Pricebook Fundamentals: 10 Tips to Drive Maximum Revenue | Podcast Ep. 09 | Mastering ServiceTitan

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Welcome to Mastering Service Titan, where we get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Liu, and today I'm here with Jeremy Wickenhauser. Jeremy is a certified service titan coach with Go Time Success Group. And today we're going to dive into price book fundamentals. Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks, Josh. It's great to be here.

Yeah, it's good to have you. I wanted to kick off with the big question, why is PriceBook so important and why is it so important to have it set up properly?

The big thing is that the price book is really, I feel anyways, the heart of Service Titan. It touches onto so many different metrics for your KPIs, for tracking your technicians, and it also is the driver of your revenue.

Right.

So if your price book is out of line or we haven't updated it in a while.

Right.

We could be leaving money on the table. We all know that costs are going up every day, really. And if we don't having a way that we can constantly be changing our price book or updating our price book, it just, it can spiral out of control very fast.

Yeah. I remember learning about the price book and being amazed at how many different parts of the business it touches with inventory and job costing. And it basically, it's everywhere. And if you have one thing wrong, it's kind of scary to think about how many other things it impacts from.

Memberships to KPIs, tech efficiencies. Like you said, job costing or even on the estimate side, costing there is a powerful tool, especially when you're using it to the full extent that you can.

Right, exactly. And I know in our previous conversation we talked about how you coach a lot of service titan customers and a lot of clients. And one of your favorite things to talk about is price book. And, and you've got these, it's really nice and organized, these 10 rules for price book. So let's dive into those fundamentals. What would be your first rule for setting up your price book properly?

The first, it's kind of not really the first rule. It's more of when I'm setting up a brand new price book or if we're thinking about setting up our brand new price book, make sure that we have categories for everything and the categories they need to make sense. Right. Because the categories are a way that your technicians are going to be able to find your services or your materials or your comfort advisors can find the equipment. If it's, if we don't have, you know, if we have One category that's just parts and one category just equipment. It does make it a lot harder for the technicians or the comfort advisors out in the field to be able to quickly and easily find what they're looking for.

Right.

The big thing I find is like speed is, is the, one of the biggest priorities, especially when you're the technician, right? They're there to figure out what the problem is, diagnose it, right. Get the repair or the estimate ready for the customer and be able to do their repair. And having a tool like Service Titan's price book available at their fingertips is great. But if they can't find the things in the price book, it leads to frustrations. It takes extra time to get everything ready and organized. That could be like, maybe they can get an extra call just because their price book is organized and they can get things in. And maybe there's templates that you have made that speed up the process a little bit more. So definitely the categories, right? Making sure that everything is kind of aligned at the same time. It's kind of like a double edged sword because you could also go the other way, right? Instead of having just one category, maybe you've got like layers of seven deep. And at that point nobody's clicking through the categories to find what they're looking for because it's just too detailed. So you want to make sure I usually say like no more than four categories deep because at that point then that's when people start, oh, well, I'll just put in, I know there's a generic task somewhere. I'll just put that generic task in because I just can't find what I'm looking for. And then that kind of skews other things. Like I like to do my reports on invoice items to see, you know, what are the, the things that I'm doing the most so that in that way I can find out, you know, oh, we're replacing all these blower motors. Maybe I need to stock those in my inventory. It gives us quite the insights, especially when we've got detailed price book items where we can say, yeah, you know, out of my installs, you know, 80% of them was this furnace and this air conditioner. So I want to make sure that I have those available so that if I need a next day install or something. So it just gives you a little bit more visibility into, you know, what the technicians are doing out there.

That's such a good takeaway. And I love that we have one action item already for listeners which if you have these categories and there's seven, eight layers deep and it's getting crazy. That's one thing you can go and clean up right away. Or if you're new on Service Titan, make sure you don't go more than four layers deep for the categories. And Jeremy, I know you've seen tons of price books, so it's cool to see that you have these best practices along with each of these price book rules. What's the second thing that we should. They should be paying attention to the codes.

