Pricebook Fundamentals: 10 Tips to Drive Maximum Revenue

Is your ServiceTitan Pricebook set up correctly to maximize revenue on every job? Or are you constantly trying to play catch-up and, ultimately, missing opportunities?

Jeremy Wickenhauser, a certified ServiceTitan coach from Go Time Success Group, considers the Pricebook to be the "heart of ServiceTitan,” impacting everything from key performance indicators (KPIs) and job costing to memberships and revenue tracking. 

“If your Pricebook is out of line or you haven't updated it in a while, you could be leaving money on the table,” Wickenhauser says. “If you’re not constantly changing or updating your Pricebook, it can spiral out of control very fast.”

In our next Mastering ServiceTitan podcast — where we get expert advice from power users — Wickenhauser provides 10 essential rules for setting up and maintaining your Pricebook, including the importance of categories, codes, and dynamic pricing. And if your existing Pricebook needs better optimization, Wickenhauser shows you how to streamline your operations and boost profitability.

“The Pricebook is the heart of ServiceTitan, and a lot of places either are afraid to put the effort in or they don’t know how. Maybe they don't have Excel skills, so they're manually putting things in. Then the task is daunting,” he says. “But Pricebook is a powerful tool, especially when you're using it to the full extent.”

>>Listen to the full podcast on ServiceTitan Pricebook fundamentals now on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

Rule #1: Make categories for everything

When setting up your ServiceTitan Pricebook, category management is critical to tracking your most important KPIs. Everything needs a category, and the categories need to make sense.

“The categories provide a way for your technicians and comfort advisors to find your services, materials, or equipment. If you only have two categories, one for parts and one for equipment, it makes it a lot harder for the technicians or the comfort advisors in the field to be able to quickly and easily find what they're looking for,” Wickenhauser says.

On the other hand, including too many categories in your Pricebook also causes frustrations for your field service team. If, for instance, your Pricebook includes seven layers of categories with lots of details, techs may stop scrolling through and just pick a generic task. And using a generic task, rather than a specific task already categorized in the Pricebook, skews the process.

 “I usually say no more than four categories deep,” Wickenhauser says. 

Rule #2: Add codes that mean something

Contractors buy materials and equipment from a variety of vendors, and each item in your Pricebook must match up with the vendor. When coding the items, be sure to use a strategy that makes sense for the entire team. 

The codes need to be consistent and match up with the right vendor, Wickenhauser says. Some strategies he uses include using the product name first followed by the size or removing the vowels from words to fit the character counts. Whatever strategy you use, just make sure it’s easy for your entire team to remember.

• Example: A plumbing part called a copper half-inch 90 would be coded as COP-½-90.

• Example: A plumbing part called a black iron half-inch tee would be coded as BLK-½-T.

“Just make sure it’s consistent,” he adds. “Once you have it in there, it makes it a whole lot easier to sort.”

Rule #3: Name your materials

Where the codes provide a unique identifier that ties back into your accounting integration, naming your materials in the Pricebook allows your techs to search for a specific part by name and easily add it to the customer’s invoice or vendor purchase order.

Naming materials based on the vendor’s specific part number ties your company to that vendor, and if that relationship breaks down, you’ll need to redo your Pricebook. You also don’t want to share that particular part number or name with your customers.

“They're just going to go on eBay or Amazon or do a Google search…and now they're trying to pick apart your invoices. It's just something you don't need,” Wickenhauser explains.

Instead, configure your materials naming to hide that information on customer invoices or estimates.

“That way, it just gives everybody a little bit better ammo, a little bit more searchability for whatever materials or equipment they're looking for,” he says.

Rule #4: Establish your equipment types

Establishing your equipment types gives you the ability to tie a lifespan to each piece of equipment your company installs.

“This is something not a lot of contractors are putting the effort into doing,” Wickenhauser says. 

ServiceTitan keeps track of the equipment’s age, and tags can be added to that equipment to alert you to potential replacement opportunities. If a call comes in for repairs on a 20-year-old furnace, the system will classify the job as a high-priority call, which tells your dispatchers to book it as such, and your techs will be properly equipped to answer the call.

“Yes, this could be a fix. But this also can be a lead for me to set for my comfort advisors or my sales staff. So, setting up the equipment types is really important,” Wickenhauser says.

By assigning equipment types to everything, contractors also gain better visibility into their most important metrics.

“The more information we can get into ServiceTitan, the better reporting and the better capabilities we're going to have to plant that lead or dispatch for profit,” Wickenhauser says.

Rule #5: Ensure services include sold hours

ServiceTitan tracks technician performance through “sold hours,” or the amount of time it takes a tech to perform a particular service. This data informs your job-costing strategies and, eventually, your profitability.

