Your pricebook is the backbone of everything your techs sell. If it’s a mess, your pricing is inconsistent, your reporting is unreliable, and your techs waste time scrolling through junk they’ll never use. A clean, well-organized pricebook fixes all of that.
This guide walks you through the core structure of a ServiceTitan pricebook, how to organize it, the settings that actually matter, and some common mistakes that trip people up. Whether you’re building from scratch or cleaning up what’s already there, this is the foundation you need to get right before anything else.
Understand the Three Core Entities
Everything in your ServiceTitan pricebook falls into one of three categories: services, materials, and equipment. There’s also a newer fourth category called Other Direct Costs, but for practical purposes it works just like materials. The difference is it lets you track things like subcontractors, permits, and rental equipment separately on your job costing reports.
Services are what your customers see on the invoice. “Replaced 35/5 run capacitor” or “Installed new garbage disposal.” That’s the line item they’re paying for. Materials are the parts your techs use to perform those services. The capacitor itself, the disposal unit, the wax ring, whatever it is. Equipment is the big stuff with serial numbers. Condensers, water heaters, furnaces, full garage doors.
Here’s where it gets useful. You can link materials and equipment to services. So when a tech sells a capacitor replacement, the linked material automatically tracks that they used a 35/5 run cap. That feeds your inventory management and your purchase orders. It also feeds dynamic pricing, which we’ll get to in a minute.
How Dynamic Pricing Keeps You Profitable
If you’re using static pricing, you’re just manually typing in what each service costs. That works until your material costs go up and nobody remembers to update the pricebook. Then you’re losing money on every job and wondering why margins look bad.
Dynamic pricing solves this. You tell ServiceTitan what you pay for a material, how long the service takes, and what formula to use. ServiceTitan calculates the price automatically. When your vendor raises the cost of a part, the price your techs charge adjusts with it. You can also set up pricing levels for things like after-hours rates or tiered service plans.
My recommendation: use dynamic pricing on everything you can. Static pricing has its place for a few edge cases, but for the vast majority of your pricebook, dynamic pricing is the way to go. It’s one of those things that takes a little more effort upfront but saves you from pricing mistakes down the road.
Organize Your Categories (and Keep Them Shallow)
ServiceTitan lets you nest categories and subcategories to organize your pricebook. This is great for keeping things tidy, but people tend to go overboard. The general rule: don’t go more than four categories deep. Every extra level of nesting is one more tap your tech has to make in the field to find what they need.
Think about how your techs actually look for things. If a tech needs to find a capacitor, they shouldn’t have to tap through HVAC > Repairs > Electrical Components > Capacitors > Standard > 35/5. That’s way too deep. HVAC Repairs > Capacitors is enough. Group things the way your team thinks about them, not the way an accountant would organize a spreadsheet.
Also, keep your naming consistent. If some items start with the brand name and others start with the part type, your techs are going to have a hard time searching. Pick a naming convention and stick with it across the entire pricebook.
Set Up Upgrades and Recommendations
This is one of those features that a lot of shops skip during setup and then never go back to. That’s a mistake, because upgrades and recommendations are one of the easiest ways to increase your average ticket.
Upgrades are for situations where you have multiple versions of the same thing at different price points. Think good, better, best. A basic toilet, a mid-range toilet, and a premium toilet. When your tech taps into the basic option, the upgrades show right there. The customer sees the options without the tech having to dig through the pricebook to find them.
Recommendations are different. These are items that are commonly sold alongside something else. If a tech is about to sell a capacitor replacement, you can set it up so a hard start kit automatically pops up as a recommendation. It serves as a reminder to the tech and saves them the step of searching for it separately. Both of these features take some time to configure, but they pay for themselves quickly.
Use Template Pricebook Items Instead of Unlocking Prices
Here’s a scenario every shop runs into. A tech is on a job and needs to sell something that isn’t in the pricebook. Maybe it’s a weird OEM part or a one-off situation. The old workaround was to give techs permission to edit service prices and then create a generic “miscellaneous” item they could customize on the fly.
The problem is that price editing is a global permission. You can’t say “only let them edit this one item.” Once it’s on, they can change the price on anything in the pricebook. That’s a terrible idea for obvious reasons. Your prices are set based on specific formulas and margins. Letting techs adjust them at will kills your profitability tracking.
The better solution is template pricebook items. This is a feature you might need to have support enable, though ServiceTitan has been rolling it out more broadly. It lets you create one editable service, one editable material, and one editable equipment item. Your techs can customize only those items. Everything else stays locked. It’s the right way to handle the “it’s not in the pricebook” problem without blowing a hole in your pricing controls.
One warning though: don’t let template items become a crutch. Every time a tech uses a template item, someone in the office should go back and add that service or material to the pricebook as a proper line item. If template items are getting used every week, that’s a sign your pricebook needs more buildout, not more miscellaneous entries.
Bulk Editing Saves Hours (Use It)
Once your pricebook has a few hundred items, making changes one at a time is painful. ServiceTitan’s bulk editing feature lets you select multiple items and change them all at once. You can update sold hours, prices, photos, material links, descriptions, whatever shows up in the table.
The trick is to use filters first. Say you need to increase sold hours across your entire refrigerant and coil category. Filter for that category, select all, and bump the hours by 0.25 across the board. Done. You can also filter for items with no photos and knock those out in batches.
A couple tips. First, make sure you’re in edit mode. There’s a toggle in the upper right corner, and if you forget to flip it, nothing will work. Second, if you need to adjust prices, you can increase or decrease by a flat dollar amount or a percentage. But if you’re using dynamic pricing like I recommended, you probably won’t need to bulk-edit prices directly since those are calculated from your formula.
One thing you can’t do yet is bulk-create new items. You still have to add each new service, material, or equipment item individually. The bulk tools are strictly for editing what’s already there. For building a pricebook from scratch, the fastest path is usually importing from a spreadsheet, but that process is finicky and you’ll run into export errors if things don’t line up exactly right. My advice: unless you’re an Excel wizard, just build in the UI and save yourself the headache.
Get the Foundation Right First
Everything else in ServiceTitan builds on your pricebook. Your estimates, your invoices, your job costing, your inventory, your reporting. If the pricebook is sloppy, all of that downstream data is sloppy too. Take the time to set it up properly, keep your categories clean, use dynamic pricing, and lock down your tech permissions with template items instead of giving everyone the keys to edit whatever they want.
If this was helpful, the Blue Collar Nerd guide goes much deeper. It covers pricebook setup, dynamic pricing, configurable services, bulk editing, and every other part of ServiceTitan with searchable video lessons built for every role on your team.