Pricebook Pro and More: The Impact of Getting Your Price Book Right

A well-managed price book serves as the backbone of any successful service business. 

James Beyer, owner of Beyer Plumbing Co. in San Antonio, Texas, switched to ServiceTitan’s Pricebook Pro to streamline his company’s operations and enhance profitability. 

In a recent episode of the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast—where we get expert advice from power users—Beyer discusses common pitfalls for businesses when managing pricing manually and highlights how Pricebook Pro automates pricing, improves accuracy, and saves time. 

Through Pricebook Pro optimization, Beyer Plumbing creates competitive pricing strategies and sales presentations to attract more customers and build more profit.

“Pricebook Pro does a really good job of making it where you can customize it based on your industry. You can make it as lean as you want it, or you can make it as complex as you want it,” Beyer says. “It’s a really good product to help any-size service business get started.”

Beyer says Pricebook Pro is an add-on service to your core ServiceTitan account, but don’t get hung up on thinking it will be too difficult to implement for your business. Many of the tasks and services you already use are set up automatically.

“That way, when you're ready to turn it on, it's ready for you to go,” Beyer adds.

Challenges before Pricebook Pro

Before switching to Pricebook Pro, Beyer utilized the same custom price book the company was using when it started with ServiceTitan, including all of its old tasks and services. 

“It was the most complex thing that we could probably bring over,” Beyer recalls, with too many catalog numbers and too many issues. “For many years, we realized the price book was one of our weakest links.”

In 2022, Beyer decided he was going to finally fix the old price book. He began sorting through all of the materials with all of the numbers to trim the fluff and make things easier. But this created even more issues.

“We got to a point where we realized that our price book was not made for ServiceTitan,” he says. “It had no way of differentiating between the materials and the labor.”

And with huge spikes in material costs as well as labor costs in recent years, Beyer needed to be able to adjust both of those areas in real time with accurate numbers.

That’s when he decided to attend Pantheon, ServiceTitan’s annual conference for the trades, and discovered the robust functionality of Pricebook Pro.

“Lo and behold, it's [now] one of my favorite products,” Beyer says.

Transitioning from old price book to Pricebook Pro

Initially, Beyer sat down with his service manager to compare the old price book’s services, tasks, and features to what’s available with Pricebook Pro. 

“What do we need to keep, what do we need to go?” Beyer says. “After a while, it was just obvious. We don't need anything from the old price book. This is not making any sense. 

“And so I was like, ‘No, we're not doing this. We're going to throw the whole thing out and we're just going completely all in on Pricebook Pro,’” he adds. 

Chucking the old and adopting the new made the transition much easier.

“There's no point in us losing all this time and effort of trying to mesh it together with something else,” Beyer says. “I got rid of that [old price book]. I don’t want to ever see it again.”

Like many new Pricebook Pro users, Beyer utilized the ServiceTitan Smart Start program to get his new pricebook up and running faster. To find Smart Start, go to Pricebook > Services > Setup, then choose the following options:

• Specify your trade

• Select your state

• In the Catalog section, view your tailored list (or skip now and come back to this later)

• In the Billable rates section, set up your billable rate

• In the Markups section, set markups for materials and equipment

• In the Surcharge section, add a flat or percentage surcharge  

Upon activation, Smart Start automatically adds estimate and proposal templates to your account so your technicians can use the pre-populated templates on their mobile devices. And once techs start using Pricebook Pro out in the field, if they discover something’s missing, it’s quick and easy to plug it right in to update your pricebook.

“It’s so easy,” Beyer says.

Pricebook Pro also simplified the transition for technicians, who previously relied on Beyer Plumbing’s manually written mapping system to figure out customer pricing. Now, Pricebook Pro helps them quickly find the materials and pricing they need based on the exact job at hand.

“You just click on what you're doing. ‘What part of the house are you in? I'm in the kitchen. What am I doing? Sink repair.’ It made it so easy for everybody,” Beyer says. “I think it sped everything up because it was just so much easier to find what item you needed.”

Pricebook Pro’s ease of use, combined with company training on how to navigate the system, made the Beyer switch easily adaptable for both field techs and the office side, he says.

Price book maintenance with Pricebook Pro

Rather than eating job material costs because he fell behind on his price book updates, Beyer says he’s constantly tweaking his pricebook to add new items or offer specials and discounts.

“The materials get updated monthly, so it’s always being adjusted,” he says. 

Beyer Plumbing also goes through the entire price book once a year to check for maximum efficiency on all services.

“What's going on with these job types? What materials are we using in them? Are we being efficient? Are we keeping our times correct?” Beyer explains.

Pricebook Pro also offers Price Insights, which uses Titan Intelligence to tap into all of the data contained within Pricebook Pro to calculate the average price for each service, then shows you how your price for a particular service compares to others in your region. 

“That was one of the really cool selling features on Pricebook Pro,” Beyer says. “It's always looking at things to help make sure you're giving your best pricing to all of your customers.”

Dynamic Pricing for core users

ServiceTitan also offers Dynamic Pricing as one of its core features. It allows you to adjust pricing for flat-rate services based on multiple factors, such as after-hours jobs, add-ons, membership discounts, and more. You set your own rules based on your company’s billable rates, markups, surcharges, and custom modifiers.

“I loved how simple Dynamic Pricing made it. Once you figure out the labor rate, then you go in there, plug that in, and then it takes you to the next step,” Beyer says. “It’s the easiest thing.”

You can choose to do material markups by a percentage across the board, or you can create a ladder-type system where markups adjust based on certain conditions.

“It's amazing how it uses your whole ServiceTitan platform and makes sure you're going to get paid what you need to be paid and use exactly what materials you need to be using on a job to become profitable,” Beyer says.   

“So, you can have your desired margin and then basically back into it with all these rules?” podcast host Josh Lu asks.

“Yep,” Beyer says, adding that no service business wants to operate for free, especially during times of high pricing fluctuations for materials and labor. 

ServiceTitan recognized the struggle, and created Pricebook Pro, Dynamic Pricing, and other features to help contractors keep their price books updated and businesses operating profitably.

Estimate and proposal templates 

Beyer Plumbing trains its technicians to offer good-better-best estimates and proposals utilizing templates, and Beyer says Pricebook Pro optimizes this process for the tech and the customer. 

For example, Beyer is currently offering a special (buy a water heater and get a free reverse-osmosis (RO) system) to its San Antonio customers by adding a pre-built Pricebook Pro template to its techs’ mobile app. 

“We can go in there and add the RO, so when the guys are on the job it's really simple and easy for them to keep up with and add to the projects. The templates keep everything updated,” he says. “It's dynamic. If you change the price in the price book, it's automatically going to change it across the board.”

In addition, TitanIntelligence (TI) features can help you build better estimates, proposals, or special offers automatically.

“If you turn on the function of TI, the AI component of ServiceTitan, it will look back at your past projects and it will actually create templates for you based on what you’ve previously done,” Beyer says. “Really neat insight.”

Just be sure to deactivate any automated special offers once they expire. Otherwise, your techs might find one and use it when it’s no longer active.

“You've got to make sure you're doing your due diligence of turning it off or turning it on, and make sure you're paying attention to what's in your price book at all times,” Beyer says.

If you’re looking for an easier way to keep prices updated, streamline efficiency, and become more profitable, ServiceTitan has the answer.

“Whatever it may be, Pricebook Pro is the solution,” Beyer says.

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

Know a business that could use a bit of muscle from ServiceTitan? Refer them here!

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