Plumbing price book template

This builds the spine of a plumbing price book. It takes your billing rate per hour, your parts markup and your diagnostic fee, and prices three representative tasks, a small one like a cartridge, a medium one like a toilet or a disposal, and a large one like a water heater, from the hours and the parts you enter. The three prices are the anchors every other task in the book is set against, and the page shows how much of each price is labor so the book stays honest when parts prices move.

A price book is a billing rate applied consistently

Every task price in a book is the same arithmetic: hours at the billing rate plus parts at the markup. A book that was set task by task, from memory and from what the last customer would pay, drifts until two similar tasks carry very different prices and the technician cannot explain why. Setting the rate and the markup once, and pricing every task from them, is what makes the book defensible.

The three anchors set the shape of the book

A small, a medium and a large task, priced properly, tell you what every other task should look like: a task with two hours and few parts sits near the medium anchor, a task with a big fixture sits near the large one. Price the anchors first, then the top forty tasks by frequency, then the rest. The page gives you the anchors.

Watch the labor share when parts prices move

A water heater price is mostly parts; a cartridge price is mostly labor. When supply house prices rise, the large tasks move and the small ones barely do. The page shows the labor share of the medium task so you can see which end of the book needs re-pricing when costs change.