The codes need to mean something. If they're. If we're just putting in like material 001, material 002, it's harder now to match up, right? Like we can buy materials from multiple different vendors. You know, like we can even run to. Sometimes you have to go to a box store like Home Depot or Lowe's and you can get some of the same stuff right in that area. Or having like a nomenclature or some kind of strategy when you're building out those codes is going to help, especially on the materials side where you can match up those codes now to those multiple vendors. Basically, I just use the product and then like if it was, let's say it's a plumbing part. So if it was like a copper half inch 90, you would do cop and then 12 and then 90. So then that way we know that's copper half inch 90. Some other things like black iron, I'll use like blk same kind of. I do the same kind of format. Make sure it's consistent, right? So if you've got like a T and you're listing out all three sizes of the T, make sure that you're doing it the same each time. So then that way you lessen the confusion. You are kind of bottlenecking to write certain character count on your code. So when you're trying to determine your strategy, make sure that it's going to be kind of a one fit. You know, one fits all. I like to remove vowels, right? So then like black becomes blk and white becomes wht. Something like that. Or coupling. Cplng. Stuff like that. Where, you know, it's. It's easy for people to remember these things. And then two, once you have it in there, it makes it a whole lot easier to sort of. That's why I like to put the product in the front. Because if you use the size in the front, right. If I have a half inch copper coupling and a half inch black iron coupling, well, when I'm sorting things, the product is all mixed together but if I start with the product copper then and I sort it based off Alphabet, right? Everything is nice and organized for me. It'll all come in, in the right sizes. And then now I can say, okay, well here's all my half inch copper and it's going to go into this category. And here's all my 3/4 and 1 inch. So it just makes it a lot easier when you have kind of a strategy going into it, because then it just, like I said, categories is important. Well, now that we have the strategy with their codes, it makes it a whole lot easier for us to get the strategy for our categories as well.

Right.

So they go hand in hand, ready. And then rule number three, I see here you have material naming. How is that different than the codes? And what advice would you have with the names?

So the, the code is kind of the unique identifier, right? That's what's going to basically be used to tie back into your accounting integration. Like that's what gets set up on that side. The name side is not customer facing, but more company facing. Like on the invoice, what we're sending to the customer, they don't see the name. We see the code and the description of the task or the equipment. So I find that the name is, is a very good opportunity for me to tie my vendor materials in there. And what this does is it helps out when we're doing our purchasing.

Right.

So whether I'm a tech in the field, I can just ask the vendor, hey, what's your part number? And then I can just type that part number in on my PO screen and it comes up. We can add the vendor code on the integration side at the bottom.

Right.

Which vendors are replenishment vendors. But unfortunately we can't search by that code. So a lot of places are, well, I need to know what this code is, but I also don't want my customers to be able to see it. You know, if I use the vendor's code as my code, then one, I'm tying myself to that vendor. And it makes it very hard if something, that relationship breaks down and I have to go to another vendor. I'm basically redoing my price book when we don't want that. But also I don't want my customers to be able to see my part numbers because then they're just going to go on ebay or Amazon or do a Google search and they'll be like, hey, you know, I can see the price here, right? And now they're trying to pick apart Your invoices and it's just something you don't need the name side. And there's a config that you can hide the name off of the estimates as well. And then that way it just gives everybody a little bit better ammo, a little bit more searchability for whatever materials or equipment that they're looking for.

That is such a good insight. So you use the config to make sure customers can't see it, but then internally your technicians and teams can always search those parts and find them and make sure you're using the right material.

For the job, right? Yep, exactly. Wow.

Such a good insight. I can tell this is going to be one of our best episodes ever because the, the price book topic is so deep and I'm sure we could do like an intermediate and advanced series at one point. But yeah, we've got three rules so far and a lot of actionable steps for people. What is rule number four?

Rule number four is more on the equipment side. And I find that this is something that not a lot of contractors are putting the effort into doing. And it's establishing your equipment types.

Right?

So your equipment types. What that does is it allows us to tie a lifespan to each piece of equipment. So where that's going to be important is let's say that I've installed a furnace at your house. Maybe it's a 20 year old furnace. Now Service Titan does record when those pieces of equipment are installed, right. And it just gives us more visibility into our dispatchers can now see, right. So we'll say our furnace has a 20 year lifespan. You're at that limit. So when we book that call, we can have those replacement opportunities tags coming up. So now our dispatchers can see, oh, this is a replacement, right. It's a high priority. We know that this has a potential to lead to a possible sale.

Right.

So we can put that as a higher priority. And then the technician as well, when they go on it shows that tag for them so that they're more equipped when they go in there. That yes, this could be a fix, but this also can be a lead for me to set for my comfort advisors or my sales staff. So setting up the equipment types is really important. And usually when you're setting it up right, you know the equipment that you're installing, right. Whether it be furnaces and heat pumps or air handling, air conditioner, boiler, whatever it is, just make sure that you're adding that in. And we're assigning equipment types to everything. So then that way we can get those metrics back out. The more information we can get in the service titan, the better reporting and the better capabilities that we're going to have to, like I said, plant that lead or you know, make sure that we are able to get to that, you know, dispatching for profit.

