CHAPTER 1
Setting up for success
Welcome to ServiceTitan’s Commercial Playbook—an aggregation of best practices from across the industry, written purposely for your Commercial business. In this playbook, you’ll learn all the key tips and tricks (what we call “best practices”) needed to take your business to the next level.
SECTION 9 OF 10
Time & Materials Pricing
Many residential contractors use some flavor of flat rate billing, but in the Commercial arena, time and material pricing practices are still very common. They can even be required by certain accounts. As a result, ServiceTitan has a workflow that allows contractors to use a simplified pricebook that charges for time and materials.
There are a couple of ways to do this. One way is to upload all the materials into your pricebook so that when a technician goes into the field, they can pick an item from their pricebook and instantly add it to an invoice. The other way is to simply make a generic service in the pricebook called “Material” and make it customizable in the field. Then the technician can enter the price they need to charge the customer for material.
The first way allows the contractor to have a lot of control around the cost of materials, because they are all in ServiceTitan. But it takes a lot of work on the contractor's part to enter all those materials into ServiceTitan.
The second way is faster and easier to get up and running, but leaves a lot of room for error in the field.
ServiceTitan has a lot of time tracking capability in the field, so charging for time can be done in a couple of ways too.
One way is to simply make a “Labor” service in the pricebook that has the price for one hour of time, then have the technician input the quantity next to it. If the technician had 2.5 hours on the job, they would enter 2.5 in the quantity section on the invoice and ServiceTitan would do the math.
But the process gets more complicated if the contractor sets different labor rates for different types of work, for instance. More detail can be found in the Knowledge Base article below.
It is also possible for a contractor to use a flat rate pricebook in certain situations and a time and material pricebook in others. The contractor can set up one category they could call Flat Rate and one category called Time and Material, with the details differing for each. More information can also be found in the Knowledge Base article below.
https://help.servicetitan.com/Content/Invoicing/time-materials-billing.htm