,” Woodruff Smith said. “It also shows me that they're not willing to release something until it's ready to be released. They could have thrown something together and said, ‘Here you go,’ and had it not worked or had a glitch or had it not do everything it needed to do.

“But they waited to release it until it did what it needed to do.”

When she thinks back to 2018 and working for her father, she realizes she was an early ServiceTitan user. She’s been with the software long enough to see it offer accounting within the application.

“We came from a software that was great and did what it needed to do,” she said. “But it wasn’t very innovative, so we moved to ServiceTitan and only really lost the accounting pieces the other software had.

“Over the course of time, ServiceTitan kept adding and it kept getting better and better.

“Now it's just this behemoth that does everything you could possibly need it to do and more. It really has helped improve everything about the trades.”

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