Did your retail prices move with your last supplier increase?
Your suppliers raised their prices this year, probably two or three times. The question is whether your pricebook followed.
For most shops the honest answer is no, or not all the way, and the difference between the cost you pay now and the price your book still charges is margin you are giving away on every job, without deciding to.
How the gap opens
It is not dramatic, which is why it works. A supplier sends a routine cost update in the spring, another in the summer, another in the fall. Each one is a few percent on a list of parts. None of them feels like an event.
But your pricebook only changes when someone changes it, and between go-live and now, usually nobody did. So the cost line steps up three times and the price line sits flat, and the gap between them is the margin you used to make and now do not.
The cruel part is that the higher-volume the item, the more it costs you, because you sell it more often. The parts a tech touches dozens of times a week are exactly the ones where a frozen price quietly drains the most. It is the same mechanism behind the zero-markup SKUs hiding in your book: cost moved, price did not, and the markup got eaten from underneath.
Why a flat percentage isn’t the fix
When shops finally notice, the instinct is to add a blanket percentage across the book. Do not. A flat bump prices some items too high and still leaves others below cost, because the increases were never uniform and your markups were never uniform either.
The right move is to re-cost from the actual updated supplier numbers and recalculate each price from your target markup or your loaded labor rate.
That is what keeps the book defensible instead of just higher.
The structural fix: stop updating prices by hand
The reason books fall behind is that updating them is manual, and manual things slip. The structural fix is dynamic pricing: when prices are driven by cost and a markup rule, you update the costs and the prices move on their own. That is the entire argument for turning it on, covered in should you turn on ServiceTitan dynamic pricing.
It does not work without a correct loaded labor rate underneath it. But once it is set, a supplier increase becomes a cost update instead of a project.
This is also why a pricebook is maintenance, not a one-time setup. Even with dynamic pricing, someone has to load the new costs each quarter. The difference is whether that takes an afternoon or a week.
Check yours this week
You do not have to guess whether your book kept up. The free Pricebook Health Audit reads your export and shows you the items selling below today’s cost and the markups that have drifted since go-live. If the gap is wide, or if you want the book rebuilt on a loaded labor rate with dynamic pricing so it follows costs automatically, that is the work we do.