Welcome to Squeegee
from Susie, COO and senior account manager at Squeegee
Hello and welcome,
Allow me to introduce myself, I'm Susie, one of the senior team at Squeegee, here to get you started with your account. I haven't always worked in software and I'm not a developer (or anything close) so I understand how hard it can be to embark on a brand new piece of software especially if you don't class yourself as being very 'techy!'
However, what I can bring is experience in getting the best set up for your business and a guarantee that if you take some time setting up your account and testing the features out as your first step, you'll soon realise just how much time you're going to be saving using Squeegee's intelligent automations. In no time at all the only thing you'll wish is that you started sooner!
It's tempting to download a new piece of software and want to see impact instantly, but we strongly advise against importing all of your customers as the very first step, and instead get to know the system and your preferences first.
So Where to start?
When you see all the training modules for Squeegee, you'll soon realise that it's a pretty big system and this can be daunting for some businesses, especially when you're so busy with little to no time on your hands. Ask yourself this though - why did you start looking at software solutions in the first place? The likely answer is that there's the promise of saving time and energy on admin tasks allowing your business to scale effectively.
In small businesses with just 5 users, the time saved by automating quoting, invoicing, payments and using bulk notifications for communications is equivalent to a whopping two full time members of staff so putting in the initial effort required to move over really IS worth it.
So in answer the question? My advice is to start with the global settings you want to have on your account and test these out on a couple of dummy customers with your own details before anything else.
Act as your own customer
Once your global settings are all as you'd like them (and remember I'm here to help if you're not sure about anything) then the next step is to take a look at the message templates in Module 17 and set these up using the available tokens at the top of each. If you take a look at the full module on our website using the link, you'll also see some written instructions as well as a handy document on tokens, what they mean with examples of how they look in messages.
Lastly make sure you have set yourself up as a dummy customer with some repeating and ad-hoc jobs and start testing!
The Squeegee Academy
Modules 8 and 9 on the Squeegee Academy focus on adding and editing customers and jobs. If you're doing this after setting your default global settings, it should be pretty simple as the customers and jobs follow some of thee such as:
Customers defaulting to:
- Preferred notification methods;
- Whether invoices are automatically generated;
- Whether invoices get automatically sent once created;
- Whether options for direct debit and card payments show on invoices if set up on the account;
- Whether time is to be tracked on jobs for this customer;
- Whether tax is enabled on invoices for this customer;
- Default payment periods or custom;
- Default invoice notes or custom;
- Whether prices are hidden from workers and
- Whether signatures are required.
The aim is to have the bulk of your business set to the default, then you will only need to edit any customers that specifically require it, otherwise they can all be added without even a glance to the customer settings speeding things up significantly.
The same can be said for jobs where defaults can be set on:
- prices of services if these are standardised in your business;
- frequencies of repeat jobs in a schedule;
- job duration and
- assignee(s)
