How To Use Client Specific Pricing For Automated Time & Materials Pricing

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. And in this video I'm going to be showing you how to set up and use client specific pricing. So client specific pricing allows you to build out rate sheets, formulas basically of how prices should be calculated, and then assign those rate sheets to either a customer, a location or an invoice. Basically it allows you to calculate your prices differently for different jobs, locations or customers. This is a feature that's going to be most useful to you if you are a company that does a lot of commercial work or possibly new construction work, or if you're a company that bills based on time and materials. If you do all flat rate pricing or you're a residential company, then dynamic pricing is probably going to be the feature that's more useful for you. And I have a whole separate video about dynamic pricing. So if that's where you need to be, then I'll put a link to it right here in the corner of the screen. So the first thing we need to do is come into the price book tab here. And then on the left hand navigation panel we have this option called Pricing Builder. And that is where we can set up our rules for client specific pricing or dynamic pricing. By the way, just for clarity, I might use the phrase CSP rules, client specific pricing rules and rate sheets interchangeably. Just know that I'm talking about the same thing. So I'm just going to come in here and click Create rule. Okay, and then we get to this setup page. Now the first thing we need to do is name our rule. It's completely up to you what you're going to name it. If you're making this rule because you have negotiated pricing with a specific customer, let's say you work with somebody who manages a whole bunch of different dollar trees and because they do such volume with you, you have negotiated rates with them. And so you're going to make a dollar tree rule. That would be one example of why you would use this if you were somebody who does a lot of commercial work. Or maybe I just want to make a time and materials based rule for all of my H Vac installs. I'm going to go with that for my example. This is my H Vac install rule. I could put a description down here, but that is optional. And then here on this next page I set up my markups or discounts for materials and equipment. So our options here are we can either mark things up based on a percentage, a dollar amount, or a multiplier or we could instead be setting up this rule to discount off of the base price. Now note that if we're applying a discount, it tells us right here, discounts are based on the price of the item, not your cost, whereas markups markups are based on your cost. This might also be a good time to mention that you do need chargeable materials enabled in your account in order to use client specific pricing. Chargeable materials is a backend configuration that basically allows you to charge a customer directly for materials, to give materials a price, not just your cost, but a price to a customer, and then make that material appear on a customer facing invoice. If you're somebody who needs client specific pricing, probably you already have that turned on, but it's just worth mentioning. Okay, so for this example, I'm going to set up a percentage markup and you can make kind of a sliding scale here. So I can say if a material costs between $0 and let's say $10, then I'm going to mark it up 300%. But then I can hit this plus to add a new rule. You'll notice that it starts at $10.01. So if the material costs between $10.01 and let's say $30, then I'm going to mark it up 200%. I can add another rule, 30.01 to $50. We're going to mark it up 150, so on and so forth. You just want to make sure that your last rule, the one at the very bottom is, goes all the way up to just put 999-9999. Just max it out and we'll just call that 100%. You want to make sure you put that ridiculously huge number in there just to make sure that nothing ever falls outside of the rule. Okay. And then we do the exact same thing over for equipment. For the sake of simplicity, I'm not going to make another scale. I'm just going to go zero to 99999. We're going to mark it up 100%. These are of course random numbers, so please don't copy them. There's no thought, math or strategy behind these numbers. These came from my butt. All right, let's hit next here. And then we have the option but not the requirement to put in some exceptions. So if we have certain items in our price book that we want to not follow this rule, even if the rule is applied to that customer or the job or the location, then we can do that here. So I'll hit Add exception. And let's just say for this condensing unit pad, I want that to be my exception. And then with this dropdown here, you have the option to set up how you do want this particular item to be priced when this rate sheet is applied. So you can give it a separate dollar amount markup, a separate multiplier, a separate percentage markup, a separate discount, or just charge a flat dollar amount. I'm going to do that. I'm just going to say that I'm always going to charge 50 bucks for this thing. So now when this rate sheet is applied, no matter what the markup rules that I just set up, say this condensing unit pad, if it's on the invoice, we're going to charge 50 bucks for it. Okay, now I'm going to hit next. And at this point, I have to set up my labor rates. So when this rate sheet is applied, how much are we charging per hour? And you can put in multiple labor rates here. Let's say you wanted to charge separately for, like, how much it costs to have a lead installer on the job versus how much it costs to have a helper on the job per hour. You could do that. You could have a lead rate and a helper rate. But if I come in right now and I click add labor rate, I'll get this dropdown. But there's nothing to add. I can't do anything. So what needs to happen here is we need to add labor rate tasks in our price book. And there's a checkbox we can check off to tell service titan that this task right here, this is a labor rate. And then those tasks will show up in this dropdown. That task is what's eventually going to show up on the invoice to show the customer what they paid for labor. So because I need to go do that, which means I need to get out of the screen, I'm just going to hit review and save rule. That's an incomplete rule that I just saved, but that's going to allow me to kind of go into services here. I'm going to hit add service, and I'll start by making an H Vac lead installer rate. So I'll make this code H Vac L instl H VAC lead installer rate. Okay, and now this checkbox right here is the one that we need to check off to tell service titan that this is a labor service. So it shows up in that dropdown when we're setting up our rule. So we've Got to have our code, our name and item description, and we have to assign it to a general ledger account. We don't need to put in a price here because that's going to be determined by our rule. And we really don't even need to assign it to a category. We don't really, really need technicians to directly access this. It's just going to be automatically applied by our rule from our rate sheet. Okay, so I hit