2020 Q2 Feature Recap!
As we continue to forge ahead through these turbulent times, we are still hard at work to provide our customers the features and tools they need to successfully manage their pet care businesses. One of the most important things our pet sitting software can offer your business is automation. Time To Pet helps to automate scheduling, reports, invoicing, and so much more. One of the biggest updates we made this past quarter was in introducing our Automatic Charging feature, as well as a brand-new report that can help you to monitor your staff and their progress more seamlessly. Please keep reading to see what we’ve been up to, and please take care of yourselves out there!
Automatic Charging
Automatic Charging is one of our most requested features and does exactly what you would expect. It automates the process of accepting payments for your pet care business. When Automatic Charging is enabled, you have the flexibility to pick and choose what days of the week you want to run payments.
You can also choose the time of day you want to run payments and what invoices should get charged (such as invoices due today or invoices past due by three days). For even more flexibility, you can pick and choose which clients are enrolled in Automatic Charging. Have a few clients that prefer to pay themselves? No problem! Just turn off Automatic Charging for them.
To enable Automatic Charging for your company, navigate to the Settings > Invoicing & Payments > Automation section of your account. Once enabled, a new “Automation” section will appear in the Invoicing section of your account. Here, you will find three tabs: “Upcoming” - which details every single upcoming payment set to be automatically charged; “History” - which will list all previous Automatic Charging payments and attempts; and “Clients” - which will allow you to toggle Automatic Charging on and off for individual clients.
Included with Automatic Charging is an automated email that we will send to all clients twenty-four hours before their card is charged. This email serves two purposes. It is a heads up that your client can expect their payment method to be charged and processed, and if your client would like to add a tip to their invoice before being charged (and your business accepts tips), then they have the ability to do so.
Automatic Charging includes a lot more flexibility and customization, including the ability to disable an auto-charge on an invoice-by-invoice basis, multiple automated retries of a card, the ability to charge more than one card, etc. For a complete breakdown of what Automatic Charging offers and how you can enable it, please see our help article here: Automatic Charging.
Reliability Report
Making sure your team stays on time and on track is one of the most important parts of a growing pet care business. For large dog walking or pet sitting businesses, it can be really challenging to keep track of which staff members are most reliable. That is why we released a new report this past quarter designed to make this process easy for you and your management team called the “Reliability Report”.
The Reliability Report can be found in the Reporting > Time section of your account. After setting your date, range, and other parameters, Time To Pet will generate a report showing you all of the events that started late, were cut short, or lasted too long (again, based on your parameters from above). If you need to perform deeper data analysis on this report, you can click the "Download" button to export a copy of this report to any spreadsheet tool (like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets).
For more information on this report and the other Time & Mileage reports, please see our help article here: Time & Mileage Reports.
Send Mass Emails to Private Channel
Time To Pet has always provided a tool for your business to send mass emails to your clients. This is a great way to send company announcements, newsletters, or any other types of messages. There may be some cases, however, where you would like to send a mass email to your clients, but you don't want your staff members to see that email. You can now choose to "Copy to Private" when sending a mass email.
When selecting "Copy to Private", Time To Pet will add the message to the Private channel, and any responses to the mass email will automatically be marked as private messages sent by your client.
To utilize the "Copy to Private" tool for mass emails, you will have to be sure to enable Private Messaging for your company, which can be done by navigating to the Settings > Client Settings > Portal Settings section of your account.
For more information on sending mass emails to your clients, please see our help article here: Sending Mass Emails To Clients.
Improved Handling Of Paid Out Events Assigned To Another User
There may be times when you have had to reassign events to another staff member that were already paid out on a generated paystub. Previously, these situations were a bit of a headache to navigate. These past few months, however, we have released some improvements to make it more apparent to the Administrator team when an event has been paid out to another staff member but it is assigned to someone else.
