Say two techs go out on the same kind of call this week: a bad igniter, a simple swap. One quotes the customer $220. The other quotes $175, because that's the number he remembers from a job last spring. Neither price came from anywhere you could point to, and the customer who got the higher quote has every right to wonder why.
That's what a price book fixes. It's a list of the tasks your shop runs most, each with a set price, so every tech quotes the same number for the same job. The hard part isn't the idea. It's building the first one from scratch when you've never kept the records a price book needs.
This guide walks through that build, in order: pick the tasks, time them from your own jobs, price the materials, decide on tiers, and set a date to check it again.
Start with the tasks you run most
Pull your invoices from the last six months to a year and sort them by job type. You'll likely find that a small set of tasks, capacitor swaps, drain clears, whatever's common in your trade, account for most of your call volume. Start your price book with those. A book with 20 well-priced tasks that cover 80 percent of your calls beats one with 200 tasks you built once and never checked.
Leave room to add a task the first time you do it for real. A price book is never finished. It grows as your shop takes on new kinds of work.
Time standards come from your own jobs, not a book
A time standard is how long a task takes, on average, for your crew. Generic flat-rate manuals exist, but a number built off someone else's techs and someone else's trucks will be wrong for your shop in ways you can't predict. Your own invoices already have the data.
For each task on your list, pull the last 15 to 20 jobs of that type and look at the labor hours billed or the time between arrival and job-complete if you track that instead. Use the middle of that range, not the fastest time and not the slowest. A tech having a bad day skews the slow end; a tech who's done the job a hundred times skews the fast end. The middle is what a typical job takes with your crew doing it.
If you don't have 15 jobs of a given type yet, start with your best estimate and correct it once you've run the task a few more times. A time standard is a working number, not a one-time guess you lock in forever.
Materials and the markup
Once you have a time standard, turn it into a price using labor cost, material cost, overhead, and a target margin. That math, including the burdened labor rate and how to set a margin instead of a markup, is covered in the flat-rate price book guide, with the burdened labor rate guide for the labor input and the free flat-rate calculator to run the numbers. What this guide adds is where the inputs come from before you ever touch that formula: your own time standards and your own current material costs, checked against what a supplier charges you this month, not what you remember paying last year.
Ken Misiewicz, president and CEO of Pleune Service Company, an ACCA bronze member, described how his shop keeps material costs from drifting: they import standard duct and piping components into their estimating software on a regular basis so the costs in the system stay current. A price book built once and never refreshed on the materials side quietly underprices every job that uses a part whose cost has gone up since you last checked.
Deciding whether you need tiers
A tier is a second or third version of the same task at a different price: a cheaper repair option next to a more complete one, or a longer warranty at a higher price. Many shops call this good-better-best. It gives a customer a choice instead of a single take-it-or-leave-it number, and it gives you a higher-margin option to offer before you negotiate down from your only price.
Tiers add work: every tier needs its own time standard and its own materials line, so it's another price to keep current. For a shop building its first price book, a single well-built price per task is enough to start. Add tiers later, on the tasks where customers ask for options most often, once the base book is solid.
Reviewing the book
Steve Howard, founder of ACT Group Inc., put it plainly in an ACCA piece on 2026 pricing pressure: review the gross margin after every job, and if a job misses its target margin, find out which cost caused the miss and fix it rather than letting the price book drift. That's a tighter cadence than most small shops can run, but the principle holds at any pace: check margin regularly, not once a year by accident.
At minimum, revisit the whole book once a year, and sooner if a wage goes up, a supplier raises prices, or you notice a task running long or short of its time standard more often than not. The price book is only as good as the last time someone checked it against what the job costs today.
Whatever software your techs invoice from, the price book only works if that's the number on the screen when they write up the job. SpanCrew runs invoicing at a flat $99 a month with every tech included, and it's currently in early access.