10 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do In Fergus

Watch this webinar to learn 10 features of the Fergus App that you may not be using and how these features can help you improve efficiency in the day-to-day running of your trades business. Among other things, you'll learn how you can use Fergus to get paid faster (with invoice reminders and Fergus Pay), how to utilise groups to get more out of your reporting and how to view and communicate activity with your customers directly from the App.

Transcript:

Hey, guys, what are you doing. My name is Chris Davis, and I am. And as Dan pollitt mentioned, we're part of the cosmos subsisting here Fergus and our role is basically to help get you and your team set up. What's the biggest impact most of you probably have already dealt with one of us in the past.

Exactly Yeah, it's been great to work with a lot of you today. We're going to be pretty much covering off a few key things in Vegas 10 things. In fact, all of your mix have been new tips just to avoid background noise. But there is a cue and I feel that you'll be able to see at the bottom middle of your screen, and there you can list questions as we're going through and we're going to do our best to cover them all off at the end of the session. So we'll keep moving through as we're covering off the points that we will cover off all questions towards the end. And it's just important to note, we will be going through them relatively quickly. So definitely pop down those questions so that we can discuss them all together. If you need some extra clarity sweep with that out of the way. My a lot of straight into it. These 10 things that perhaps didn't know some of you. Admittedly might have already discovered them for you. They still serve as a refresher, but for those who haven't already seen them will be learning a bunch of new stuff today. So the first thing I wanted to take you through was invoice reminders inside of Fergus so to finally going to hit two system settings on the top right. And we're looking for reminders about halfway down here on the left bottom right hand corner here, we have email reminders for overdue invoices. If this is enabled, which I believe it's actually turned off by default. And your account to switch it on. What Fergus will do is send an email to your customer. The day after the invoices do. And then every 14 days after that point up to three emails or until the customer pays that invoice perfect. Another key part is what's called the summary of activity and figure. So this again, might be something that a few of you already know, but with the summary of activity. It gives you the option and the invoicing. So we're here to view what's being paid. So far at a glance and also kind of gives you a document that you could see across your customer if they're wanting to view how much is being paid and how much is still left outstanding. So just going to click up here and view summary of activity. And you should be able to say here we've got a little bit of a document that outlines how much is being paid to that amount as 500.

And how much is left outstanding and is still due. So that's a handy little dog. You can either look at or you can see in the way to your customers by clicking here either viewing or emailing that away or some one of show showing next is how to move items from one part of a job or one site visit into a different site physical perhaps a completely separate job in this little scenario. We've got a little quote a job yet. And a team have gone out working on the job. And I'm sure that most of you start with us. The customer has been asked for additional work to be done just fine. We're happy to do the work, but this is a quarter jobs. We're going to charge him extra for this. However our staff have recorded all of that information into the same job or into that same site visit. So I'm going to show you how we take that information move it to the right place. We can charge for it separately or at least not just separately on the invoice. So here, we're dealing with site visit a currently I've got a couple of time entries in here. And I've also got a few materials listed what I'm going to do, however, is move my time in train and a few of these materials across to this separate site visit here. So I'm going to start inside visit a because this is where my items are currently sitting. And over on the top right, we have this move IDM's option selecting this brings up a separate window on the left side of the screen. I'm feeling my current site visits. Click the arrow here, I can expand to view all of the time entries and materials currently recorded here I select what I want to move, which is this time entry. And let's move the glue and the switch. So these three items up selecting to move across, I can move these to a completely separate job. Just search out that job number if you know it. Otherwise I'm actually going to send them to a separate site visit within this job sending them across the site visit based just click Move. Selected folks will take a second. But it's going to take my labor entry from here to say that now we've only got Christie's time entry. If I view the extra works tab my second site visit. I'll have my two labor entries and I've also got the additional materials. So the glue on the switch that I've just moved across as well. Nice That's a really handy little tip there. Another really good one is if you have started a job with that's quoted or charge up job and you want to see the schedule to your customer, or maybe they've asked for a ski Joe to let them know when your team will actually hit out to site there's a handy section on the site visit that shows up here. And it's just this little email or little icon, you can see as I hover over there. This is scene schedule to the customer. So if we know that the team is being schedule. We can click here and you're going to get an email that pops up pre-populated with your customers. Email We also have the subject line, which you can adjust. You can remove anything or edit anything if you need to. But it does outline that base to our team members will be heading out tomorrow at 10:00 AM. So it's just a handy little tip if you wanted to seen that across to your customers just clicking on the icon. You can also add in any other wording if you needed to just outline something specific. Scroll down. You could also attach any files and photos from your desktop or if they were on the job. Otherwise you're ready to assume that will click Send Email and now your customer has received that schedule. All right. The next thing I want to show you is really a tip for the admin staff. Fergus is a huge tool.

