Understanding Equipment: The object of Service
The customer equipment module in Service Fusion is a component of the customer record, accessible by estimates and jobs, and centralizes important equipment level information. Its important to become familiar with the idea of what equipment is in Service Fusion before adopting the use of equipment to best position your organization for success. Navigating to the customer equipment section, learning about specific field entry, and understanding equipment as a component of the customer record can be learned here.
For a broad introduction to equipment, consider that, in Service Fusion, equipment is considered the object of service.
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How are Products that I set up in the Product Catalog different from Equipment entries that I set - up in the customer record and include on estimates and jobs?
While your organization may have sold the equipment to the customer whose equipment is being serviced, this would have been facilitated in Service Fusion through two distinct actions that differentiate products from equipment. We explore these differences below:
- Creating the item that is being sold as an entry in the Product Catalog
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- Including the product catalog entry on a job/invoice for the customer
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From a Service Fusion perspective, your products and your equipment are different in a lot of ways. In reality, the physical item may be only 1 tangible thing, and would be entered into Service Fusion as both an equipment entry as well as a product catalog entry. Consider our definition of what equipment is in Service Fusion: The object of service.
Let's use the example of a 30 gallon water heater. Lets also suggest that your organization sold, installed, and continues servicing the water heater. When you sold and installed the water heater, this sale would have been transacted through Service Fusion by creating a job, perhaps first creating an estimate, and, upon completion of the installation, created an invoice and invoiced the customer for the water heater and presumably the installation of the water heater. During this process of selling and installing the water heater, in Service Fusion, the water heater would, ideally, have been created as an entry in the product catalog and treated as a product in the rate table through the estimate / job / invoice workflow process. Servicing the same water heater uses an equipment entry in Service Fusion. Selling the service of maintaining the water heater would similarly use an entry in the Service Catalog (e.g. "Service", "Maintenance", "Water Heater Maintenance", or similar), the object of service is tracked through an equipment entry. In other words, tracking that the service that was sold pertained to a specific 30 gallon water heater is facilitated through the use of the equipment function in Service Fusion.
Use this example as a way to help explain the difference between products and equipment to new users to Service Fusion. Product Catalog entries (products) are used to populate rate tables, important for accurate inventory management practices, and act as taxable entities. Equipment entries are used to track information regarding a specific piece of equipment including installation dates, extended warranty information, model #, serial #, etc.
When is the equipment entry created? At point of sale or during the first service call for the piece of equipment?
The best practice would dictate the inclusion of equipment on every service call. However, the above is an important question to consider if you facilitate both the service of equipment as well as the sale and potential installation of products.
If your organization participates in both activities, the best practice would be to create the equipment entry during the sales/installation cycle, and include the equipment in the sales estimate / installation job. This is an opportunity to capture the specific information that product catalog entries tend to miss.
When creating product catalog entries, there are inventory management practices and entry obsolesce activities that we need to be concerned with when we are considering the best way to enter something in Service Fusion. From a product catalog entry perspective, the entry may want to be generic enough to avoid having an obsolete product catalog entry the moment it is included on a job. Said another way, if I choose to include a unit specific number at the product catalog level, once I sell that product (use that entry), it has become obsolete. If I engage in the sale of another unit, I would need a new product catalog entry to be created to accurately convey that a different unit was sold during each subsequent transaction.
One benefit of choosing to use the equipment module in Service Fusion is the flexibility gained for the creation of product catalog entries. Unit specific information can be omitted from the product catalog entry and instead collected at the equipment entry, ensuring an appropriate level of universality to your product catalog entries without compromising on the amount of data that you collect. Save fields like manufactured date, extended warranty information, installation date for the equipment entry, and begin leveraging service history at the equipment level today.