Drive Time Task Category
When it comes to punching into and out of drive time, every second counts — especially for companies that serve large maintenance routes (e.g. snow removal, mowing, all-season). With a goal of making this process more efficient, we’ve introduced a helpful, new Drive Time task category that brings those punch-ins to the forefront, enabling a Crew Lead to perform this critical operation in just two or three taps.
Having a separate task category for Drive Time will also pave the way for future drive time analytics views, which will empower you to analyze and compare the efficiency of your crews’ routes and overall time spent driving.
How It Works:
- Open up a Job belonging to a Job Type that you’ve categorized as ‘NonProduction.’
- From the ‘Punch-In Tasks’ panel, add a new Punch-In Task or edit an existing one.
- Select a category from the Task Category dropdown (this appears on NonProduction jobs only).
- ‘Default’ will categorize this task the same as any of your currently existing tasks.
- ‘Drive Time’ will categorize this task specifically as a driving task.
Quick Start/End Tasks
If you have tasks that don’t usually require documentation — such as drive time, staff training, loading/unloading, and other non-billable tasks — you can turn Quick Start/End feature on to allow your Crews to start and end these tasks more quickly, bypassing the photos, notes, and materials prompts that usually appear upon ending the task.
How It Works:
- Underneath the Task Category dropdown, you’ll see a checkmark for ‘Enable “Quick Start/End for this task’.
- When enabled, "Quick Start/End Task" will skip the photos, notes, and linked materials steps when a crew leads starts or ends the task. They can still edit/add this information in the task at any time.
- Quick Start/End can be applied to a task regardless of whether it is categorized as Drive Time or Default.
- Note: Crew leads can still add photos, notes, and document materials on the task at any time
Drive Time Shortcuts
We are making it even easier for crew leads to punch in to drive time from their dashboard by automatically displaying Drive Time tasks on jobs.
How It Works:
- To get Drive Time tasks to display automatically within the Crew app:
- Head over to your Settings > Job Types page, and open up a Job Type that you want that shortcut displaying for. (E.g. if you want the Drive Time shortcut to show within the Crew app for every snow removal visit, you might head here and open up your ‘Snow’ Job Type.)
- Find the ‘Drive Time Shortcut’ option at the bottom of ‘Prompt Settings,’ switch this setting to ‘Yes’ and click ‘Save.’
- Now, when one of your Crew Leads brings up a Job with that Job Type within the Crew app, they’ll see a Drive Time task shortcut with a play icon.
- If multiple tasks within the same NonProduction job are categorized as ‘Drive Time’, clicking the Play icon will open a ‘Select Drive Time’ view that your Crew Lead can use to pick which one they’d like to punch into. This is useful if, for example, you have different drive time tasks set up for two different depots that are both affiliated with your business.
- Punching into Drive Time through this shortcut will bring you through a flow that allows you to (optionally) bring up a map route to the jobsite upon punching into the Drive Time
- Note: You must have a NonProduction job and Drive Time task created in order to link the shortcut to the task
Absent or Late Notes
Crew Leads marking a crew member as Late or Absent will now have the ability to add a note connected to that Absence, which can help add additional detail and context for the timesheet reviewer.
How It Works:
- Within the Crew app, instances of Absent that have a note attached will show a blue visual icon indicating this (as seen in the right screenshot below).
- Using the browser version of LMN, your operations staff can view any Absence Notes coming in from the field while reviewing a timesheet:
- You’ll also notice that the Timesheet Details main screen now shows the initial circles as seen in the Crew app — representing those individuals who worked on the crew during that Timesheet. Clicking on these circles will bring up the Timesheet Staff modal (similarly to clicking the ‘Staff’ button to the right of ‘Review’).
Skip and Reschedule Services
Not every skipped visit is the same. Improve communication between your crew leads and your office, and collect critical context when crew leads need to skip a scheduled visit, with the ability to leave notes and mark scheduled visits that should be rescheduled.
How It Works:
With the initial launch of the LMN Crew app, we put the ability to Skip a visit into the hands of crew leads for the first time ever. To help maximize communication between the field and your back office, we’re taking that tool two steps further. When marking a visit as Skipped, your leads will now be able to:
- Write a note providing context for why they had to skip the visit. (E.g. “Front lawn obstructed by parked vehicle”)
- Mark the skipped visit as ‘Reschedule Needed,’ to let the Operations team know that they’ll need to reach out to the customer and arrange a new date and time for the visit.
- If a skipped visit is marked as needing a reschedule, this will be visible in multiple LMN web app views including Timesheet Review, Whiteboard, and Calendar. (An LMN user with Timesheet editing permissions will also be able to mark a visit as ‘Reschedule Needed’ from the web application.)
- After the visit has been moved to a different date by an LMN user within the browser, its status will automatically be changed from ‘Reschedule Needed,’ to ‘Scheduled.’
On the browser side, a visit that has been Skipped and marked as ‘Needs Reschedule’ will be indicated as follows:
- On the Whiteboard: A ‘Skipped’ status and a yellow calendar icon shown on the visit card.
- On the Calendar: An icon of a calendar with an exclamation mark will appear on the visit block shown on the calendar.
- On the ‘Schedule Review’ Screen: If you filter down to show ‘Skipped’ visits only, you’ll now see a ‘Reschedule Needed’ column. If the skipped visit is in need of rescheduling, this column will show the same yellow calendar icon seen on the Whiteboard.
- Clicking into the Visit from any of these screens will allow you to view the ‘Skipped Reason’ provided by your Crew Lead via the text input box:
- When a visit that has been marked ‘Reschedule’ is rescheduled, its status will automatically revert from ‘Skipped’ to ‘Scheduled’:
Invoice Analytics Dashboards
Keeping an eye on your invoicing numbers — like your current overdue amounts, or how many invoices are currently in Pending status — is critical when it comes to ensuring the health of your business’s cashflow.
To help with this, we’ve added three powerful new dashboards to our LMN Analytics views, all of which can be found under the brand-new Invoicing menu subsection:
- Invoice Overview: Use this to pull up a filtered grouping of invoices and view your most important action items, such as top overdue accounts, top accounts with remaining balances, and the total invoice amount broken out by invoice status.
- Invoice Aging: This dashboard breaks out your filtered invoices by the amount of days that have passed since the Invoice Date. This will allow you to get a high-level sense of how quickly your team is capturing anticipated revenue (which, in turn, will help your business stay profitable).
- Invoice Listing: Just like our Estimate Listing and Job Listing reports, this provides you with details of each filtered invoice in a basic table that you can feel free to export (XLSX or CSV) and further manipulate in your chosen environment.
Services/Work Areas Listing Order
Preserve an Estimate’s Ordering of Services / Work Areas while Exporting it to a Job
Prefer to have your Operations team looking at services in the order that your estimators specified? Now, LMN gives you the ability to preserve an estimate’s ordering of Services/Work areas while exporting it to a job.
How It Works:
When using the ‘Create Job’ tool from an estimate, choose between two settings:
- Turn the toggle on to arrange the Job’s services / work areas by order of most hours to least (existing default setting); OR,
- Leave the toggle off to arrange the Job’s services / work areas in the exact same order as they were on the linked estimate.
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