Yeah. And I think that seems like a theme is like with the price book, there's a lot of different pieces of information that can go into it. And so if you set each one up properly, they connect to a bunch of other opportunities to either help you grow revenue or save costs or have more accurate costing and, and whatnot. So pretty cool.

Yeah.

The price book is like I said, I, I, I feel like it is the heart of service titan and a lot of places either are afraid to put the effort in. They're unknown, maybe they don't have Excel skills at, so they're manually putting things in and then it gets daunting. Like the task is daunting. It is, it is a big thing. Whenever we're doing it. Like it's, you know, I say plan for a minimum of 20 hours of establishing a price book or if you're kind of, you know, you've got your, your price book established but you're not quite happy with it, it's still going to be around that 15, 20 hours of going through it. You're going to find different things, you're update certain tasks. Some things are going to be just not useful anymore.

Right.

Equipment or materials change to get updated. So deactivating things so that people can't find or you don't, can't use them anymore. There's a whole bunch of things like you could almost have a full time employee just in that price book all the time.

Totally. I heard someone once say that managing and maintaining your price book, customers kind of feel like it's like doing their taxes. It's, it's like something you have to do, you know, you need to do it, but you kind of like don't look forward to it every year.

Yeah, it is, it is definitely one of the necessary evils maintaining, that's for sure.

Yeah.

But it's always cool to, to meet people like you who just love the price book and are really good at Excel and this is one of your strengths. So thanks again for coming on the podcast and going over these. Let's jump into rule number five here, which is to ensure services have sold hours. What do you mean by that?

So sold hours is a way that we can track our technician's performance.

Right.

So if we're saying that this blower motor is going to take an hour. We expect that our technician can do that as well. So service time does a great job. Once a technician arrives at that job, we start tracking the time that they're spending. Right. So that comes into the job costing. But what it also is tracking is it's tracking the time the technician spent versus the amount of sold hours that are on that invoice.

Right.

So if we've got a dispatch fee and that's a half hour and then we've got our blower motors an hour. Well, we expect that tech to be in and out of that house in that hour and a half. So if they take, you know, two hours to do it, now they're, you know, 75% efficient. But if it takes them, you know, three quarters of an hour, well, now they're 200% efficient. So having sold hours with all of our tasks, it's just a way that we can better get visibility on what the techs are doing in the field. Do we need to talk to them? Are they taking too much time?

Right.

With this though, grain of salt, great. Is your more experienced technicians. Yeah, we expect them to hit that three quarter hour mark.

Right.

Because that's the knowledge that they've gained from it. But you know, we've got our apprentices coming in, right. They're just learning the kind of the ropes there. So if it does take them two hours to do that job, well, you do have to kind of be a little bit lenient. But at the same time it's like, well, the apprentices, they're not making quite as much, Right. Because they're still learning. So your profitability is still kind of the same.

Right.

Because the more experienced tech, yeah, they're making more money, but they're spending less time. So it does kind of balance out that way. But without sold hours like that metric, you just can't, you just don't know how well your technicians are performing.

For people who are having a, or struggling with like what the sold hours are for certain services, how do you recommend they figure that out?

A lot of the time. So like on the install side, if we have install managers, they're pretty dialed in on how long it takes their technicians to do. A lot of the times it's, you know, I'm not sure what is going on with the price book. I know I have to do something, but a lot of people in your organization, they do know and it's great to bring them in. You kind of get that they'll get that feeling, hey, you know, I got a little bit of ownership in this price book asking the technicians. So some of the senior technicians was something that I've done as well in the past, was, hey, you know, come into my office for a couple hours and you know, we'll look at some of these sold hours. We want to make sure that we're not marking it down that, oh yeah, you should. Everybody should be able to do this in three quarters of an hour.

Right.

We don't want to be putting everybody into a bad spot where they, they have no opportunity to actually show that they are performing great. So having multiple input from the organization, that's helpful. There are other, like, there's pricing services like PriceBook Pro and proper Rentals and other places like that where they have these kind of guidelines of this is what you can do. So if, you know, if building your own price book is a little daunting, there are different services that have a lot of these established sold hours and kind of general costing to kind of get you going.

