If you’re running a home service company big enough to need inventory tracking, you already know the pain. Parts go missing. Trucks aren’t stocked right. Your techs are making supply house runs in the middle of the day. And your accounting team is guessing at what you actually have on hand. ServiceTitan’s inventory module can fix most of that, but only if you set it up correctly. And there’s a lot to get right.
This post walks you through the key decisions, settings, and workflows you need to understand before going live with inventory in ServiceTitan. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This is a big project. But if your company is at the size where it makes sense, the payoff is worth it.
Do You Actually Need Full Inventory?
Before you start flipping settings on, let’s be honest about something. Full inventory in ServiceTitan is really built for enterprise-sized shops. If you’re a smaller operation, the overhead of tracking every part through every warehouse and truck might not make good business sense. The setup is involved, the daily discipline is real, and you need people dedicated to managing it.
ServiceTitan actually has two tiers here. There’s purchasing, which lets you create purchase orders, track vendors, and use the replenishment screen to restock trucks. And then there’s full inventory, which adds real-time quantity tracking, costing methods, serialized items, and warehouse management on top of that. A lot of mid-size companies do just fine with purchasing alone. If you’re not sure which one you need, start with purchasing and add full inventory later once your processes are dialed in.
Getting Your Foundation Right: Warehouses, Trucks, and Vendors
Before you can do anything with inventory, you need three things set up: at least one warehouse, your trucks, and your vendors. Head to Settings > Inventory > Inventory Locations to get started.
Warehouses are exactly what they sound like. If your company has a single location where everything gets shipped, you only need one. But if you have multiple branches or storage locations, each one needs its own warehouse in the system. You’ll assign a contact manager to each warehouse, which is just whoever you want vendors calling when there’s a delivery question.
Trucks get assigned to both a warehouse and a technician. If more than one tech drives the same truck, you can assign multiple technicians to a single truck. This matters because when your techs use materials on jobs, ServiceTitan tracks which truck the materials came from. That’s how the replenishment screen knows what to reorder and for whom.
For vendors, you’ll want to know the difference between integrated vendors and manual vendors. Integrated vendors connect directly to ServiceTitan, so your purchase orders go straight from ServiceTitan into the vendor’s system. You can see real-time pricing and stock levels. Manual vendors just get an emailed PDF or spreadsheet. If your supplier offers full procurement integration, I’d recommend setting that up. It’s a better experience all around. You can check which vendors support full procurement by looking at ServiceTitan’s supply chain integrations page under Settings > Integrations > Vendor Integration Settings.
Key Inventory Settings You Need to Decide On
Once your locations and vendors are in place, you need to configure your inventory settings under Settings > Inventory > Configuration. There are a few decisions here that matter a lot, so don’t just click through these.
Costing Method: Weighted Average vs. Standard
You’ve got two options. Standard costing uses the primary vendor’s cost from your pricebook, and any cost changes affect all your inventory immediately. Weighted average calculates based on the volume you purchased and the prices you actually paid. My recommendation for most people is weighted average. It gives you a more accurate picture of what your inventory is actually worth, and it smooths out price fluctuations. With standard costing, if a supplier raises the price on a part by $10, your system suddenly acts like every unit you already have costs $10 more. That’s not reality. Weighted average handles that more gracefully.
Serialized Inventory
This lets you track items by individual serial number instead of just quantity. So instead of knowing you have five condensers at the warehouse, you know exactly which five condensers you have, by serial number. That’s useful for warranty registration and tracking specific units to specific job sites. But it’s also a more strict version of inventory tracking. If you’re brand new to inventory, you might want to skip this at first and turn it on later once your team is comfortable with the basics. One thing to know: once you enable serialized inventory, you can’t turn it off. But you don’t have to mark every item as serialized just because the setting is on. You choose which specific items get serialized tracking.
Negative Inventory (Don’t Do It)
There’s a setting to allow inventory quantities to go below zero. I’m going to be pretty direct here: don’t enable this. Negative inventory isn’t a real thing. You can’t have negative three capacitors on a truck. If the system says you do, something went wrong, and you need to fix it when it happens, not later. Enabling negative inventory just kicks the problem down the road to your accounting team, who will then have to deal with export errors and messy numbers. The only reason this setting still exists is because ServiceTitan is hesitant to remove features that some legacy accounts might be using. But for any new setup, leave it off.