For instance, if your HVAC company allocates 1.5 hours to replace a faulty blower motor, including a half hour for the dispatch fee, and your tech takes two hours — the tech is 75% efficient. If the job only takes 45 minutes, then they’re 200% efficient.

“It's just a way we can get better visibility on what the techs are doing in the field,” Wickenhauser says. “Do we need to talk to them? Are they taking too much time?”

The more experienced techs will make more money, but spend less time, and apprentices and new hires may take more time, but make less money.

“It does kind of balance out. But without that metric, you just don't know how well your technicians are performing,” he adds.

Rule #6: Build out material and equipment lists

One common mistake contractors make when adding materials and equipment to their Pricebook is adding entire catalogs from their top suppliers. It might seem easier to just export an entire catalog with 20,000 items to your Pricebook, but that also means you have to categorize and code each of those 20,000 items.

Instead of asking your top suppliers for the full catalog, ask for your last two years of purchases. That will show you exactly what to add to your Pricebook and help you plan for future purchases.

“You can make more informed decisions on how to build out your Pricebook without adding that extra fluff,” Wickenhauser says. “Just because this is your list today, that doesn't mean it's your list going forward. It's always kind of a work in progress.”

Rule #7: Use Pricing Builder to set up your Pricebook

ServiceTitan”s Pricing Builder tool helps contractors automate updates and changes to their Pricebooks, and set dynamic pricing for residential flat-rate businesses or client-specific pricing for commercial businesses. Contractors can set pricing rules, price materials automatically, and update the Pricebook in minutes.

“However you're billing, dynamic pricing and client-specific pricing are set up to help you succeed,” Wickenhauser says. “As long as you're updating costs, then your pricing is going to get updated, too. And ServiceTitan has made it easy for you to update costing based on your purchasing.” 

With dynamic pricing, you can create pricing rules for flat-rate services based on your billable hours and sold hours as well as add modifiers for different pricing levels, such as after-hours, weekends, or holidays. Client-specific pricing automates the process of pricing time and materials for certain customers, with no need to create a cheat sheet for your techs to follow.

Rule #8: Take advantage of task workflows

Task workflows in your Pricebook often come into play when setting up customer memberships. For example, you may offer an HVAC membership that covers 80% of the tasks involved with HVAC maintenance, but then decide to also service the customer’s water heater.

Task workflows allow you to add on certain services to the membership, so you don’t end up with 100 different memberships. It also updates your existing billing template for the customer, so they only receive one invoice and make one payment.

“It allows us to attach different, additional services onto our memberships,” Wickenhauser says. “And there's another config that allows you to book your maintenance calls based on the sold hours of what your recurring services are. It just opens up a lot of different options for our techs to be able to upsell, not just off of our basic memberships, but all the equipment in the house. Now, we've got more revenue opportunities.”

Rule #9: Set the right permissions and access 

Provide very limited access to who controls or updates your Pricebook. This might be you as the owner, your ServiceTitan champion within the organization, and a lead accounting specialist in charge of purchasing materials and equipment. 

Limiting access and permissions provides far better accountability and prevents unauthorized employees from making willy-nilly changes.

“Definitely limit that, so you can maintain control on what's being changed and who's authorized to change it,” Wickenhauser says.

Rule #10: Use generic tasks for one-offs

The key with using generic tasks for one-off services — something you may only do for a certain customer — is to include material costing based on certain levels. 

“Maybe you have different price points that you hit where you've got different markups, then those are your levels. That gives the technicians a little bit more room to say, ‘Okay, I know it's going to take me two hours and I know it's going to be $500 in parts. So I can select this task,’” Wickenhauser says. “I can change the description because it’s unique, and it stops the techs from phoning into the office.”

When techs stop calling the office with pricing questions, your CSRs can spend more time talking to customers and booking jobs.

“Any kind of ammo I can give them into the field, I want to do that,” Wickenhauser says. “That means setting up these generic tasks, linking the materials to them, and then setting up the code in a way that makes sense for everybody in the company, but doesn’t make sense for the customer to be able to peel it apart.”

Bonus Rule #11: Avoid duplicate materials

When adding materials in your Pricebook, try to match them up with any vendor in your Pricebook that offers those materials. 

“We can have one piece of material associated with however many vendors we want,” Wickenhauser explains, but if you’re working through the inventory module, you may end up with duplicates of the same item in the same inventory bin, so you won’t know which vendor you’re pulling it from. 

“Not having duplicates keeps the Pricebook a little bit cleaner. It's kind of like feature-proofing,” Wickenhauser says.

Typically, contractors need to plan for a minimum of 15 to 20 hours to establish a new Pricebook or optimize an existing one. Wickenhauser says sometimes it feels like he’s performing heart surgery when working on his Pricebook.

“You have to be precise, because if you miss something it affects a whole lot of other areas downstream, things you might not even be aware of,” he says.

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or our website, or search for Mastering ServiceTitan in your favorite podcast player.

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