That makes sense. And the point you mentioned about your mix of technicians, some if you have a lot of apprentices versus some, if you have a lot of people who are really seasoned. Do you try to just put the sold hours right in the middle, like average out how long your technician team would, would take?

Yeah, I try to do a general average.

Right.

Because like I said, we don't want to make it look like, you know, people are underperforming. You can see your performance on your mobile.

Right.

And if you wake up in the morning and you log in a service item, it says you're 75%. That's not a good feeling.

Yeah, totally. Especially if that's what you see every single day, right. And the bar is just way too high.

Right.

You gotta find that mix of, you know what, what do I really expect the technicians to be able to do? And then speaking with the technicians, that could be eye opening as well, where, you know, maybe our expectations are just unrealistic. Right? Oh, I expect you to be able to do that toilet in half an hour. And it's like, well, there's a lot to go into it. You know, it's not just as simple as just dropping a toilet over, over a flange and away I go. Right. So just be realistic, make sure that you're not penalizing with your sold hours. It's not like, oh well, I've set my sold hours, I'm good to go now.

Right.

If you need to tweak Them do some reporting, see how much time is taking on some of these tasks. And if you have to alter them, you know, up or down, maybe, you know, like I thought it was an hour and these guys are busting it out in half an hour. Well, maybe I should, you know, pull that down a little bit more. But typically I don't want to pull things down.

Makes sense. So how about rule number six, Building out material and equipment lists.

This is where I see a lot of places getting into trouble where they'll have, you know, I want my three. And this is where I like to be, my three top suppliers. I like to have them in my price book, a lot of places that I'm seeing. And they'll say, okay, well here's my three top suppliers. I reach out to them, I get their catalog, right? 20,000 items, and I just import that right into my price book, right? So now I've got their entire catalog. Well, you know what? I don't need all of these items. And it's going to make it a lot harder because now, right, from everything else that we've talked about, Now I've got 20,000 items. I got to set categories for them, right. I gotta make sure that there's a proper code on them. And like, this stuff all takes time. Like, sure, you can use AI to help generating the codes. I've used that before. That kind of speeds up the process, but you still have to review it, make sure everything is right. Typically what I recommend is instead of asking for the full calendar, ask for your last two years of purchases. And then from that, what you can do is you can say, okay, well here are the items that I purchased in the last two years. Depending on your Excel skills, you can put it into a pivot table and then it'll tell you, okay, well, I bought these widgets, you know, 100 times in the last three months or 600 times in the last two years. So this is definitely an item that I want to put in my price book, right? So you can get that data and you can make more informed decisions on how to build your price book out without adding that extra fluff. And like, just because this is your list today, that doesn't mean it's your list going forward.

Right?

You're going to be buying new product, new products going to be available. Maybe we're switching from, you know, a different type of packs or rose bow into some other product. It's always kind of a work in progress where having this list, oh, you know what? I do need this I'm buying this quite frequently and typically it's my accounting staff or the accounting staff that's the one that's realizing, hey, I've seen this product. A lot of I haven't been able to find it. When I put it in, this is something that we should be adding. So you kind of have different people in the organization that can be kind of those stop gaps for you that can say, hey, you know, I know that I've seen this product a lot of times. Maybe we should get it added into our price book.

Yeah, Jeremy, that's a really smart way to approach it. Just looking at the last two years and then I suck at Excel, but it's cool that you can do that. Pivot table and just see, you can see like it's almost like an 8020 approach to this. Instead of getting all 20,000 items, what are like the ones that do most commonly and then using that data to just inform how you set up those lists.

I've set up a lot of price books even before I went to go time. The first price book I set up, it was before we really had any kind of electronic anything. And it was a PDF that I created, added all these services. Here's our membership pricing. This was back in like 2013 or so. So and there was a book and the technicians had this book, it had pictures in it and they'll be like, oh, here is, you know, a pressure switch. And they flipped to the page, it told them what the pressure switch did and then it listed out what the prices were. That was my first one. And then we started moving into other softwares and we started building out other price books. And then we came into service titan and it was just, that's when it was like eye opening. I was like, wow, there's so many things that we can do that we never even had. You know, you didn't even think that it was an opportunity. And before, like there was no way that we could do it. So that was kind of like the big spot for me. I was like, wow, we can really get into this and dial in, dial in a lot of stuff that we're kind of missing out on right now.

Wow, so much has changed in 10 years time, right? And one of those like the advancement of technology is crazy. Going from what you had before to what you're working on now. I know rule number seven is one of those big cool technologies that we have in service line. Can you talk a little bit about pricing builder?

