How to audit your ServiceTitan pricebook
You do not need to hire anyone to find out whether your ServiceTitan pricebook is working against you. You can audit it yourself in an afternoon.
The trick is knowing what to look at, and in what order, because the things that cost you the most are rarely the things you notice first. Here are the seven checks, the order that matters, and what each one is quietly costing you.
Is this you? This is worth an afternoon if you have never counted how many services in your book actually get sold, if a supplier raised prices this year and you are not sure the book followed, or if two techs quote the same job at two different numbers.
Jump to: sell vs loaded · at-cost items · the labor rate · linking · duplicates · tiers · the names
Check one: what you sell vs what you loaded
Run it: pull the services your techs actually sold in the last year, then count how many are loaded in the book.
For most shops the second number dwarfs the first, and that gap is the whole problem. A book stuffed with services nobody sells is not impressive. It is a haystack your techs dig through in a driveway.
The fix is not to have fewer services, it is to make the ones you sell easy to find. The ratio of loaded to sold is the real signal, not the raw count. (More in your pricebook has 400 services.)
A pricebook that’s hard to use doesn’t get used. Your techs fall back on memory, and memory undercharges.
Check two: items priced at or near cost
Run it: sort your materials by markup, or by the gap between cost and price, and look at the bottom.
On almost every pricebook we rebuild there is a cluster of items priced at, near, or below cost, hiding in plain sight. They got copy-pasted from old software and never re-priced, and every time a tech sells one you lose money without knowing.
Flag every one. This single check often pays for the whole audit.
Check three: a loaded labor rate that’s real
Run it: find the rate your services are built on and ask one question, is it the real, fully burdened cost of an hour, or a wage with a round number on top?
If it is the wage plus a cushion, every labor-driven price in the book is too low, automatically. This is the number everything else stands on, so get it right before you touch anything downstream.
Not sure? Our free loaded labor rate calculator gets you the true number, and how to calculate your loaded labor rate walks the whole ladder.
Check four: materials and equipment linked
Run it: pick ten common services and look at what is attached to each one.
A healthy service carries the materials and equipment the job actually consumes, linked, so the cost rolls up and job costing means something. When parts are not linked, two things break:
- Your margins become a guess.
- Your techs hand-enter items in the driveway, which is slow and wrong.
Linking is tedious, and it is exactly where a sloppy build shows.
Check five: duplicate codes and categories
Run it: search for the same service twice, and look for categories that mean the same thing.
Watch for:
- The same repair loaded under two codes.
- Two or three categories that overlap.
- Codes that repeat across the book.
Duplicates are how a book becomes a maze, and they are what breaks a clean import. If a tech finds two versions of the same repair at two prices, they pick one at random and you have lost control of your pricing. (The import side is in ServiceTitan pricebook import errors.)
Check six: tiers that differ by question
Run it: open a good-better-best option set and ask what actually changes between the tiers.
If the only difference is price, the customer is being asked to pay more for the same thing, and they pick the cheapest every time. Real tiers answer different questions the homeowner is actually asking:
- How long will it last?
- How comfortable will it be?
- How efficient is it to run?
- What is covered, and for how long?
(The full click path is in good, better, best is a different question.)
Check seven: names a customer understands
Run it: read your service names and descriptions the way a customer reads them on a tablet in their kitchen.
“Cond fan motor R&R” means nothing to them. A plain name and one line that explains what they are getting, and why, is the difference between a number they accept and a number they fight.
The cheapest fix on the list, and one of the most visible.
What to do with what you found
Audit first, then fix in order:
- Get the loaded labor rate right.
- Re-price the at-cost items.
- Link materials and equipment to services.
- Merge duplicate codes and categories.
- Build real tiers that differ by question.
- Rewrite the names a customer reads.
Before you delete anything: deactivating services can make a whole category disappear from the tech’s view, and removing a linked item can break things downstream. Clone or export before you cut, and confirm nothing depends on it first.
Then keep it clean. A pricebook is not a one-time setup. Put a short version of this audit on the calendar every quarter so it never drifts back into the mess you just cleaned up. (Here’s the maintenance rhythm.)
Two ways to get there:
- Have it found for you. The free Pricebook Health Audit reads your export and flags the at-cost items, missing links, duplicates and thin descriptions, with what each one costs.
- Have it fixed across the book. That is the done-for-you build.
Either way, start with the audit. You cannot fix what you have not measured.