How to Manage Construction Projects in ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan Project Tracking

ServiceTitan Project Tracking helps you accurately track your project progress and profits in real-time. With additional tools to progressively bill on long-term projects, capture change orders, automate the procurement process, and more, you have everything you need in one place to manage and collect payments for your projects effectively.

Every project in ServiceTitan gives you the key details and insight you need to efficiently manage your construction jobs from start to finish. From project details to contractual information to your budget, you have all the information in one place. 

Using the left navigation menu, you will find:

• Dashboard

• Project Overview

• Financials

• Project costing, invoices, payments

• Estimates

• Sold and Unsold Estimates

• Purchasing

• Purchase Orders & Requisitions

• Technicians

• Teams’ Timesheets

• Audit Trail

• Notes, Events & Media

You can quickly jump to your Project Financials or check your Purchase Orders using the left navigation menu. In the Project Overview, you can name the project, add photos, indicate job status, assign supervisors and crews, set start and target completion dates, add payment terms, and more.

How to create project estimates

For most projects, you need to start with an estimate. And ServiceTitan’s new workflow just made that process a bit easier with a more intuitive Estimate Builder.

“We heard from many of you that you don’t want to build a project until you’ve won the bid or sold the estimate,” Weeks says. 

So, with that in mind, the new features set to be released in April allow companies to build an estimate on either the customer page or location page, then once the estimate is sold, it automatically converts to a project page. 

“It was clunky before. We’re trying to make it as streamlined as possible,” Weeks says. “When you build estimates, you can build estimates on a job, and now with the updates you can build estimates on the project level. Either way, you’re going to get that information built into your project page.”

ServiceTitan’s Estimate Builder lets you easily build estimates by:

• Leveraging Estimate Templates. This is useful for those repeatable projects, like tract homes.

• Creating a custom estimate by adding your Tasks, Equipment, and Materials one by one, without navigating away from the page.

• Importing an estimate from a spreadsheet.

A key aspect of the Estimate Builder is the Price & Cost Details panel. This dynamically updates as you add items to your estimate so you can ensure every estimate going out the door will be profitable. 

Once you've added items to your estimate, you can view them or make adjustments with inline editing and drag & drop functionality. 

You can define your Schedule of Values (SOV) by applying labels to the items in your estimate. This lets you track your budgeted costs vs. actual costs against these SOV items. 

“Here, you can get as detailed as you want,” Jonathan notes, explaining how he tries to keep it simple with labels for Total Equipment, Total Labor, and Total Materials, and linking all costs into one of those three categories to determine total job costing.

Pat also points out how some folks may not be familiar with the job labels. 

“I know it's something we were new with,” Pat says. “Every single material or task that you will have as you set all these things up, if you go into your Pricebook at the very bottom of every single item, there’s a project label added to the bottom of every single material card. So, if you want to know where that's coming from, you create your own project labels and then those project labels are then added to each material in your Pricebook.”

If you don’t use Pricebook Pro, Jonathan says, the project labels are also tagged to your purchase orders, allowing you to go in and select which project label you want that PO to hit.

“All of these labels are fully customizable. You have complete control over how you want to classify your project job cost and information,” Weeks says. 

How to procure materials and equipment

Once you've sent the estimate to your customer and marked it as sold, you can start the procurement process with one click: Initiate Requisition.

ServiceTitan helps simplify the procurement process by automatically populating the items from your estimate in the Purchase Order. This gives you full transparency on where your expenses are coming from, and you can even source and ship the items to the location of your choice, such as your warehouse or the customer's location. 

After your Estimate is created and your PO fulfilled, you're ready to keep the project moving. Let's jump back to the main project page to learn more about managing a project. 

The Project Summary table gives you an overview of your contract, expenses paid, your invoices, and more. From here you can see how far along the project is and your cost to complete.

The Budget vs. Actual table gives you a detailed breakdown of every line item. This helps you quickly ensure that your project is staying on budget. 

The Expense Details table gives you a breakdown of all of your expenses and their impact on your budget. All of these tables are updated in real-time, so you have the latest and greatest information on your project right from here. 

As you scroll down the page, you'll also see your Invoices, Payments, along with any Application for Payments. 

How to progressively bill

The Application for Payment workflow lets you progressively bill for work completed during a given period and automatically generates your payment applications following AIA standards. Let's take a look at creating an Application for Payment. 

• First, your Schedule of Values is displayed on the Continuation Sheet. 

• You can make adjustments to the work completed by clicking an item and making adjustments for this period, such as billing all permits or making change orders. 

• Set up Progress Billing for your specific project, such as billing the client in 30% increments, 60/40, or whatever works best for your business. 

• Once you're ready, you can preview and send your Application for Payment. 

In seconds, you get a professional, auto-generated payment application that follows AIA standards. 

“We really enjoy it. We used to do all of this through our accounting system, and it took some of our girls here in the office a long time to do it,” Jonathan says. “This has made it a lot faster on the construction billing side.”

When you're ready to send to your General Contractor for review, simply click Finish and Generate Invoice. The project and invoice details are imported to this page. 

The payment collection process allows you to collect payment by ACH, cash, check, credit card, or via a financing partner. Or if the customer has credits on their account, you can apply those. You can apply the payment to the customer's profile or the invoice via the payment application. 

Once you click Save, your payment is applied. 

How to schedule and dispatch installer technicians

Since construction projects tend to be longer in duration, ServiceTitan built out the Appointments feature to better manage multi-day jobs. Here, you can select multiple appointments over several days to schedule and dispatch installer technicians to complete a large trenching job, for instance.

Appointments also allow you to assign a specific team of technicians or whole crew to the multi-day job, with a few simple clicks using the bulk editing feature.

“What's nice about assigning these crews is that I can do these actions in bulk. So, I can dispatch and arrive multiple technicians at one time, rather than going individually, technician by technician,” Weeks says.

Once the techs are assigned to a job, ServiceTitan captures those labor hours in the time sheets, and automatically calculates payroll.

That's a high-level overview of Project Tracking in ServiceTitan! To learn more about the many features and workflows available, reach out to your Account Manager or request a demo for more information.