Plumbing Material List Template: Free PDF Download

In this post, we share a free plumbing material list template for plumbing contractors and project managers to track and manage their materials throughout a service or construction project. The spreadsheet template is set up to track material statuses, vendors, unit prices, quantities, pricing, and more.

We’ll provide a link below to download the template and use it in your plumbing business.  

However, while this template has some benefits, such as providing organization and a central document for tracking project materials, spreadsheet templates have some key limitations. Specifically:

• Creating and maintaining material lists inside a spreadsheet is a highly manual, time-consuming, and error-prone effort, requiring you to manually enter and update each line item repeatedly throughout a project.

• Spreadsheet templates lack integration with the other platforms you use for tracking materials such as your inventory management system. 

• There’s no connection between the industry supplier catalogs you use or the pricebook you maintain, which can lead to pricing inaccuracies that diminish profit margins.

So, in addition to sharing the free material list template below, we’ll also walk through how our plumbing contractor software, ServiceTitan, solves these challenges and more.

Below, we cover:

• How to download and use our plumbing material list template

• ServiceTitan features for tracking and managing plumbing materials

  • Built-in pricebook system with direct connection to top industry supplier catalogs

  • Integrated project material tracking and purchase order management

  • Track company-wide inventory with ServiceTitan inventory management

Want to see how ServiceTitan’s plumbing business software can give you the tools you need to streamline operations and grow your business? Schedule a call for a free product tour.

How to Download and Use Our Plumbing Material List Template

Note: If you need these numbers accessible from more than one team member in real-time, you can also convert this from Excel to Google Sheets.

The template allows you to list each material item that is required for a plumbing project and provides the following fields for tracking and managing them:

• Material ID

• Material Description

• Category

• Size/Dimensions

• Unit of Measure

• Quantity Required

• Quantity in Stock

• Quantity to Order

• Vendor

• Vendor Part Number

• Unit Price

• Total Price

• Date Ordered

• Expected Delivery Date

• Actual Delivery Date

• Status

• Notes

The template can be customized to include additional information such as your plumbing company name, project name, etc. However, as we pointed out above, the downsides of relying on a spreadsheet template are the manual effort required to maintain them and the lack of integration with the systems you use for pricing, inventory, project management, purchase orders, and more.

Holistic plumbing contractor software like ServiceTitan brings all of these job functions into a single platform and uses automation to streamline these workflows. The result is a reduction of administrative overhead, assurance of accurate pricing, and improved profit margins.

In the next section, we’ll walk through our pricing, project material tracking, and inventory management systems to demonstrate how it all works.

ServiceTitan Features for Tracking and Managing Plumbing Materials

Built-In Pricebook System with Direct Connection to Top Industry Supplier Catalogs

ServiceTitan users can set up their pricebook using one of three basic approaches:

1. Plumbing contractors can upload a pricebook that they’re already using. For example, if you currently use a price list spreadsheet to manage your pricing, you could upload and use that pricing as a starting point within ServiceTitan. 

2. Alternatively, users can create a brand new pricebook from the ground up. Our interface makes it easy to do, and for small businesses, this can be a practical option. 

3. Finally, plumbing contractors can opt for ServiceTitan’s Pricebook Pro catalog. Pricebook Pro is an upgrade product that offers a pre-built, continually managed flat-rate pricebook (more on this below). 

Organize Pricebooks for Easy Navigation

Plumbing business owners can organize their pricebook into categories to make locating items and services as easy and efficient as possible. 

To save time — and avoid sifting through long lists and catalogs — many of our users arrange their pricebooks by business units and verticals, as shown in the screenshot below.

For example, if they offer electrical or HVAC services in addition to plumbing services, they can create separate categories for their electrical flat rate and HVAC flat rate pricebooks. Or they can categorize pricebooks by residential, commercial, and construction, depending on the business divisions they serve.

Keep Prices Up to Date with Pricebook Editing and Automation

To ensure that contractors are pricing their plumbing work for profitability, ServiceTitan’s plumbing pricing app provides an interface that allows contractors and their employees to edit prices and specs on multiple pricebook items simultaneously. 

Specifically, our built-in pricebook features allow for:

• Individual pricebook item editing: The ability to edit any pricebook item or plumbing service as needed, any time, with just a few clicks.

• Bulk editing: The ability to make edits and markups to groups of services, packages, equipment, and/or materials. With a few clicks, changes can even be applied across an entire pricebook. 

• Dynamic pricing automations: The ability to set up rules to auto-update pricing according to customized parameters, such as when certain overhead costs change (e.g. labor rates, materials, etc.).

• Pricebook Connect: With Pricebook Connect, you’ll have direct, cloud-based access to equipment and material costs from top industry-supplier catalogs, with automated updates of item descriptions, product images, and pricing as manufacturers make changes.

Combined, this suite of features makes pricebook management seamless, reduces the time your team needs to spend on manual spreadsheet updates, and ensures that your prices reflect evolving costs — all while protecting your profit margins.

Furthermore, as soon as any updates in your pricebook are made, they’re reflected in real-time on any new quotes that are created in ServiceTitan, whether from the office or the field. 

Leverage Pricebook Pro for Even More Efficient Pricebook Management

While the features we’ve described so far give plumbing businesses significant efficiency improvements in pricebook management, businesses still need to make continuous decisions about which flat-rate services to offer, what to include in service packages, and how to set their flat-rate pricing to hit target profit margins. They also need to continuously monitor pricing updates from vendors and periodically implement those changes. 