So regardless if you're using time and material or if you're doing flat rate or a mix of both. Like some people will have flat rate for residential customers and some will have time and material for their commercial multifamily. Depending on how, however you're billing, dynamic pricing and client specific pricing, they're set up to help you succeed.

Right.

If we've, if we know like we've got people that are updating our costing, well that's great, but who's updating the pricing? And that's where CSP and dynamic pricing kind of take over, where they go based off of the actual cost in your price book. And that's how they determine your price of the customer. So as long as we're updating our costs, then our pricing is going to get updated to and service Titan has made it easy for us to update our costing based off of our purchasing. If you're manually creating a build, there's a little toggle switch that says, hey, update my pricing. And it will update in real time. Which is great news for people that are using client specific or dynamic pricing because now we know our costs are in line and our revenues are going to be in line too.

Yeah, Some people have never even heard of dynamic pricing or CSP for those people. Can you describe what those features are?

They're just, they're basically pricing rules. So we can establish what our billable rates are, we can establish what our markups are. And if you're using client specific pricing, so it's more of the time and material side, what you do is we can assign different labor types. So if you have a different billing rate for your apprentice versus your lead technician, we can set those rates there. If you have kind of special pricing that don't follow the rules, there's different exclusions. So you can still keep that pricing outside of the rules that you're creating. And where CSP is really helpful is now our technicians really only have to add the materials to their invoice. So they can add the materials, they can click the calculate button service. It will say, okay, depending on what your billing rules are, here's what your labor rate is. And it automatically pops that in. So the technicians don't. It's one less thing for them to do. And with software, my thoughts, always the least amount of clicks wins, right?

Totally. And then that way for that specific customer, it'll make sure that pricing is accurate for them. Whether it's like a specific multifamily unit that you, you work with, or maybe it's a Starbucks and you have special pricing for Them and every time it'll just ensure that pricing is right.

Right.

And it's not like you're limited to one single rule. Right. So if you have, maybe you have one customer that does a lot of business, you have special pricing for them, you can tie certain rules specifically to customers to make sure that they're getting that pricing. Before this was an option with Service Titan, I had to have different billing codes for, you know, different tasks, different billing codes for different customers that I had. Plus I had to have in my content portal a cheat sheet for my text to say, okay, this, this customer gets these tasks and this customer gets this task. And I broke up my price book by categories for my kind of special customers so that they knew which ones to go into. But it was, you know, extra clicks, extra work, extra time.

Right.

So now with like the client specific pricing, that kind of does away with that. It, it makes it a lot more streamlined. Dynamic pricing, that's another one that's just, it's come a long way where, same as client specific, we can create rules based off of our billable hour amount. Another thing that comes into this is sold hours. We can't use dynamic pricing if we don't have sold hours because that's what develops our price. But it also lets us have kind of modifiers, which is really neat. So we can have different pricing levels. So maybe I'm going into a crawl space and I want to charge an extra 25% because of that, I can have a level two of extra 25%. Or maybe it's difficult access and I need to cut an inspection hole or I'm going into an attic. So you can have these different levels and then the technician can say, okay, yeah, this is difficult access. And when they're selecting those tasks, then they can actually just put that on and say, yeah, this is a level 2 or level 3 without having to phone into the office and say, hey, I'm going into this difficult spot. Can you update my pricing?

And there's other modifiers like after hours, I think is a pretty common use case for that, right?

Yeah, that's. That one is probably the best one. That enhancement that they made to dynamic pricing where you can not only set after hours, but you can also set evenings or weekends and holidays.

Super cool. So yeah, with dynamic pricing, you can preset all these rules for your flat rate side of the business, it sounds like. And then on the CSP side, it's for time and material, right?

Yeah. And then same like on some more modifiers.

Right.

Is you can kind of hide different surcharges in there. So if you wanted to say, you know, shop supplies, you know, this is a big one where you want to charge shop supplies. Like, you go to a mechanic and you see it clearly on your invoice, but somehow there's some clear distinction between going to a shop and having someone come to your house. And, you know, the biggest thing is, well, I'm not paying for shop supplies, right? So you want to still cover the miscellaneous, you know, the rags. If you're using consumables, you know, whether it's like pipe dope or whatever, you're using it like it's something that you can't charge the customer, right? You can't be like, oh, yeah, this is, you know, a dollar's worth of glue or cement, right? So the surcharges is a great way that we can hide those additional bees within our services.

