How to Implement ServiceTitan's New Construction Workflows

For years, James Beyer ran two separate systems — ServiceTitan for residential service, and a separate accounting platform for the commercial construction work that makes up 75% of Beyer Plumbing's revenue. The disconnect was constant: reporting was painful, timekeeping lived in a different system, and real-time job costing was impossible. In a recent episode of the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast, host Josh Lu sits down with Beyer, owner of Beyer Plumbing in San Antonio, TX, to cover how he moved his entire construction operation into ServiceTitan — work breakdown structures, cost codes, real-time reporting, and all the hard lessons that came with it.

Beyer also played an active role in shaping these features. After years of working alongside ServiceTitan engineers to help build out the commercial service side, he became one of the first contractors to stress-test the platform's new construction workflows — and has the battle scars to prove it.

How to Use Cost Codes, Cost Types, and Phases for Job Costing

The foundation of ServiceTitan's construction workflows is the work breakdown structure (WBS) — the system that organizes every labor hour, material cost, and subcontractor fee into a structured hierarchy. For Beyer, that hierarchy has three levels:

• Phase — the top-level stage of the job (rough-in, top-out, trim-out, change orders)

• Cost code — what's being worked on within that phase (water lines, vent lines, compressed air, med gas)

• Cost type — what the cost actually is (labor, material, subcontractors, permit fees)

The goal is accurate job costing at every level of a project — not just at close, but in real time, every day. "Now with ServiceTitan, you are getting that live information," Beyer says. "You know exactly how that job is at the end of that day because you are now able to put every single labor hour or material cost, whatever it is, into all these different buckets where now you're seeing accurate information from day one."

That visibility extends beyond the project level. With labor and materials tracked this granularly, Beyer can see how individual technicians and superintendents are performing on specific phases — and use that data to inform future bids, training decisions, and staffing.

Lessons Learned: How Beyer Shifted His WBS Setup

Beyer came into the implementation with a cost code structure borrowed from his old accounting system — and quickly found it didn't translate cleanly. The original setup used rough-in, top-out, and similar stages as cost codes, with labor and material as cost types. The problem surfaced on complex jobs where multiple scopes of work overlapped within a single phase.

"When we had multiple things happening in one phase — like in our rough-in phase when we're underground, we may have a grease waste and sanitary sewer and other things under the slab — everything was getting put into that one place, but we weren't able to track down what each thing goes to."

The fix was conceptually simple but required a full reset: make phases equal actual phases of the job, cost codes equal the specific scope within that phase, and cost types equal the nature of the cost. The team worked it out on a whiteboard, then Beyer went back to his desk and updated it. "It was the easiest thing," he says. "And then just going back and implementing those back into the project has made it really simple."

One feature that made the transition more manageable: project-specific phases. Rather than relying entirely on universal settings, ServiceTitan allows contractors to create phases that exist only within a single project. For a job covering five buildings under one contract, each building can have its own set of phases — rough-in, top-out, trim-out — without affecting the broader system.

Real-Time Reporting and the WIP

Once the WBS is set up correctly, the reporting capabilities open up significantly. Beyer's team built a custom report using the work-in-progress (WIP) data that serves as their primary billing tool every month. The report surfaces active costs, labor hours, and billed amounts — all in one view — so the team knows exactly where each job stands before they submit pay applications by the 20th.

"We look at that report as the most important thing in our world right now, every single month," Beyer says.

From there, reporting can be sorted and filtered in multiple ways — by project manager, by business unit, by superintendent, or by material vendor. Beyer even added a custom field for vendors so the team can identify when a specific supplier is contributing to cost overruns across multiple jobs. The flexibility is what makes it worth investing time in the setup: the same underlying data can answer different operational questions depending on who's asking.

Implementation Challenges and What Beyer Would Do Differently

Beyer's team went live in January — after spending December trying to get there. They activated roughly 60–70 active jobs, migrated approximately 3,000 schedule-of-value line items, launched the new field mobile app, and switched from legacy to flexible timekeeping. All at once. Over the holidays.

"Don't do it around the holidays," Beyer says flatly. "That was just completely dumb."

Beyond the timing, a few other lessons stood out:

• Start with your work breakdown structure. Messy cost codes and phases will compound across every project. Get the structure right before you go live.

• Build with the future in mind. Think about what you'll want to drill into a year or two from now — not just what you need today.

• Give yourself and your team grace. The first billing cycle out of ServiceTitan took longer than expected. That's normal.

On the change management side, Beyer focused buy-in around what the data could do for his people — not just for leadership. The construction team, previously invisible in ServiceTitan, will now be able to participate in the same SPIFF program the service side has had access to, because efficiency can finally be tracked at the individual level. "It's gonna make us more efficient. It's gonna make us even better than who we are right now," Beyer told his team.

What's Next for ServiceTitan Construction

Beyer has presented at Pantheon for the past two years on construction workflows and has had visibility into what's coming on the product roadmap. He wasn't specific, but pointed to project planning and task-level management as the next major capabilities on the way. For contractors curious about the direction, he recommended watching the projects session from last year's Pantheon.

"The biggest parting thing is I firmly believe in ServiceTitan because it has evolved so much over the past few years," Beyer says. "From just being residential service focused on the trades to being more than residential — commercial, and now construction. This evolution of ServiceTitan is gonna be big for our industry as a whole."

Check out these resources mentioned during the podcast:

• ServiceTitan Pantheon

• ServiceTitan Torch Network

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.