To take this burden off of plumbing business owners — and free up staff to spend more time focusing on providing great customer experiences or marketing activities that help grow the business — we offer our Pricebook Pro add-on feature. 

Drawing on decades of experience from industry veterans, Pricebook Pro further streamlines pricebook management in three ways:

• Giving you a well-built plumbing pricebook from the outset, based on industry average prices and best practices, saving you hours of pricebook setup time. (You can add your items and make adjustments to this base pricebook, as your business requires.)

• Keeping on top of price updates. Our team monitors changes in supplier pricing on your behalf and updates prices every month.

• Providing a comprehensive range of pre-designed flat-rate services based on plumbing industry best practices and trends, which keep track of updated prices. 

In combination, Pricebook Pro features help ensure that users can offer their customers cutting-edge plumbing services and products at prices that align with their profitability goals, all while saving plumbing companies innumerable hours on pricebook creation and maintenance. 

It also gives subscribers a host of extras that can be used to increase close rates and average ticket prices: product images and upgrades, recommendations, detailed item descriptions, and more. 

Techs can draw on these and other resources while they’re at job sites to educate customers and give them confidence in their purchase decisions.  

A recent survey of service businesses using Pricebook Pro found that this ServiceTitan add-on boosted their revenue by an average of 13% year-over-year. 

Integrated Project Material Tracking and Purchase Order Management

Material tracking for individual projects—akin to what you would do in the free spreadsheet template shared above—is done in ServiceTitan through project estimates.

The estimate page allows you to begin adding all of the specific tasks, equipment, and materials that will be needed to do the work for a project. Users have the option to draw from pre-built job estimate templates or build estimates from scratch. 

For example, if you have a standardized quote template for a commercial plumbing installation, you can use that as a base and then adjust the fine details accordingly to save you some time during estimate creation.

Tasks, materials, and equipment can all be tagged with color-coded project labels to organize the project details and make everything easy to visualize. 

Once an estimate is complete, it can be printed, emailed, or exported in PDF format and sent to the client. 

Initiate Requisition and Purchase Orders Within Your Estimate

When the estimate is sold, all of the details you’ve set up in the estimate are automatically integrated into the rest of the project management workflow. For example, you can initiate a requisition of equipment and materials right from within your sold estimate.

You simply click “Initiate Requisition” in the top right corner of your estimate and then select the equipment and materials you want to order. 

For example, let’s say at the beginning of a project, you want to start the process of ordering your permits and materials for your plumbing work — you can select those items right from your estimate, which will lead you through a workflow to create the purchase orders you’ll need. 

In the purchase order workflow, the line items are automatically populated from your estimate. You can simply select your vendors and shipping locations for each material to complete your order details. 

Then, you can save that order to create a transaction, and send those purchase orders to your vendors — without ever leaving ServiceTitan. 

Automate Project Tracking and Job Costing

As you move throughout a job — creating purchase orders, logging labor hours, processing change orders, receiving progress payments, and so on — your project summary and expense tables make automatic calculations that take all of your project’s progress into account.

So, instead of constantly needing to update a series of spreadsheets every time labor costs and material costs are incurred, this is done automatically for you in real-time, based on work that’s completed and entered into the system. 

If we continue with our example from above, and you’ve made your initial purchase order of permits and plumbing materials, your project summary table is updated to reflect those expenses:

Furthermore, you can view a more detailed breakdown of your actual costs versus your budgeted construction costs.

This will automatically update as you accumulate expenses from materials, equipment, and labor hours. It will display your margins in dollar and percent form to help you track your job costs and profitability throughout your project. 

You can also access a table breaking down your expenses in further detail:

You can click on any line item and see the exact source of that expense (e.g., which technician logged those hours, or which purchase orders and vendors a given set of materials came from). This allows you to easily check your numbers and feel confident in the sources of your data.

Track Company-Wide Inventory with ServiceTitan Inventory Management

In addition to streamlining the material tracking for individual projects, ServiceTitan inventory management also helps contractors employ automation that helps them track warehouse counts, ensure trucks are always stocked, and generate purchase orders automatically when materials are running low. 

Appointed staff can use a suite of tools to optimize inventory and purchase order management, including:

• Inventory Overview: See big-picture numbers, such as total inventory valuation and total number of items, or drill down into individual inventory items for further detail.

• Replenishment: Easily track equipment and materials in your trucks and warehouse with automatic updates that reflect the number of items needed for replenishment in a given location.

• Purchase Orders: Users can then create and send purchase orders to the appropriate vendors, and track those orders through fulfillment. Inventory data automatically updates to reflect all POs.

• And more: This feature set also includes workflows for managing adjustments, returns, warranty parts tracking, and more. 

In addition, with the introduction of our Inventory App, customers can leverage barcode scanning to automate these processes even more. 

Conclusion: Save Time and Improve Margins with Plumbing Contractor Software

A spreadsheet material list template is better than tracking materials through miscellaneous docs, notes, or purchase orders, but the tools we’ve discussed throughout this post can help streamline workflows and improve profit margins for contractors.

Want a personalized walk-through of the features we’ve discussed throughout this post? Get a free ServiceTitan demo.