Ready to start planning and prepping for 2026? With ServiceTitan doing the heavy lifting, you can take charge of organizing and prioritizing your company’s revenue goals, budgeting, and forecasting for the new year.
In a Back 2 Basics webinar, ServiceTitan Sr. Program Facilitator Tim Sjobeck walks through how to figure out your revenue goals for 2026, how to plan appropriately with accurate data, and how to use features like dashboards, reports, and KPI tracking to achieve next-level success.
In the following recap, you’ll learn:
When and how to start?
How to analyze what worked well in 2025 and where you fell short
How to look ahead for 2026 and set the right key performance indicator (KPI) goals
When and how to start planning and prep for 2026
Now—typically in late October through November—is when your service business should start planning and prepping for the new year, Sjobeck says. And it all starts with reviewing your P&L (profit and loss) statement and your balance sheet.
To know what to look for in both documents, Sjobeck breaks it down into two segments, with two sections per segment:
Review of 2025 (what did your story look like in 2025 based on the last 10 months?)
Financials (numbers, results)
Operations (work processes, workflows, memberships, etc.)
Planning (you understand your story for 2025; how do you improve upon it?)
Financials (numbers, results)
Operations (work processes, workflows, memberships, etc.)
Pro Tip: Know what you’re trying to review. Some good questions to start are:
What KPIs are important as we go forward with planning?
Where did we hit or exceed our goals in 2025?
Where did we fall short?
How do we grow in 2026?
And finally, Sjobeck demonstrates some ServiceTitan tools that can answer all of those questions and help you uncover your true P&L story.
New year planning and prep is not something you should avoid or put off, but many contractors do for various reasons. Planning budgets and setting revenue goals can be intimidating to some, or lead others down a never-ending rabbit hole.
“We don't know where to start. We don't know what's important yet. We really just don't have a process in place to do this,” Sjobeck says. “Or we get over ambitious. We're going to drill into every single granular and it's going to get so complicated that we never want to do this again.
“And then we have a few who are just scared,” he adds. “I’ve met some business owners who don’t want to know those numbers.”
But the good news is, it gets easier each time you do it. And the better you get at it, the deeper and more granular you can go.
“Under ‘Review,’ you’re going to plan, implement, and repeat. And we’re going to keep this as simple as possible,” Sjobeck says.
Pro Tips:
Start your review in late October or early November to give yourself ample time.
Conduct the review offsite to minimize distractions.
Start with wins! Look at three to five major KPIs to begin.
Review your trade’s industry benchmarks.
Review both operations and financial performance for each trade you provide.
Compare results to the goals you set.
Seek employee feedback, mainly from the operational side.
Looking back at 2025
In order to start planning for the new year, you must first look back at 2025 to review both your Financials and Operations.
“Remember, we have a story to uncover,” says Sjobeck, so start by finding the answers to those earlier questions:
What KPIs are important as we go forward with planning?
Where did we hit or exceed our goals in 2025?
Where did we fall short?
How do we grow in 2026?
Under Financials, you need to know:
Job costing (were costs correct?)
Review your breakeven (were you profitable?)
Update your billable hour (were you priced right?)
Prior budget (did you stay under or overshoot it?)
Risk and contingency (did you plan appropriately?)
All prior goals (which ones did you meet and where did you fall short?)
Pro Tip: Be proactive, be realistic. Make sure your goals are attainable.
“When we review Financials, focus on three to five. Let's keep this very simple. What are our three to five top rocks in our Financials that we want to focus on? As you get more granular and you get deeper involved in the planning and the review, you can expand that,” Sjobeck advises.
Under Operations, you need to know:
Business plan (does it need an update?)
Mission statement or core values (do they still align with your business?)
Workflows and procedures (are they optimized and efficient?)
Third-party costs (are you getting the best ROI from paid services?)
SWOT analysis (do you know your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?)
Chart of Accounts update (do you need to make any year-end changes?)
ServiceTitan
Memberships
Business units
Job types
Campaigns
Pro Tip: Learning what made a difference and how it happened in 2025 will help you make better decisions in 2026.
Looking ahead to 2026
Once you’ve reviewed your Financials and Operations for 2025, you can start business planning for the next year.
The main idea with business planning is to determine:
Where the business is headed
How the business will get there
How the business will measure progress
And know the difference between budgeting and planning, Sjobeck says.