One of the places we have made changes to is in the “Visits” Report, which can be found in the Reporting > Schedule section of your account. On that report, if an event has been paid out but is assigned to a different staff member than who it was paid to, a red warning sign will be shown, and when hovered over or clicked on, the following message will be displayed:
This same warning will be shown on a staff member’s profile in the “Services” tab. Additionally, when you are generating paystubs in bulk or for an individual staff member, if an event is assigned to a staff member but has already been paid out, we will make it abundantly clear there, as well.
Option To Add New Pet To Existing Events
There may be times when a client gets a new pet and wants to add them to their regularly recurring services. While a joyous occasion, it can mean a lot of manual work updating profiles, care instructions, Templates, events, and so on. In order to cut down on the amount of work that needs to be done, we have released a new update that, if adding a new pet to a client profile that already has a Template or upcoming events scheduled, you will see a new window that asks if you would like to add the new pet to those visits.
This window will let you know how many upcoming events and how many Templates the client has and will let you know that the pet won’t be added to events that have a cancelled or deleted status.
Updates To Text Message Integration Log
If you make use of our text messaging integration, we have some great news to share! One of the most recent updates we rolled out was some upgrades made to our text messaging integration’s “Messages” tab. The “Messages” tab contains a complete log of all text messages sent to and from your company and can be reached by navigating to the Settings > Integrations > Texting > Messages tab of your account.
In order to allow for easier searching and sifting through past messages, we have updated the date picker to a more standard one used throughout the rest of Time To Pet and added two new filters to search with. We added a client filter that will allow you to narrow down the client whose messages you would like to view, as well as a “Sent” or “Received” filter so you can choose between seeing all messages, seeing only messages with a “Sent” status, and seeing only messages with a “Received” status.
If you are interested in a text messaging integration for your company or if you would like to learn more about the updates made, please see our help article here: Text Messages Integration.
Warning About Past/Incomplete Visits When Marking Staff Inactive
Marking a staff member as inactive can mean a lot of things – they may only work during the summer, for example, or maybe they are taking an extended vacation. Sometimes, however, marking a staff member as inactive may mean that you have had to let them go or they have been in an accident and aren’t sure when they will be able to return to work. When such situations arise, it’s usually with very little notice and typically means a lot of work will need to go into reassigning their visits, paying them out for their last visits and tips, and wrapping up any other last loose ends.
During such a hectic time, it can be easy to overlook something. In order to help make this process easier, whenever you mark a staff member inactive, we have added a new warning that will pop up to help you reassign any scheduled events they have coming up (that have not been marked as cancelled or complete) to another team member and let you decide how you would like to handle any clients they are listed as a preferred sitter for. You can choose to either move each preferred staff member for clients up by one, or you can choose to have the staff member you are marking inactive replaced by the staff member you are choosing to reassign all of their events to.
We also recommend that you not reassign past visits, as it can negatively affect your reporting and auditing. Any past visits that haven’t been marked as completed or as cancelled are ones we suggest marked as “Completed” so they do not get reassigned as part of making the staff member inactive. This will help you to preserve accurate records and avoid any potential confusion moving forward.
For more information on this process, please see our help article here: Marking A Staff Member As Inactive.
Clients Can See Available Credits/Open Payments In Mobile App
Just as there are some clients that only make use of the web version of their Client Portal, there are some clients who heavily rely on the Mobile App version of their portal. For that reason, having as much functionality as possible exist in the Mobile App as it exists in the Web Portal is extremely important to our team. It is something we are always looking to improve – which is why we are so happy to announce that clients can now view the credits and open payments they have available on their accounts in their Mobile Apps just as they can in their Web Portals if your company has granted them the ability to view those.
While they are not able to apply them themselves, this will help them to avoid overpayment and allow them to see when they have received a credit for services that have already been paid for that can then be applied to future events.
To allow clients to see the credits and open payments they have available on their accounts, you can navigate to the Settings > Client Settings > Portal Settings section of your account and will be able to enable the option underneath the “Invoicing” header.
For more information on the differences between a credit and an open payment in Time To Pet and how to apply them to a client’s account, please see our help articles here: Understanding Open Payments And Credits In Time To Pet & How To Apply Open Payments & Applying And Redeeming Client Credit.