save there, back out, and now I'm going to add a second service for the helper rate. Okay, those are both in. Let's go back to our pricing builder. We're going to hover over our rule here. Go to this kebab menu and hit view slash edit details. It's going to warn us that if we update this, that's going to change it for all of the customers and locations that have have this rate sheet. We haven't applied this rate sheet anything yet. So we're fine with that. We're just going to say edit existing. And I'm going to come back where I left off, which was here at the labor rate step. I'm going to hit add labor rate. And now you'll see I have my two options here. So I'll put in the install lead rate and let's call that 190 an hour. And then I can add my second labor rate, my helper rate, and we'll call that 99 an hour. Okay, now before we move on, you might be thinking, all right, we've got this lead rate and this helper rate. How does service titan know when to apply one, the other, or both? Well, we can map these labor rates to technicians, so we can map this labor rate to our lead installers. It's the lead installer rate. And then that's going to let service Titan know. Okay, I've got this rate sheet applied. It's got a lead installer rate. And this person right here, this is the lead installer. They're on this job for this amount of time. So I'm going to charge this rate per hour. That mapping isn't done here. It's done on a separate screen. So I'll show you that in just a minute. Okay, now finally, under that we have our settings for minimum billing increments. So we can choose whether we're going to charge these rates times the actual time that they spent on the job to the minute, or if we would prefer to charge in 15 minute increments or 30 minute increments. And it does tell us right Here, that service titan is always going to round up. So if I chose to bill in 15 minute increments and my technicians were on the job for one hour and one minute, it is going to bill for one hour and 15 minutes. All right, and then we have these two options down here. Charge for drive time. I think that one's pretty self explanatory. From the time when the technician hits dispatch to the time when the technician arrives at the job. Should that time count towards what we're charging for here? If yes, then you would check that box off. Okay. And then there's this other checkbox. Deduct labor time for service fees. That one needs a little bit more explaining. So I'm going to check that off. Let's say that I have a service fee. It's, I don't know, $89. Well, with this setting, I can say that for that service fee, for that $89, I am going to include X amount of time in labor. So the customer isn't going to start getting charged for labor time until after that threshold. Let me show you. So I'm going to hit add service fee here and that's going to allow me to pick a service fee task out of my price book. So there we go. I've got this evaluation service fee, it is $89. And then deduct labor time, that's the threshold that I want to set. So for my example, I'm going to say it is 60 minutes. And then I can choose which labor rates this affects. If it affects all of them or just one or just a few, whatever, I'm going to check them both off. So with this the way I've just set this up, this means that when I go out to a job with this rate sheet applied, if I have this service fee on the invoice, then the customer is not going to be getting charged these hourly rates until after 60 minutes. Because I'm saying that the first hour is included in this $89 price. If I unchecked one of these, if I unchecked the helper rate, for example, then they're going to get charged this helper hourly rate from the get go. But they're only going to start getting charged this lead hourly rate after the 60 minutes have passed. Okay. Once all of that's set up to my liking, I'm going to hit review. This gives me a chance to just look everything over and make sure I'm happy with it. If there's anything I want to change, I have these edit buttons here. But otherwise I can just hit save rule. Okay, now I mentioned that we could map those labor rates to technicians. So let me show you how to do that. We're going to come over here to settings. We're going to look for payroll. And then under our payroll settings, we have this option, labor types. If you don't see that option, there is a separate backend configuration of feature gate that controls this. If you're not seeing it, then talk to support and they can get it showing up for you. It should already be showing up by default for you. But something good to know just in case. So we're going to hit edit here and then we're going to hit create labor type. And then we're going to give the labor type a name and code and then map it to the labor service. So this is my lead service, H Vac lead rate. Okay. And I'm going to hit this blue check. I'm going to create labor type again for my helper rate, H Vac helper rate, map it to the labor service in the price book and hit blue check. Great. Okay, now I can tie those to technicians. A few moments later. I got got, I got got. I'm shooting this out of order because I made a mistake. When you're putting these in, make sure that you remember to check off this checkbox that says active, because if they're not active, they're not going to show up in the next step. We'll whoops. Okay, now that those are made and active, we need to go to our technician settings. I'm gonna type in tech over here. There we go. And I'm gonna make my guy, Chris Hunter here a lead installer. So I'm gonna hit edit and I'm gonna come in to this payroll tab and then I have this default labor type dropdown. And from there I can choose what his default labor type is. So that's the code for my lead H Vac install labor type. So I'll select that and hit save changes and that's that. So now anytime Chris is assigned to a job where that rate she is applied, his time spent on that job is going to be multiplied by the lead H Vac installer rate. And we would just do that exact same thing for the helper. And that's it. That's the setup. So again, you can apply these rate sheets on the customer level, the location level, or the individual job level. You can also set an umbrella default for if you just wanted all of your commercial customers to follow this rule, or all of your residential customers to do that we're back in price book back under pricing builder. You would hover over your rule over that kebab menu there on the far right and then you have this option here set as default so you can set as default for residential or commercial. You also from this screen can see an overview of how many customers or locations this rate sheet is applied to. Anyways that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit like if you liked this video and found it valuable be sure to subscribe to service Titan's YouTube channel. If you haven't done that already hit that bell icon so that YouTube notifies you anytime we upload a new video. And be sure to leave me a comment down below. Let me know what you think about client specific pricing and what you think I should make a video on Next your engagement through likes. Comments and subscriber numbers are the ways in which my success is measured. Appreciate it. Peace.