And of course, we're using it to track all about jobs. And so it can be a little easy to get lost sometimes. What Fergus can do for us if we hover over this recent tab at the top here Fergus remembers the last four or five jobs that you've previously been working in and just makes it really easy to navigate things if it may be closed. The wrong tab. You'll be able to quickly find the old job open it up and get back up to what you need to. And one other really quick tip. This isn't necessarily a bogus tip, but it's a trick that you can use and honestly, every single website is just opening hyperlinks with your middle mouse button will open that job or that tab or whatever you happen to be looking at. In a separate tab. See if I click on this. Let's just go. So if I right click, I can open this link in a new tab. Makes it really easy. So that you're not getting too swamped and deal with this here. But I can also hover over a link and click with my middle mouse button. And again, you'll see that it's open to that customers page in a separate tab. So that I'm not going to lose my place. I'm working in this job here. Cheers so the other thing that can also be helpful. We just talked about emailing schedule to a customer that's something that you can use just to view your emails have been sent. You can kind of look at past information for a job specifically to see past emails. The best place to go is just to go to notes in history. So we're going to click into here. And you can say, for example, that this is the email we've just sent. We've also got a whole lot of other historical items from what we were doing with moving items and editing certain site visits. But if you just want to view email specific to this job you can unstick the parts that you don't want to view. And he would just get the emails that we've seen. So can see the one we see just before for the schedule. You also say the original quote email. So it's just a handy way to view past emails linked to that job at a glance. You can also add any manual entries as well. If you needed to track something. But this is the key part here to view emails associated to a job. Also, if you needed to just view emails links to a specific customer not a job, but just the customer overall, you can click either on the customer's tab here and into their name or via the section using a little tip that danger told us with using the middle scroll button of the mouse to open that tab up. And now we're in the customer's name. We've got their information, but I just want to show you here emails. You can see we've got that heating and now we get a list literally of all emails linked to that customer regardless of job. The key kind of linking part is that customer names we can scroll down and view any of these emails just by clicking into it. So that's something else that you guys may or may not have used before. All right. We're going to take you through next is utilizing groups inside of Ferguson. I truly feel that this is one thing that very few people have discovered and even less people are using. So I think it's one of the coolest things that folks can do for us right now. So let's head back to our job. I'm going to view site visit aims pick him up at random groups can be used in two ways. They can be used to bulk assign staff to a job, which is way. So we delete just that. So when I click a sign.

