Electrical Contractor Price Book: A Guide to Maximize Profitability

Electrical contractors typically use one of two pricing models — time and materials (hourly rates), or flat-rate pricing. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of each and explain why we think switching to a flat-rate pricing system and using electrical pricebook software like ours, ServiceTitan, is the best way to ensure your electricians are consistently charging the right price for every electrical job and maximizing the profit for your electrical services so your business can thrive. 

In this post, we’ll cover:

• The two typical electrical pricing models

• Benefits of using flat-rate pricing software vs traditional pricebooks

• The challenges of standard pricebook software

• How ServiceTitan’s electrical price book helps maximize efficiency and profitability

• Quick guide on how to price an electrical job

The Two Typical Electrical Pricing Models

As we mentioned above, most electrical contractors use one of two pricing systems:

1. Time & materials (hourly rate): Costs are based on the time spent performing the work and for the materials used in the job.

2. Flat-rate pricing: A fixed rate for a service.

Each pricing model offers advantages and disadvantages for your electrical business and your customers, including:

Time & Materials (Hourly Rates): Pros & Cons

Pros for the customer

• Customers understand hourly rates and use it as a baseline for comparable work.

• Some customers appreciate an itemized list of exactly what’s included (such as specific costs for circuit breakers and light switches), as well as the total cost.

• Billing hourly can work better for long-term projects, rather than short, sporadic jobs.

Cons for the customer

• Customers may watch over your techs to make sure they’re not wasting time.

• Techs who don’t perform optimally may cost customers more money for less work.

• Unexpected changes may significantly increase the cost of the project.

• Customers prefer to know roughly what they’ll be paying upfront. 

Pros for the contractor

• You can track the exact number of hours worked on a job, and invoice the customer on completion or at certain phases for bigger jobs (such as a new construction).

• You can account for changes (and charge for them) as they arise.

• Your techs know their average hourly rate and how many hours they need to work each week to reach a certain level of pay.

Cons for the contractor

• Contractors need to keep detailed records of hours worked — many are too busy to do this regularly and accurately.

• There is no incentive for techs to perform quickly and efficiently, so they may do fewer jobs, or some customers may notice and complain.

• Profitability is limited (while pricing focused on production boosts your revenue potential).

Flat-Rate Pricing: Pros & Cons

Pros for the customer

• Answers two important questions: What’s wrong and how much will it cost?

• Reduces price concerns because customers know the fixed cost in advance.

• Eases the pressure of needing to closely monitor the electrician’s progress.

• Eliminates repair bill surprises, even if a tech needs more time to complete the work.

• Simple and easy for customers to understand, and for your techs to sell.

Cons for the customer

• When your fee is not itemized, customers may view it with suspicion or as upselling.

• It doesn’t allow for customers to negotiate the price.

• The service may seem overpriced, especially if the homeowner or commercial client doesn’t understand the value your company brings to the job above and beyond the installation cost.

• Creating a high-pressure environment to perform may leave your clients feeling like your techs rushed through the job.

Pros for the contractor

• Rewards high performance and efficiency, resulting in more booked jobs per week and more revenue. 

• Allows you to set prices based on the true value of your services and scope of work.

• Eliminates the problem of underperforming techs.

• Allows you to sell a service with no need to justify your hourly rate or markups.

• Shortens the billing cycle — customers can prepay the fixed cost or pay the tech on site.

Cons for the contractor

• If the job takes longer than estimated, you may end up earning less than your regular hourly rate.

• Clients may insist on hourly invoicing, or want to haggle over your flat-rate pricing.

• You may get locked into a certain price even when a job turns out to be more complicated than you originally thought. 

• With emphasis placed on performance, slower techs may struggle to earn.

Benefits of Flat-Rate Pricing Software vs. Traditional Price Books

With all the above pros and cons considered, our experience working with hundreds of electrical companies (as well as HVAC and plumbing) shows that the most successful electrical businesses use the flat-rate pricing model and digital pricing software.

With flat-rate pricing, customers know exactly what a job will cost, regardless of how long it takes, so they don’t need to clock-watch or worry about unexpected costs. Likewise, electricians are incentivized to execute jobs efficiently, so they can tackle more jobs and bring in more revenue.

Flat-rate price electrical shops typically use a physical flat-rate pricing book: a comprehensive document listing all the company’s purchases and sales, labor costs, job types, markups, and materials and equipment used.

But these require technicians to lug around heavy binders to every sales or service call. They inevitably become grimy and often contain outdated information. Just putting together such a pricing guide takes hundreds of hours. 

In contrast, flat-rate pricing software gives your estimators and electricians a better tool to use when communicating with customers, one that provides accurate, reliable pricing information and doesn’t involve unwieldy, and outdated, paper books.

Some software-based, ready-made pricebooks require contractors to wrangle multiple spreadsheets, import and export data, and make constant manual updates. 