“Those words are interchanged a lot, and they shouldn't be. They're different words,” he says. “I like to think about planning in simple terms: ‘This is what we want to do.’ For budgeting: ‘This is how we get there.’ So, two different levels.”
Pro Tip: Figure out your revenue goals and work backward to see what you need to get there (average ticket, call booking rates, etc.)
“This has always been something that was taught to me as I started to learn my P&L,” Sjobeck says. “We have this story, we have the goals of this story. Now we have to work backwards to get the answers that we're looking for, like average ticket, call booking rates, etc.”
Do your business planning with SMART goals in mind:
Specific. Define your specific goals and focus on improving three to five KPIs.
Measurable. Use numbers and data to track progress and evaluate success.
Achievable. Set goals that are realistic and attainable for your business.
Relevant. Do your goals align with your company’s vision, mission, and values?
Time-bound. Set a clear timeframe for achieving your goals to create urgency.
When setting revenue goals or specific KPI goals, Sjobeck says he’s choosing his two biggest rocks for business planning in 2026.
“I like to identify the big rocks, my medium rocks, and my small rocks,” he says. “That allows me to get a direction of how I want to plan towards the future.”
Make sure your goals match your actionable business objectives, and start with long-term goals. Then, set short-term goals that help you reach the long-term goals, as well as employee goals that help you reach short- and long-term goals.
“Those are the three key components that I like to emphasize when we're looking at planning,” Sjobeck says. “I'm going to look at my long-term first, the bigger two rocks, then those short-term goals are going to be those medium rocks that we put under the big rocks, and then, of course, our little rocks that allow us to start to put all those together.”
It’s also important to identify what “success” means for each goal, identify who’s accountable for each goal’s results, and give each goal a measurable timeline to gauge success.
ServiceTitan tools for new year planning and prep
In addition to using your P&L for planning and prep, ServiceTitan users have a variety of tools at their disposal to better understand their business performance.
To see Sjobeck demonstrate Reports, Dashboards, and Toolbox resources, watch the full webinar on-demand. Here are the key points:
ServiceTitan Tools: Reports
Daily Huddle: Use it to assess performance across business units. Use the Team Performance Board Report Guide to assess technicians, for example.
“The one thing I love about this report is the detail that’s in it,” Sjobeck says.”It's giving me a tremendous amount of information. It also allows me to highlight certain things that maybe stand out, then I can run a different report to really drill in.”
YoY (Year over Year): Track current year performance vs. prior year vs. budget. For instance, you can track total sales on a monthly (Month-over-Month Analysis report template), quarterly-to-date, or year-to-date basis.
Marketing Campaign Summary: See which marketing campaigns are performing, and which ones need changes. Reverse engineer your marketing spend by first determining how many leads you need to generate and at what average ticket.
Job Costing Summary Report & Technician Timesheet Summary: Use our Job Costing Report Guide to get a breakdown of all of your job costs.
Invoice Item Detail with Pricebook Information: See how technicians price your company’s services as compared to how you set up pricing in your pricebook.
Membership Performance Report: Provides basic membership information as well as the jobs and revenue completed by members during a specific time period.
“Reports, I think, are fantastic for your financial review,” Sjobeck says.
ServiceTitan Tools: Dashboards
Dashboards are great to use for planning because they give you a simple chart view of month-over-month or year-over-year comparisons. You can also choose custom dashboards from the TitanExchange networks, such as:
Sales Coordinator Dashboard
Business Unit Dashboard
Business Owner Dashboard/Service Manager Dashboard
Membership Dashboard
Technician Performance Dashboard
You can find TitanExchange and prebuilt custom dashboards in ServiceTitan’s Customer Resource Hub, along with hundreds of other great resources.
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ServiceTitan Tools: Toolbox
The Customer Resource Hub is also where you’ll discover a variety of Toolbox digital resources, such as:
Benchmark Report (issued quarterly)
SparkSessions, Ember Sessions, Torch Network (free ServiceTitan programs)
Contractor Playbooks (expert advice from the pros)
ServiceTitan Certified Providers (hired through Marketplace)
Trade associations
AI tools
To recap:
Start planning in late October to November.
Start with some basic KPIs, the most important to your company.
Look at Financials and Operations.
Review, plan, implement, and repeat.
Review prior year with SWOT analysis, job costing, break even, billable hour, call metrics and industry standard benchmarks.
Plan for 2026 with improved KPIs (goals), your business plan, mission, vision statements, core values, procedures, and better ServiceTitan utilization.