That's amazing. When. So when you hear that service tank comes out with new feature like this, and you're like, oh my gosh, I gotta go clean up like a bunch of stuff in my price book, do you get excited, Scared like that? Just a side note, when every time we make an update, it seems like a lot has to change in the way we set up price books.

Every time there is an update, a lot of things change, especially the price book. They're constantly evolving. This last update, they've allowed configurable services throughout everybody, not just the people using PriceBook Pro. And. And like, that is a game changer, I think, for a lot of contractors. Because now especially, like inventory, inventory is always a hot topic, right? How do we do this? It allows you to have your generic price set up with a generic item. And then in, the technician can now say, this is the specific item and add that to their invoice. And the really neat thing is it's powered by Titan Intelligence, so it remembers what you selected. So then the next time you use that task, it'll be like, oh, you selected this before. Do you want to select it again? So every time you're using it, it like develops better, better, better, faster for our technicians to use it. I think it's just that configurable services I think is just great. So when they come out with things like that, the first thing that I like to do is, okay, knowledge base, articles, whatever, I can read about it. And then I've got a little bit of information about it now. And now I go in and see, okay, well, what can I do? What are things that might break this.

Right.

Because there are things in your price book that don't work together.

Right.

So like discounts and fees might not work with compatible payroll. There's a lot of different kind of nuances, so it's okay. Well, I need to find these nuances out because I'm not. I don't want to be the one setting up a price book and not really knowing either the full capabilities or, you know, what kind of. If there is any kind of draws or something that's not going to work the way that I really expect it to.

Gotcha. Gosh. Configurable service is such a cool feature. I feel like that one could be in its entire episode just on its own.

Oh, I think so too. It's definitely, it's definitely. Like I said, I think it's a big game changer for a lot of, a lot of different contractors being able to on the fly have your technicians add the, you know, the actual materials that they need on there. So then now again, that's going to limit the amount of services that I need.

Right.

Because I don't need to have a service for the oem, blower, motor and integrated and just your job or. Right. So it allows a lot more flexibility in your pricing and your options.

Yeah, that one is so cool. We'll put a pin in that topic. Maybe a little bit more intermediate or advanced, but going to step or rule number eight here with taking advantage of task workflows. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. So task workflows, it's something. It does take a little bit of time to kind of wrap your head around how they kind of work. But basically what we can do is the workflows are more of an add on. So if I have a membership, maybe it's a system membership. So you get your furnace and your air conditioner, but I also want to service their water heater or their hrv. I don't want to have to have different memberships because you have a boiler and an air handler and an HRV and a water heater and they're all different.

Right.

So what I like to do is set up my basic, you know, these memberships are going to cover 80% of my customers.

Right.

Yeah. I probably will have to have a Boulder membership on its own.

Right.

My standalone equipment to systems. But then what it can do is kind of like our humidifiers. It allows us to add these on so that we can't just create a membership for a humidifier.

Right.

Somebody goes in, it doesn't make sense to anybody to have, you know, just a solidary, you know, smaller piece of equipment. But it does make sense to add it on to other memberships. So what the task workflows do is it allows us to either attach different additional services onto our membership. So whether it be the water heater, it allows us to add recurring services. Again, there's another config that allows you to book your maintenance calls based off of the sold hours off of what your recurring services are. So again, sold hours come into play.

Right.

One of the biggest ones. Now, our ease of dispatching, because they don't have to book. You know, if we say a maintenance call is an hour and a half, but because we've got two systems, then the dispatcher would have to expand that out for the three hours they had to go into it to find out what the, what the actual services are. So with these configs on, it allows us to book off the sold hours. So we've got some streamlining there. Kind of like the McDonald's menu, right? Would you like fries with that? Okay, here you go. It just opens up a lot of different options for our text to be able to upsell not just off of our basic memberships, but, you know, all the equipment in the house. And once we're looking at all the equipment in the house, now we've got more revenue opportunities. Right? Oh, I'm at your water heater. But I also notice, like, your HRV is frozen over or it's leaking. Do you want me to take a look at that too? So the workflow is taking advantage of those. The nice thing too is it can update your billing template. So then now we're not, you know, if I have three different memberships and they're set for recurring, that's three different invoices I'm sending to my customer and charging them three separate times. Or the workflows, they'll just add to either your existing recurring service or your existing billing template. So now it's one invoice, one payment from the customer. We're not having to worry about all this extra, extra stuff. We can just take care of it just in that workflow.

