Creating Standard Professional Services
You can create pre-built Professional Services in ScopeStack that allow you to easily scope common and standard projects.
Check out this short video to learn more about creating these services.
Creating a Service
You can create pre-defined professional services to be used in projects under Settings > Content > Professional Services.
On this screen: The Professional Services list page. Shows a table of active services with a search field and filter icon at the top. Tabs across the top switch between Active, Pending, and Archived services. Buttons in the upper right allow you to Import a service from CSV/Excel or click Add a Service to create a new one.
Here, you can see the list of services already in your account and make changes. To create a new service, click the Add a Service button.
Defining Effort
The first step is to define the structure and the effort of your service.
There are several things at play here, and Concepts in Effort and Service Building to learn more about how to think about services.
For now, we’re going to stick to the high points.
On this screen: The “Add a Professional Service” form. Fields for Phase, Line of Business, Service Category, Name, Resource, and Hours appear at the top. Below that is an editable subservices table with columns for Subservice Name, QTY, Unit Hrs, and Resource. A + Add Subservice button appears below the table. A Save button in the header saves the service.
In this dialogue, you can do the following:
- Align your service to a Phase
- Store your service in a Line of Business and Service Category
- Give your service a name
- Determine if an overall Resource will be completing the work of the service
- Assigning any overall effort to the whole service
- Creating individual sub-services and assigning them default effort, quantities, and resources as needed
To finish your setup, you can click Save.
Once you’ve saved the initial setup of your service, you can add Variable Rates to the top-level portion of the service or any of the sub-services.
Defining Language
Once you’ve defined the effort and clicked Save, additional tabs appear for language, products, and more.
On this screen: The service edit page showing five tabs: General, Service Language, Products, Assign Teams & Tags, and Version History (the last tab is hidden for users without audit log access). The General tab is selected by default after saving.
Service Description
If you click on the Service Language tab, you can define the service’s description and any additional language fields set up for your account.
On this screen: The Service Language tab shows a “Show / edit content for:” dropdown at the top, defaulting to Service Description. Below is a table with each service and subservice name in the left column and a markdown text editor in the right column. Select different language fields from the dropdown to switch which content you’re editing.
The top box gives you a place to define the language for the top-level portion of the service and the additional boxes are spots of the individual sub-services you defined on the service-overview tab.
The language here can be used in many different ways in your documents after you’ve added the service to a project and is accessible in the Merge Data view. We highly suggest working out the general structure of your document template before building lots of services as moving lots of data around after you’ve created services may be challenging. Learn more about using Merge Data here.
Once you’re done defining language, click Save.
Language Fields
Additionally, you can pre-define language for each language field in your account. On the Service Language tab, use the “Show / edit content for:” dropdown to switch between language fields — Service Description is the default, and any additional fields your account has configured appear in this list.
”Merge Fields” for Service Descriptions and Language Fields
Both Service Descriptions and Language Fields support dynamic merge fields that pull in project-specific data. See Merge Fields in Service Content for the full list of available fields.
Associating Products
The Products tab gives you a place to identify ancillary Products that may be required in order to complete a service, such as licenses or physical devices. Once the Product is associated with the Service, the Product will be added automatically to a project whenever the Service is added to the Project.
On this screen: The Products tab shows a table of products currently linked to this service with columns for Name, MFR Part, SKU, and Price. A Select Products button opens a slideout where you can search and link additional products from your account’s product library.
If the service is later removed from the project, the Product will not be removed.