We’ll outline the difficulties associated with traditional pricebook software products next. 

The Challenges of Standard Pricebook Software

Prebuilt software pricebooks don’t get dirty, and they save contractors from spending hours building a pricebook from scratch. 

But some software pricebooks, like physical pricebooks, fall behind on current equipment costs, so, many electrical contractors who use pricebook software don’t even bother to attach material prices to their job estimates. If they do, it’s generally so that their office knows what code to use when they’re ordering supplies, rather than how to factor materials into the price of a job.         

Similarly, many software pricebooks don’t make distinctions between varieties of equipment (e.g. types of light fixtures or receptacles). They’ll simply have a standardized price. Some software pricebooks will allow contractors to get more specific, but that’s not common. So, every time a tech creates an estimate using standardized pricing, they risk losing money on equipment that might turn out to be pricier than the ballpark figure in their quote.    

Finally, once a job is sold in this way, contractors need to download the relevant data from their pricebook app, and upload it into both their dispatching and accounting software. Each time they do this is an opportunity for something to go wrong — for data to get lost, corrupted, mis-transcribed, or otherwise confused.   

In designing ServiceTitan’s pricebook features, we’ve addressed these challenges so that our pricebook features seamlessly integrate with the dispatching, inventory management, equipment tracking, electrical estimating software, and accounting portions of our product, eliminating the need to transfer data between platforms. 

Next, we’ll discuss how.

ServiceTitan’s Electrical Price Book Maximizes Efficiency & Profitability

ServiceTitan helps professional electricians manage their pricebooks and electrical work easily and profitably whether you offer residential electrical services or if you are a multi-industry service business that also provides HVAC, plumbing and/or other services.

Key features that set ServiceTitan’s electrical pricebook software apart include:

Flexible Pricebook Setup & Management

ServiceTitan’s software offers a flexible approach to pricebook management that meets the needs of different business sizes and can scale with a growing electrical business. 

With our three options, you can: 

1. Create a completely new pricebook from scratch

2. Import a pricebook you’re already using

3. Use our pre-built pricebook available through Pricebook Pro

Whichever you choose, you can refine your pricebook with as much detail as you’d like.

Accessibility is flexible too. Because it is cloud-based, everybody who needs access to the pricebook can view it in real-time via their desktop (if office based), laptop, or mobile devices (if out in the field). 

Customized Pricebook Organization

Our pricebook solution is completely customizable, so you can easily create and organize your pricebook efficiently to suit the size and complexity of your business. 

For example, you can create different pricebooks for residential and commercial customers. Or, if your business serves multiple industries (such as HVAC and plumbing), you can create industry-specific pricebooks for each.

Clear, visual organization helps your electricians find what they need in the field. In addition, you have the ability to set specific access permissions — for example, for residential electricians to have access only to the residential pricebook, or plumbing techs to have access only to the plumbing pricebook.

Finding a specific item is straightforward, too, as the pricebook has a variety of searchable options, including product code, part number, model number, name, or category. 

In the office view, you can click to see the item description, photo/video, price, sold hours, etc. You can easily edit an individual service or add whatever other information is useful to your business, such as warranty description or an employee incentive bonus.

You can also elect to automatically attach essential materials to a specific item or service package. 

Upload Your Own Photos & Videos 

When you add items to your ServiceTitan pricebook through Pricebook Pro or Pricebook Connect (more on that below), these are automatically populated with professional-quality photos. This helps techs find, identify, and verify parts. 

Unlike most other pricebooks, our software also allows you to upload photos and videos of your own. These can then be inserted in your customer proposals and may help them with their selection. 

Advanced Editing Features

Updating and editing prices is one of the challenges of managing a pricebook — specifically when electrical companies undergo price changes that need to be reflected in hundreds or thousands of jobs. In a spreadsheet, physical book, or even standard software-based pricebooks, these edits have to be done manually for each job, which is extremely tedious. 

In contrast, editing a pricebook in ServiceTitan is efficient. We let contractors:

• Bulk edit: Apply bulk edits and markups to multiple services, materials, or equipment across your entire pricebook or to select groups or categories.

• Individually edit: Edit individual services or pricebook items manually, including as many or as few details as you want.

• Create Dynamic Price automations: ServiceTitan’s Dynamic Pricing feature lets you set up rules that automatically update your pricing when material costs and labor rates change.

Electricians can easily adjust any individual service or item (for example, a light switch or circuit breaker) for single jobs, or use global edits to automatically implement changes across their entire pricebook, such as discount or labor rate changes. This saves a huge amount of time. 

And because ServiceTitan’s pricebook is integrated with the rest of your software, changes you make to your pricebook automatically extend to all other relevant applications, like purchase orders and invoices, and to your accounting software (such as QuickBooks or Intacct).

