Quoting Jobs W/ Non-Pricebook Materials + Dynamically Calculating Quotes | Super Tech Support Ep. 2

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the blue collar nerd. And welcome to another episode of Super Tech Support. So in this episode we're gonna be helping out Aaron Johnson who's looking for some help with office side estimate building specifically for commercial jobs. So basically he posted this video of another software. I have no idea what this other software is, but another software, their office side estimate builder and asks, hey, is, is service item working on anything that can do this? So I said, okay, let me see what we got here. I watched this video. They're adding an item there. I'm not really sure what service line is. Quantity, unit cost. Okay, we're adding another item. Yep, yep. Quantity one, entering in a unit cost. All right. And that generates a price. And that's pretty much it. I just enter in a few more items. So I'm watching that and I'm thinking, what am I, what am I supposed to be seeing here? Because I didn't see anything happen that can't already be done with surfacetit. So I asked Aaron for some clarification and he said that the main thing that he saw there that he was looking for was the ability to add just a generic task that's not in your price book, enter in the cost on the fly and have a price automatically generate. Well, I've got good news. You can already do that. Okay, so the first thing that we need to do is to go into our service titan price book and create one. Just generic material doesn't have to be a material, it could be equipment. But I'm trying to replicate what I was shown in that video and it looked like they were just charging based on materials. So I made this item here. The name is custom material and for the description I just wrote edit me because that's where we're going to put whatever it is that we're actually selling. Okay, now step two is to set up a rate sheet or multiple rate sheets with client specific pricing. Client specific pricing is a feature that allows you to dynamically calculate prices for quotes and invoices based on time and materials and it was specifically designed for commercial use cases. So as far as automated pricing, there's two buckets, dynamic pricing and client specific pricing. Dynamic pricing was designed for flat rate. Client specific pricing was designed for commercial use cases, time and materials, that sort of thing. Now I'm not going to show you how to set that up in this video because it would make it too long. It's a one time setup that you just do and you're done with it, and I have a whole separate video about that already. And I'll put a link to that video in the description box down below. But let's assume we've got all that set up and let me show you how it works in action. So I'm on the office side here and I'm making an estimate. I'm just going to call this the CSP client specific pricing demo estimate. Then we scroll down here and here's the important part. We need to select a rate sheet. Rate sheets are what we build with client specific pricing. So I have one built out here, the H Vac install rule. So now that's the set of rules that this quote is going to follow when it's calculating. All right, let's create that estimate. Okay. Now, in the video that Aaron showed me, they added five pieces of material to calculate their quote, plus a labor task. I'm going to leave off the labor task because with client specific pricing, you have some choices as to how you want to charge for labor.

So.

So you could set up a rule as part of your rate sheet that calculates based on the actual time taken on the job. Or if you really wanted to, you could do it the way that it was shown in that video where you just basically create a task in your price book for labor and put that in there. That. That could work too. But anyways, let's add our first piece of material here. I'm going to add that guy right there. Custom material. The description. This is going to be a. We'll do a Mitsubishi Mini split. Hey, just a real quick note here for this example, I'm entering in everything in as materials just because in that video I saw, it didn't look like there was any differentiation. But really I wouldn't recommend putting in a mini split as material. I would recommend putting it in as equipment. You could have a custom piece of equipment if you wanted to that will do the exact same thing I'm about to show. But with equipment, your technicians will have the ability to enter in some important details like the model and serial number once they install the equipment. Okay, moving on. For the cost of 2849 and boom. You see there that my price just calculated based on that cost. And now I'm just going to add all of the other things that they added in that video he showed me. Stand in the place where you live. Okay, so there's my quote all built out. I'm going to speed it up for the sake of making the video not super boring. But it probably took me in real time 45 seconds. My custom material here has a default cost of $0 and then whatever I type in that's going to automatically generate the unit price. I've got all my information over here. Here's my gross margin, my total cost for this qu. And then there's a couple of different ways that you can have your quote configured to show like the customer facing version. The way I've got this configured doesn't show the name of the task, equipment or material. It only shows the description and the code. And if you're going to be building out a lot of things this way, I would recommend having it set up like that because that way you don't have to have this custom material name over and over. That can be kind of confusing to the customer. So let me show you the print view here. So that's what it looks like as the print view. You see we've only got the task code and the description, so it's pretty clear to a customer what is what. And just for posterity sake, I'll email this to myself so that we can see what it looks like as an online estimate as well. Okay, so here it is as an online estimate. You see, we've got the same situation where it's only showing the code and the description. And of course we could make this look a lot prettier. We could put a summary in and we could actually use pictures with all of our material tasks here. I didn't upload any pictures for that piece of custom material, but that's that if you want to build out quotes that way you can do that in Service Titan. Now that said, I do still think even in a commercial application it's kind of a band aid to do it that way. There's only so many materials that you're using and only so many vendors you're purchasing it from. I really recommend just actually having that material set up in your price book individually. This is my line set material, 3/4 inch, whatever it is. Mainly because if you just do a custom material as everything, I mean A it creates just more work when you're quoting because you have to type everything in and B it really diminishes your ability to use ServiceTitan's purchase ordering and inventory features.