Going Live: The Part Most People Underestimate
Your go-live date is the day ServiceTitan starts actually tracking your inventory. Before that date, you can mark items as inventory and load beginning balances, but nothing moves until you flip the switch. The tricky part is that you need to give ServiceTitan an accurate snapshot of what you have on that date, and inventory is a moving target. If you’re big enough to need inventory tracking, you probably have a lot of parts spread across warehouses and trucks. Counting all of it takes time, and there’s going to be drift between when you count and when you actually go live.
Here’s what I’d recommend. Try to do your main warehouse count the weekend before you go live, so that number is as fresh as possible. Your truck counts might be a few days older, and that’s okay. The important thing is to build in a buffer. Talk to your accountant about this, but the general advice is to set aside 10-15% of your total inventory value in an accrual account. So if you count $100,000 in inventory, move about $15,000 into an accrual account as a cushion.
Then, about 30 days after going live, you do a true-up count and use that accrual money to offset any discrepancies. This way, when you inevitably discover that some items were used but not tracked during the transition, the financial hit doesn’t slam a single month’s cost of goods sold. It’s a way of smoothing out the inevitable bumps of any inventory system launch.
Using the Replenishment Screen to Keep Trucks Stocked
Once you’re live, the replenishment screen becomes your weekly routine. The concept is simple: your techs use materials throughout the week, those used materials show up on the replenishment screen, and you generate purchase orders from there to restock their trucks.
Go to Purchasing > Replenishment and set your filters. Usually you’ll pick a date range covering the previous week and filter by materials only. You typically don’t need to replenish equipment on trucks because you’re not keeping three condensers on every van. Group by vendor and location. That creates a separate purchase order per vendor per truck, so when the parts come in, you can hand each tech their own box of stuff and say here’s what you used last week.
The one thing you’ll need to figure out is how to handle consumables, stuff like nitrile gloves or cheap fittings that you’re not tracking individually. One option is to have your techs manually add those items to a job before your weekly cutoff date so they show up on the replenishment screen. The downside is it makes one random job’s costing look a little off. Another option is to just keep those items available on a shelf and handle them outside of ServiceTitan entirely. There’s no perfect answer here, but pick a method and be consistent about it. If you’re planning to eventually move to full inventory, you need your techs used to tracking everything. Once you’re on full inventory, they can’t just grab stuff off the shelf anymore. Nothing can be off-system, or your inventory numbers will never be right.
Take Advantage of ServiceTitan’s Onboarding Help
ServiceTitan offers a white glove onboarding for inventory where you get a dedicated implementation team to walk you through the whole process. It’s not cheap, but if you’re an enterprise-sized shop, it’s doable and I’d recommend springing for it. Inventory has too many variables for a one-size-fits-all approach. You’re going to run into situations that are very specific to your business, and having experts to ask is valuable.
If that’s not in the budget, they also offer a cohort guided implementation. You register, attend an initial webinar, and then get access to inventory office hours, which are scheduled Zoom sessions where you can ask ServiceTitan’s inventory experts your questions in a group setting. That’s usually free or included with certain ServiceTitan packages. At minimum, I’d take advantage of those office hours. Combine that with solid training material and you’ll be in good shape.
Setting up inventory in ServiceTitan is one of the bigger projects you’ll take on in the platform. There’s a lot of settings, a lot of decisions, and a lot of daily discipline required to keep it accurate. But if your company has outgrown the “just grab it from the supply house” phase, getting inventory right means stocked trucks, accurate job costing, and fewer emergency parts runs eating into your day.
If this was useful, the Blue Collar Nerd Ultimate ServiceTitan Guide goes much deeper. There are full video walkthroughs covering every inventory setting, purchasing workflow, replenishment cycle, and vendor integration, plus every other part of ServiceTitan, built for every role on your team. Check it out here.