I have a series of groups here. If I assign my climbing team group that sends a notification to everyone who is a part of that group letting them know that they've now been assigned to this job really easy rather than sitting there and clicking on five, six different people's names gets a bit tedious. Secondly if we check the home page, our dashboard by default, this shows us every single job that you have running right now. But again, you can filter this not only by a specific staff members. But also by those groups. If I find that plumbing take once more we'll see the jobs that they're working on, which apparently there's not a lot. The second way that we use groups and is a little bit different to what we've just shown you. So to explain this better. We're going to hit the system settings and groups. So this is where you can create your group. So AD groups have already gone. You can see that some of my groups have users like the plumbing team is not one figure the electrical team and some of them are empty, the groups that have left empty. I've kept aside. So that I can use these to better filter on my work report. So let's open up my job once more. And now we're going to head to the job summaries tab. And here we have group tracking now I've already assigned the Oakland group, which has no stuff, right. But I can assign let's say Christchurch as well. You might have already noticed actually when you create a new job there is the group tracking tab here. This serves the same purpose. All right. Now that I've assigned my group to this job if I open my book report, it's going to bring that up on a separate tab. With support. I'm sure all of you have dealt with in the past. And I'm really hoping that you've already discovered the custom filters here because I've already got dozens of these groups, which I've assigned my jobs to a fi filter the report to show me my open group, click Submit some is going to refresh that report. I'm now viewing all of the jobs through this frame that are part of this for like I said, not a lot of people are using this but this allows you to break down all of your jobs and see income from the electrical side of your business with the plumbing side of your business or hand, we've used the groups to break down different districts of our country. In this case. Perfect guys, we're going to hit over two reports. Now we've got a couple of points that we're wanting to mention here. The first one is the quoting reports. This is actually a really recent addition to our reports tab here. So it sits under its own heating under quoting and it's the reports will open it up and just take a quick look. So first things first, we've got a quote section and an estimate section. This pot is empty. We haven't been dealing with any estimates all of our data is linked to our quotes. And you can also filter to a specific date range as well. So perhaps you wanting to look at the success of your quotes from the month of October versus how November is tracking. So far as you can do that just by allocating the date range. And you can see also down here, we've got the status of the quote. So how many you've made. And you can also just see how many have been accepted or rejected and how many you get to be priced. And we've also got the total quoted value here.

And how much it's actually going to cost you. So this is based on the data that you've popped into your quote. How much it's going to cost you as a business and in the margin just based on these two columns here. This is a really great way to track at a glance for a specified time period. How your quoted jobs we estimate jobs are going. It is just also important to note this report is designed to be a general gauge of the approximate quotes for the time period. You don't get a specific breakdown of associated jobs, but you do get your tally breakdown here and your general count. What should be really helpful just to see how you are tracking with your quotes and how successful they are. All right in keeping on the theme of reports. I'm now going to show you the Fergus hay report. Now for those of you who already have focused pay enabled. I'm sure you've actually already dealt with this report. But for those of you who don't I'm going to quickly explain what it does, how it's used and really just try and encourage you to use it. So I think it's another really awesome tool with God. So let's get into Settings really quickly and Fergus paid down the bottom here. Now Fergus Payne gives your customer more options to pay the rent voices right. By default, you send an invoice to your customer PDF file, and make a deposit to your bank account. However, with bogus pay enabled, they still receive that ADF but they also get the opportunity to pay via credit card or debit card. This is a system that we've offered for quite a while. And so we've noticed that customers know our customers who use focus pay received payments from their customers up to 35% faster. There is really no reason not to be using focused bank. We have recently changed the provider that we've been using. We're now using stripe. We made you change because that allows us to give you more support. So I highly, highly encourage you to get set up. It is super easy just head to Fergus pay. Sign up for straight course, once you agree. And read the terms, conditions sign up for stripe it's a really easy process. I'm just asking you to input your details, where you want your funds to be sent to and verifying your business address and your personal details, of course, once you are signed up for stripe you can then use the Fergus Pay Report when your customers make payments to you. These will be sent to strike first and then deposited to your account in a batch. So one payment from strike may hold 3 or four customers payments. The better report allows you to view that payment in a little more detail and make sure that you allocate the correct sums to the correct jobs or invoices however, we do get a lot of people asking about the health payments. Doesn't happen often, but in the off chance that your customer pays you. And then for whatever reason cancels