This recipe is intended primarily for Admin users of OnCall Air who have access to the Office application.

With this recipe, you’ll create installation packages using FlexJobs, and then include those installation packages when building a proposal instead of selecting accessories and installation items manually.

This recipe offers several advantages – for both admin and consultant users -- over the traditional way of customizing a proposal in OnCall Air.

To use this recipe, you’ll need to be comfortable with four key concepts.

Taking a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the concepts in this section can save you a LOT of time when quoting jobs in the future!

OnCall Air’s unique proposal builder allows you to easily drag multiple systems into one proposal option. That same capability is useful for adding a FlexJob to an existing system. Doing this allows you to make changes to the Equipment, for example, without affecting the FlexJob Installation Package.

In fact, you can even remove the Equipment combination altogether, and replace it with a different combination without affecting all the work you have done to customize all other aspects of the job.

In the animation below, we show how an Installation Kit built as a FlexJob can easily be added to an existing System (equipment bundle) in the same proposal option. This is what we refer to as “stacking”.

Figure 1.2 - Display of Stacked Items on Presented Proposal

In the animation below, we look at how a stacked proposal, with an equipment bundle at top and a FlexJob Installation Kit looks when presented. This technique has the advantage of showing off more of your unique company information and notes inside the FlexJob!

FlexJobs have several pricing capabilities that (a) match the pricing approach of the Equipment Pricing Engine, (b) add general labor to a job, and (c) allocate a markup for taxes paid on products you purchase.

Getting familiar with these pricing concepts will help you define the right pricing for your kit.

After reviewing this approach, you may even decide to allocate the labor and material portion of your HVAC installation pricing from the Equipment bundle into the FlexJob.

Remember: this is only a setup step. You do not need to redo this every time you quote a job! But taking the time upfront to think through your pricing strategy will save you and your team a lot of time in the future.

Instead, set your Installation Kit pricing at the FlexJob level, in two simple steps:

Pricing Step 1 - FlexJob Pricing Settings

In the Pricing Engine section of the Office, you’ll find a section for FlexJob Pricing. This is where you can specify the following pricing settings to apply to all your FlexJobs:

Note that you can create these settings for all your FlexJobs by default, or you can also create different versions with different values for different categories of FlexJob. This might be useful - for instance - if you’re using OnCall Air for a different business line (e.g., service & repair, electrical, etc) that have different cost assumptions.

Pricing Step 2 - Specific Pricing Values in the FlexJob Setup

Second, when you create your Installation Kit as a FlexJob, allocate the actual hours you want for that type of job, and any base material costs you want included.

This gives you more control over your labor and material pricing.

For instance, perhaps you create an installation kit for larger 4 or 5 ton systems with Variable Speed. You can now control more precisely the hours and base material you want to allocate to this job, rather than being restricted to a single value based on the job type only.

A FlexJob contains multiple equipment, accessories and installation items.

These items can either be added ahead of time in the Office (typically by an admin), or they can be added when a Proposal is being built (typically by a consultant). In this section, we’ll review the power and flexibility of editing a FlexJob when a proposal is being built.

There are two ways to edit items on a FlexJob when building a proposal: Before adding to an option, or after adding. Let’s take a look at two examples to clarify the difference:

Editing a FlexJob before it’s added to a proposal option allows you to include that customized version of the FlexJob on multiple proposal options all at once (rather than individually).

Editing a FlexJob after it’s been added to a proposal option will apply the changes only to that specific option.

NOTE :If you’ve been using OnCall Air for a while, it may take some getting used to, but the dynamic editing capability of FlexJobs allows a user to completely skip the step of navigating through the Accessories and Installation Items, as this can all be done “inside the FlexJob”.

The Inspector is a tool that lets you see the exact details of what’s included in a proposal option at any point before or after you build and present a quote.

Getting familiar with the power of the Inspector is a key concept for OnCall Air, and particularly important when using FlexJobs!

It’s a great way to verify the detailed contents of your FlexJob Installation Kit, and any customizations:

The Inspector, and the included FlexJob details, can be accessed in many places, as shown in the following illustration:

Now that we have a solid understanding of the key concepts, let’s walk through a more realistic, step-by-step example.

In the sections below, we’ll explain how to create the initial FlexJob, how to price it, how a user can find that FlexJob and add it to a quote. We’ll then show you the final product.

For this recipe, we’ll use an example scenario: Build a FlexJob Installation Kit for a Heat Pump + Air Handler job. Our goal for this scenario is to set up the proper FlexJob catalog items so that our team can then use these items to quote the jobs.

The first step, of course, is to plan out your strategy. We recommend using a spreadsheet (e.g., Google Sheets or Excel) to plan out the types of FlexJobs you will build.

Use the planning stage to answer some questions:

In this example, we have decided to build 4 variations of our Installation Package of Residential Heat Pumps:

We’ll have two variations based on the capacity of the job: (a) 1.5-3 Ton, and (b) 4-5 Ton

We’ll also have two variations based for each tier of job.

Perhaps we have a higher-end package that includes a longer base warranty, and a smart thermostat.

Example spreadsheet to organize prior to implementing:

Once you’ve planned your strategy, we highly recommend that you implement one or two FlexJobs in the Office, and then test out building a proposal and presenting it BEFORE you build all of your FlexJobs.

By familiarizing yourself with the building and presentation of a FlexJob, you will likely identify tweaks or edits that you’d like to make to your strategy.

You can use the Inspector as well to review how the pricing is lining up, and present the proposal to yourself to clearly visualize how your customer would perceive it.

Tip - Duplicate Tabs

One tip to make it easier to test your changes when you’re implementing anything in the Office is to “Duplicate” your browser tab.

Here’s an example of how to do this in Chrome, by right clicking anywhere on the tab with your mouse:

Then you can make changes in the Office, save them, and switch to the other tab, refresh, and see what the changes look like without having to lose your place in the Office.

So now you’ve designed your strategy, and tested it by creating one or two FlexJobs in the Office and making sure they price and present exactly how you want them.

The next step is to start creating all the variations of the FlexJobs. This is where the handy “Clone” feature comes into play. Once you clone a FlexJob, you can then make the small edits to the name and content of the job saving you lots of time and potential errors.

You and your team are now ready to start presenting proposals!

Remember, one of the key concepts is that you have two items for a typical HVAC install job:

First, you select the equipment matchup that you want to quote, and drag it into the Option. Second, you find the FlexJob Installation Kit you want for that proposal option, and click Include to add it.

Of course, you can customize the FlexJob before or after you add it.

And the great thing is that for most jobs you can simply skip ahead to the summary page to finalize your options and get ready to present!
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The last step is to make sure your team is familiar with the new process.

Just like most features in OnCall Air, once you do it a couple of time, it’s really fast and simple to repeat the process.

If you’re transitioning your quoting from the “old” way of quoting an HVAC job to the technique described above, then we recommend two things:

1. Don’t Include Equipment bundles in your FlexJob

It might be tempting to create a unique FlexJob that also includes the Equipment. But we don’t recommend this.

Keeping equipment separate gives you more flexibility to use our Bundles to match up just the right units for any job.

And if you need to make changes to your equipment, you can do it in one place – rather than having to find that piece of equipment in dozens or even hundreds of jobs.

2. Remove the “Include by Default” settings in your Installation Items

You may have set up certain Installation Items to be “included by default” based on the type of system you are quoting.

We recommend removing these settings, as those installation items are likely stored inside your new FlexJob kit.

If you use both features, the installation items may be duplicated on the presented proposal, leading to pricing issues (potentially) and confusion for your customer.