Wow, that's amazing. There's so many things, like I'm just looking at these eight rules that we talked about, and they can just tackle one at a time, it seems like. And each one will just optimize in so many areas. Like you're talking about the dispatcher being impacted by this, memberships being impacted. It's, it's super Cool to see.

Sometimes I think, oh, I'm a doctor performing heart surgery when I'm going into doing these Facebooks, you know, and, and it is like, it's really like, it's. You have to be precise because if you, if you miss something, right. It affects a whole lot of other areas downstream. You might not even be aware. And you're just wondering, you know, you're looking at your dashboard and you're wondering, well, why isn't this making sense or working out for me? I'm pretty sure I've got everything set up that I need, but I'm not getting the metrics that I, that I'm expecting. Right. So any little change that you can make for the better, it's definitely going to get more information in your hands.

So the first eight, we've really been talking a lot about the setup. This, I love this rule, rule number nine, in terms of having too many hands in the cookie pot, can you talk a little bit about permissions and access?

If you're allowing everybody to adjust prices in your price book, right? So if it was like you exported into Excel and imported in, you've got a cookie trail of, this is what your price book looked before, this is what it looks like now. This is the user that did that. You have that accountability. You can go to those people. If we're individually marking on the price books, you don't know who changed it, right. Somebody, one of the texts could have phoned into one of the dispatchers and says, hey, you need to update this, or this is too high of a price and they change it. You don't know, you don't know who's changing it or why they're changing it. So limiting to a handful of people, maybe you have a service item champion in your organization and they're the ones that are controlling the price book. And then maybe somebody on your accounting staff because they're the ones that are knowing what materials that should be getting added, right. So having very limited access to who can edit, you know, we still want to have let people know what's enterprise, but there's still view settings you can have, but edit settings definitely limit that so that you can maintain control on what's being changed. Who's the ones that are authorized to change it. Once you have that kind of those rules in place, then. And it helps out other areas too, where, you know, if I'm the price book champion, the technicians know they have to come to me to ask for, can you add another task? So it's not taking up our CSRs or dispatchers time and they could be on calls with customers or, you know, they can be adjusting their dispatch board to make sure it's more efficient. So having somebody in place and letting everybody know this is the person that you talk to if we need to make alterations. There's no bottlenecks, really. It just makes it a lot more efficient of, you know, this is what I got to do to get my prices in. And I know I have control because, you know, these two people are the.

Only people touching it makes sense. I love this rule because the other ones are about set up. And this one's a great piece of advice for maintaining and managing the price book ongoing. If there's someone out there listening and they're like, oh my gosh, we have way too many people who have access to this price book. How should they think about, like, who should have access in their organization?

For me, anyways, it was who is the, you know, the best Excel champion of your organization?

Right.

They should definitely be the one that's able to. And then kind of like you're, you know, it's not going to be like your controller that's going to be adding items in, but maybe you have a lead accounting specialist. They're the ones that, I would say, so the owner, obviously they, they can have full control because it's their pricing right there, the ones that are in control that way. So, you know, limit to, you know, one accounting staff needs to be, I think that accounting staff needs to be in there. Your champion, you know, who is your best user? Maybe they have a little bit lacking Excel skills. Well, there's tons of information online to get them. We train our technicians, we can train our office staff too to learn these different Excel functions. And your owner, those really are the only three people that have any business going in there.

Perfect.

All right, wrapping up here with rule number 10. What do you got for us?

It comes just from knowing. Getting these phone calls. Hey, Jeremy, we don't have a task for this. And it's like you're working on a very specific piece of equipment. Like maybe it's a dectron for a pool, like a pool heater. It's like, yeah, we're not going to have a service for that because, you know, we only work on this one for that one customer. So having generic tasks in there where you have it kind of based off of your labor amount, so in half hour increments and then also having your material costing and it's up to you for how you want Your material costing levels to work, maybe you have like different price points that you hit where you've got different markups. Then that's what I would say those levels would be. So, you know, between 10 and $30. So you would have a $30 cost. And that gives the technicians a little bit more room to say, okay, well I know that it's going to take me two hours and I know it's going to be $500 in parts. So I can select this task, I can change the description because it is unique and it stops them from phoning into the office. Those the biggest thing for me is what can I do to stop my text from phoning, right? Because as soon as a technician phones into the office, I'm tying up my CSRs or my call takers, right? They're getting tied up. They need to be with customers. I don't want them being with my tech. So any kind of ammo I can give them into the field. You know, I want to do that. So setting up these generic tasks, linking the materials to them and then setting up the code in a way that it makes sense for everybody in the company but not make sense for the customer to be able to peel it apart. So a lot of the times and like pricebook Pro has something with these where they have the custom repairs where it's you know, one hour. So it'll be like 1.0050 and that's one hour for $50 of cost. So there's ways, again with the, you know, strategies of our coding. There's ways of making it so that it's easy for the text.