or holds that payment still already being sent to strike. And we will be marked here as a health payment allowing you to locate the invoice get in touch with the customer and find out what the next step should be. Because if you get stuck with any of these just get in touch with our support team. And they'll be happy to look out for you. Yeah we'll pop up some more information in a second as well for a support contact we'll also outline a bit of extra resources and information. But for the time being, we're actually just going to cover awesome questions that have come through. I think is one here from Kurt that we'll take a quick look at a theory. Any other questions that you guys have top your mind. Regardless of how detailed or how simple. Please just pop, pop them in the Q&A box for the time being. And we'll be able to cover them off just in this last part of the weaponization but I really encourage you to just seen them over now. We can cover them all together. A few other people might have the same question as your eyes, it can always be helpful. But the one that we have here is just a question saying, can you run a report on revenue based on job source and not just percentage. So I think that one would link back to our report. We can take a quick look at. So if I understand correctly kind of wanting a little bit of information to run a report on revenue and based on the job source. So guessing that is the job growth, but not just percentage. So you are able to track here. And see the price total versus cost. The main thing that Vegas does work on is the margin. But if you're wanting more of an in-depth view of this information annual report you get the outline here, but you also have this little icon, which is that specific job summary. So this would give you your actual dollar values as we scroll down here. There's a handy section at the very bottom. That's also quite good. If you're looking at this for the first time. And it's a bit too much. I always recommend this bottom section here, but you're able to see how much the realized profit is sitting on that job. You've got your price amount, especially if it was quoted how much you quoted versus how much it's actually cost based on how much labor or materials you've entered. So your actuals and then the actual profit at the end. So in this job, it's not tracking. So well. But the final invoices are yet to be seen. So once they are seen and paid this would actually go into the grain. So that's how you get more of an in-depth section there from the system. Hopefully that kind of answers that question. Kurt OK. OK So I just mentioned it was the customer source report. OK So for the customer source report. That's a separate one here that sets the bottom. It is just a very basic pie graph. So for this one in the customer service report. You don't just give an outline of how many customers are in each source. But there is not a broken down less. So if you are needing something more in depth the best bet is to also have a spreadsheet with an outline externally to Fergus. Fergus will just give you a basic report here. I think we have to get a little closer to Mike. Could you mention the customer sales report what some people who have been working with in the past. What they'll do is create a group full that time in this kind of touches on Charlene's question. I'm asking about how to create a group and assign people to them. So I'm going to create a group here hitting two system settings groups and add in your group if you want to add stuff to the script just click carefully dropdown assign the staff who are relevant and we consider group name. All right. So this is my new group. Now to touch back on Kurt's question to see the income from different customer sources or customer types. What I could do is when I create a new job assigned that group to that job. So that I can then use the WIP Report to give me more insight. Where is she this, you guys. So the groups that I have in this account. They're all super generic here we go. I've got different locations. But if I had groups that tell me this customer came from Google Google searches or word of mouth or look me up on the yellow pages, you could then use this WIP report and filter to those specific customer types. You might end up with a dozen or more groups some customer sources, some for job locations or districts or types of work. I really believe groups would be the best answer to your question they're different if you're wanting a more in-depth way to analyze it. Customer source does just give you that basic paragraph of law. But like Dan mentioned, if you are wanting additional insight using groups in the state would be the best way. There's also just a point here from Schelling or Eric just mentioning if we can run through seating at the group we won't have time for that specifically today, but we are running a we've been are on Friday, which we will see in the link or pop up the page to register for that, which does, which will solely focus on group creation. So that's what you can average just for that one as well as anyone else that's interested for that. So we've go a lot more depth rather than just a quick overview, which is all we can really give today. We've also got one on just running a report on the customer source. So that is just going to Reports and customer source report, you will need to into customer sources. First if you're just wanting that basic report can just do that by going to system settings. And if we go into here for customer sources. If we just scroll to the very bottom of general he is where you can into the options. And that's what we populate to that report there. Andrew for your question Carly all have a go at answering a question. I'm making a couple of assumptions here. So forgive me if I don't get it quite right. If you're looking to add your invoices from a supplier to a job. Let's just use this job here as our example. So just reading the question out. Are you able to enter a purchase into purchase items as gross amounts as your major supplier invoices show up this way. Currently you're using basically a calculator to