Updates are made across the platform in real-time so any estimates or proposals that are created will automatically reflect the most up-to-date pricing, preventing delays from the time lag of onerous pricing updates.

Link to Supplier Catalogs via Pricebook Connect

ServiceTitan integrates with specific suppliers so that you can automatically keep your materials and equipment prices updated through Pricebook Connect. Supplier catalogs are linked to your pricebook so you can be notified of any changes to their prices, product description and images, or you can choose to have the changes made to your pricebook automatically. 

Pricebook Connect also notifies you of any upgrades or recommendations that sell well for the specific electrical services you offer. As well as safeguarding your margins and profitability, you can keep on top of the latest products and opportunities to sell higher-ticket products as they become available. 

Keeping your pricebook up to date ensures your estimates are accurate so you don’t inadvertently underbid or have to make revisions later, while keeping pace with new products lets you provide your customers with the latest options and provides upselling opportunities, too.

Additional Functionality with Pricebook Pro

In addition to the features we outlined above, ServiceTitan offers additional functionality with Pricebook Pro — a dynamic pricebook we build and maintain with the guidance of experienced industry experts. Customers who upgrade to Pricebook Pro see an average year-over-year revenue growth of about 13%. 

With Pricebook Pro, all categories and services (including hundreds of ready-made templates) are preset for you and include professional images, descriptions, sold hours, average prices, and more. You insert your labor rate, and the software automatically updates all of your flat-rate prices accordingly.

Pricebook Pro automatically pulls in the most up-to-date product photos, descriptions, and costs, and continues to automatically update that information. This ensures your estimates are accurate and saves hundreds of hours of manual edits and potential errors. 

We also suggest upgrades and other service recommendations that maximize revenue from each sale. 

Price Insights is a new ServiceTitan feature exclusive to Pricebook Pro that helps you bid with even more confidence. It compares your flat-rate price with the average ticket price for that service in your geographical area. 

Note: Pricebook Pro is also available to plumbing, HVAC, drain, and sewer trades. So if you provide services in more than one field, you’ll have access to everything in one pricebook. 

Create Multi-Option Estimates with Ease

ServiceTitan allows you to draw from your pricebook to quickly and easily build accurate and professional proposals that protect (and even increase) your profit margin. 

Good-Better-Best-style proposals can be created (either from scratch or customized from any of our hundreds of templates) for presenting multiple options to customers in the field. The customer will see only the details the technician or business chooses to share in their estimate templates and can click into each option and view further details of the service, including the material images and descriptions we covered above.

In addition, ServiceTitan’s financing feature offers another way to boost sales. This option embeds a financing application in proposals that allows customers to apply for financing in just a few steps. 

Integrate Estimates with Billing and Other Features

In addition to powering a professional, up-to-date, and easy-to-maintain pricebook, ServiceTitan also helps integrate your pricebook with the rest of your operational process, namely estimating, invoicing, and payments. This saves the time it would take to use different software (or processes) and reduces the likelihood of input and transfer errors.

Once the customer has agreed to the estimate, ServiceTitan lets you:

• Generate electronic purchase orders

• Order equipment and materials

• Schedule and dispatch the work order

• Produce the electrical invoice, send it via email to the customer, and automatically file it electronically

• Accept check or credit card payments on the spot via mobile or through the ServiceTitan portal, speeding up cash flow and reducing the need for follow-up calls

• Integrate directly with accounting tools such as Intacct and QuickBooks so you don't have to change your current workflow.

Connect Your Pricebook to Data Reporting

ServiceTitan also directly connects your pricebook to reporting. The software lets you track the key components of your business, such as every job, technician and CSR, as well as every marketing campaign.

With our technician scorecard, you can stay up-to-date on every tech’s stats, such as, number of calls per day, estimates closed, generated revenue, memberships sold, and more. Likewise, our CSR scorecard lets you monitor metrics for your customer service team, such as number of calls handled, conversions, etc. 

Setting up your electrical contractor pricebook so that it directly feeds your reporting means you can dig deep into your metrics to see what’s driving revenue and where there’s room for improvement.

Compiling an electrical contractor pricebook that’s easy for your technicians to understand and execute is critical for them to be able to create and close estimates and proposals for your electrical business. ServiceTitan allows you to use flat-rate pricing to set up a dynamic flat-rate pricebook that lets you and your team build accurate estimates that bring in profit and seamlessly connect to your other business processes in your workflow.

Finally, here’s our quick guide on how to price an electrical job. 

Quick Guide on How to Price an Electrical Job

To set electrical prices accurately, we recommend electrical contractors follow a four-pronged approach:

1. Work out your company's operating costs

2. Visit the customer's home or business to determine the exact job scope

3. Specify materials and quantities needed 

4. Calculate labor costs

You can learn more from our full guide here.