So.

So personally I don't recommend putting everything ever in as a custom material. I recommend having your commonly used items actually entered in and then still have a custom material for those one off things here and there that happen once a year or whatever. Now before I let you go. There was somebody else who chimed in on this thread and they were wondering how to do a similar thing, but with flat rate pricing. So dynamic pricing is the feature that is intended to be used for flat rate. So like I said earlier, dynamic pricing, that's your more flat rate focused feature versus client specific pricing is your more commercial focused feature. And they're different features that work a little differently. If you're calculating flat rate using dynamic pricing, then if you have materials tied to a service, then your dynamic pricing rule is going to calculate based on whatever that cost of that material is in your price book. And if you go in while you're building a quote and change the cost of a material on the fly, then that's not going to change the cost of the service. The service cost was already calculated based on what you had it as in the price book. And as I'm talking, I realized that was kind of hard to follow. So let me show you an example. Now, if you're not familiar yet with what dynamic pricing is at all, then this is still not going to make sense to you, example or not. So check out my video on dynamic pricing first. If you just have no idea what I'm even talking about here. Okay, so I'm in my price book here. I've got this replace 35 at 5 run capacitor task. And, and it has one material tied to it. It's this capacitor here that cost me $200. And right now the price for this task, the dynamic price, is calculating at $350. That's based off of the material costs and whatever hours I have assigned to this, which is zero. It really shouldn't be zero. Let's call it 0.5.

Boom.

And you see the price just updated by itself. Magic of dynamic pricing. Okay, so I'm going to make a new estimate here. I'm not going to select a rate sheet because rate sheets are for client specific pricing. Very important. These are different things. We're not using client specific pricing, but using flat rate. We're using dynamic pricing. I'll hit save and then I will add that task that I just showed you. So there it is. I'm going to select that and it's going to populate both the task and the material that is tied to that task. So here's that capacitor that costs $200 and there's our dynamic price of $475 that we are charging to the customer. But if I just go in here and say, actually this thing costs $300 now. I'll save that. You'll notice that does not change my price up here. All that did was lower my gross margin. Let's say it costs $400 now. Boom. All that did was lower my gross margin. It does not change my price. If you're using flat rate, if you're using dynamic pricing, then you need to be keeping your material costs up to date. And the way I recommend doing that is twofold. One is to get all of them up to date in the first place. The bulk editing features of the price book are going to be your friend there. I have a video on that. I'll put a link in the description below.

And.

And then once everything is up to date, there's a feature that will let you automatically update material prices based on purchase orders. So as you're buying things, oh, price went up. It automatically just updates the material cost in your price book and that keeps everything up to date in a very hands off way. But if you do get pins in this situation and you're like, okay, well I need to sell this right now. But I know that this thing is going for $300 and not the $200 that it says. So by default, this was at 200. Just so we're clear. So you're like, well, it doesn't cost 200, it costs 300 now. Okay, well that's really no problem. All we've got to do is update the cost in our price book. So in my price book I'm going to go to materials and I'm going to find that piece of material. There it is. The cost is currently set at 200, but I know that now they are going for 300 click out of that to save it. Okay, now let's go back to that estimate I was building and I'm just going to take this task off and put it back on so that it pulls in the new data. Boom. You see now the price is 300 and the dynamic price that it's calculating is $650. Anyways, that's all I got for today. I hope this was helpful for some of you out there. If it was helpful, please leave me a comment down below. I'd love to hear the feedback. Please hit like if you did like the video and found it valuable. And please subscribe to surface Titan's YouTube channel if you haven't done that already. Appreciate it. Peace.

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