find out the net price before entering these into focus. So when the customer invoices appear of course, standard is to list them here within the supplied documents tab. Fergus wants to see costs inclusive of GST. We want to see the full cost amount here. If for whatever reason perhaps it's the top of supply or type of invoice that we're receiving is not going to work. And the supply documents tab is a bit cheeky it's a bit of a workaround but what some people will do is list a custom line. So I'm just going to invoice number 14 for example. And then we can list the cost of that invoice here. It's just 1,500 doing it this way. The benefit to this is we get an accurate cost on my job by default. This is recognized as a material cost that I can change this to a different sales account code. If you're using those. And then we can assign a cell value to this here, or we can just do this when we get to the invoicing tab. Hopefully that helps Kylie if it doesn't just let me know and I'll give it another go. Awesome and there's just one other one here just asking about a strike payment issue from July. So Fergus payments showing up twice on the customer invoice. We will have to just double check that one without tech support team then we'll be able to let what the outcome of that one was mentioning is kind of duplicate payment. So we'll need to double check that one. We will get back to you on how that is looking. Yeah, I do remember that being brought up, but I know that the team would definitely working on this. I haven't heard anything about it since. So my inclination is that it has been resolved. However I will definitely look into that for you. Just a quick note as well. Your name is appearing as office. So I'm not sure exactly who to get in touch with. If you're able just to put a few if you don't mind listing another question with your email address that won't be public at all just so we know who to reach out to afterwards email address or phone number would be perfect for that one. And then someone's given that one a thumbs up as well. So if both of you can just pop your contact detail perfect. Cheers thank you. I appreciate that. And then the other person that comes up that one. That would be perfect. I've got a question just come through from Chris. If you already have a stripe account can it be integrated into Fergus pay. And we will just double check that one with our support team as well, just to make sure whether that will have to be a Fergus specific stripe account in the wallet that you know that one as well. Can get back to you to confirm shortly. Awesome guys just wanted to check if this. Any other questions that you have at the moment that you wanted to just quickly ask us otherwise we will just pop up that information that I mentioned before, for our webinars. The success team will be running from Wednesday through Friday. Dan Paul had mentioned this slightly earlier as well just to get that information up on the screen for you. Just get it out. Now We also have this before we get there. I just tried trade help with our videos short how tows and previous webinars as well. But this is the portal that we're talking about. So our customer training portal. We have three topics for this week Wednesdays we'll be covering off moving items in a bit more detail, which we talked about today. Thursday's topic is going to be showing you more detail. Just recapping how to view past sent emails for a customer or for a job. And the last section for Friday will be groups, which we talked about before. So to register for this. It is and photo op Fergus customer training portal. So I will just lay this up in case anyone wants to take note and register for those sessions. Definitely jump in to them if you can. There are about 10 or 15 minutes long. So not too long for you to do. And Wednesday and Friday at 10:30 AM New Zealand time and Thursday is 12:30 PM New Zealand time. Yeah really encouraged you guys to come along to those. They're totally free and they're a very similar format to what we're doing right here. I'm accepted and have to deal with one of us not to probably not even be a little bit up. Yeah perfect Avenue just one other question that's just popped third for today's webinar. Just mentioning if there will be a replay link there will be it will be automatically sent out to you. I believe within the next 24 hours. If not sooner. So you'll definitely get a copy. Just refer back to this if you need to listen to it in the future. Otherwise I believe it should also be hosted on our trade hub, which Christie mentioned earlier. So you should find this webinar as well as previous ones that Dan pollitt has run some of those will be talking about business coaching out a bit or effectively run your business. But we're working on putting up more focused specific webinars and tutorial videos as well. Yeah perfect doesn't like we've had anything else come through now for any other questions. So if there's nothing else that you guys needed to ask. We will wrap up shortly. Again Just wanting to talk about these customer success webinars that we run weekly Wednesday through Friday. Keep an eye on this portal will be updated every Friday or Monday with the upcoming weeks topics. So different keep an eye on that. And also, if you have any requests for topics to cover things that you're wanting a bit more clarity on that you think might also help other Fergus customers or your friends that you've kind of run into the same issue on Fergus or need a bit of extra info. Definitely just pass them through to us on support Fergus just come just with the hitting. We've been at topic request and we can definitely do our best to accommodate those things that you want to talk about. So that's just one of the little thing to note but other otherwise looks like we're all OK to wrap up for today. Guys she is very much for joining us. This is just our contact info if you need to reach out after this. With any account specific questions. Otherwise, we'll leave it there for today. And hopefully we can have you joining us for any future sessions like this. Have a lovely rest of your day.