Right.

But again, double edged sword here is if you make something really easy, it's going to be the default, right. So you have to make sure that everything else is easy, like going back to the categories because if it's, you know, I'm going searching for something, I can't find it. Oh, generic task it is. And away I go. One of the big reports that I always like to use when it's coming through, when I'm looking at price book stuff is the invoice item detail report and I'll have a report specifically for my customer pairs. So then that way I can look at the descriptions and I can see, okay, well you know, here are the customer repairs that I know I already have in my price book. And we just need to show the technicians where they can find them a little coaching opportunity there, right? Or oh yeah, no, these are definitely ones that I have. I don't have My price book. But I see that it's been here like four or five times. So then that another bit of information that okay, they've used it enough times, I'm going to add it to my price book and let them know where it's going to be. There's so much different information that you can pull out and it's you know, generic task. Make sure that our coding is proper so that we can pull this out. Or maybe we just have our generic tasks in a specific category and I can report just off of that category. So there's a bunch of different things that, that we can do once we have our price book kind of dialed in a little bit more.

That's such a great tip. The use case for those generic tasks and materials for that weird job every now and then that the head scratching special work. So but then to not make it too easy where that they'll just default to it. So I like that balance there.

It's great to have because it gives, you know, I don't like to have technicians be able to edit the prices. That was like a big thing for so having letting them have these generic tasks that it's just a way that again it gives them ammo. They're not having to stop production because they're waiting for somebody to update a price book item or you know, they have that information, they could, they can do their job and then we can still report on that after the fact to see, you know, is somebody abusing the generic tasks and we need to just show them how to find things or show them how the pressbook works a little better. It gives you quite a lot of insights.

So many insights. So yeah, Those are our 10 rules for price book. We could probably talk for hours more with more intermediate advanced level stuff, the new configurable services. But I did see here you have one last bonus tip that maybe we can wrap up on about duplicate materials.

A lot of the places are wanting, you know, they all start with purchasing and they'll want to go to inventory if we've got the duplicate materials in there. Now our inventory build out is going to be twice as long because now we have to find these duplicates, marry them up to the different vendors, right where we can have one piece of material associated to however many vendors we want really. So it's easier to have that one piece of material and you match it up at the beginning then just keep bringing in everybody's price books and saying okay, yeah, well which copper 90am I using?

Right?

Am I using the one from, you know, vendor A or vendor B or vendor C, they all have different pricing.

Right.

If you're using inventory now, you've got three items set up as inventory, but they're the same item. They're in the same bin, so you don't know which one you're pulling from. So when you are adding the materials in, do your best to try to match them up with the other vendors. And that kind of goes back into, you know, the naming convention, where if I'm looking at the vendor's list, I can say, okay, well, here's their copper section. So then I can open up my service titan, bring in the copper section and say, okay, here are the ones that do line up, and then I would export it out and then go to that vendor and tie it or go to that material and tie the vendors that way. So there are ways that you can do. You can limit the risk of having duplicates. Not having duplicates keeps the price book a little bit cleaner. I think it just helps out in all different areas. It's kind of like future proofing, having the naming convention, all the vendors are tied to the right material. Now when you're going into inventory, it's like, okay, well, I know it's easier for me to establish, you know, these are my inventory pieces, and I know that I'm not going to have three items that are the same item in the same bin set up three different ways.

Totally. Wow. So many, so many great pieces of advice that you've given across this episode here. If you're listening and you may feel a little overwhelmed, like, oh, my gosh, there's so many things I need to work on. For my price book, I'd recommend you just review these 10 rules and then just pick one. Pick one to start with, and then you can slowly, once you get that one done, you can go on to the next. And eventually, after all these 10 rules are all cleaned up, you will have a much, much better price book. Jeremy, where can people find you if they want to work with you or.

Say, hi, I'm always on service site masterminds. You might see me commenting there. I'm pretty active on there. Or you can reach out to Stephanie Fritz at GoTime Success Group and she can either connect you with myself or one of the other coaches. Great coaches that we have.

Awesome. Thanks, Jeremy. We'll be sure to link those in the description if you want to learn more. And other than that, thanks so much for coming on today.