Why shops price from a book
Pricing in your head is fine until the day you’re tired, the customer is friendly, and the job is bigger than it looked. Then you give a number you regret for the next six hours. A book means the price was decided in your office, by you, when nobody was standing there waiting.
It also means every tech quotes the same job the same way. Two trucks giving two prices for a water heater swap is the fastest way to lose a customer who talks to their neighbor.
What belongs in a flat rate price
Four things, and most underpriced books are missing the same two.
- Material at your cost, plus markup. Not list, not what you paid two years ago. What it costs you this month.
- The labor the job really takes. Drive time, setup, pulling the old unit, cleanup, and the conversation at the door. Not just the wrench time.
- Overhead. The truck, the insurance, the phone that answers, the software, the person doing the books. Divide the yearly number by your billable hours and carry it on every hour you sell.
- Profit. Separate from your own wage. If the only profit in the business is your paycheck, you own a job, not a shop.
The two that go missing are overhead and profit, which is exactly why a shop can be busy all year and finish it with nothing in the account.
Start with the jobs you actually run
Pull your last fifty invoices and sort them by what the work was. Most residential service shops will find a short list doing most of the revenue: water heater replacement, drain cable, toilet rebuild or replace, faucet replacement, hose bib, shutoff valves, a disposal, pressure regulator. Price those properly first. Everything else can wait.
Keeping it from going stale
This is where most price books fail. Copper moves. Water heaters move. The book does not, because updating it’s nobody’s job on a Tuesday.
Two habits fix it:
- Put a date on it. If you can’t remember the last time you touched it, it is out of date.
- Catch corrections as they happen. When a tech has to change a price in the field, that’s the book telling you it’s wrong. Write it down the day it happens, not at the end of the quarter when nobody remembers.
BidRise does the second one for you. When you correct a price on an estimate, it offers to save the new number back to your price book, and it tells you when you’ve corrected the same item more than once.
Flat rate versus time and materials
Flat rate isn’t about charging more. It’s about the customer knowing the number before work starts, and you carrying the risk on how long it takes. That trade is good for you on work you’ve done a hundred times and bad on work nobody can scope from the doorway.
There’s a longer piece on this in flat rate vs time and materials, including where each one bleeds money.
Loading your book into BidRise
Three ways in: type it, upload a spreadsheet, or photograph the printed sheet you already carry and let the app read it. Set your material markup and your sales tax rate once, and every estimate after that comes out priced the way you decided. Then the app does the arithmetic so nobody is adding up a column on the tailgate.
If you want a paper starting point instead, the plumbing estimate template is free and lays out the same line structure.
