A flat-rate price book is just answers written down before the question comes. The capacitor fails at 4pm on a Friday, and instead of doing arithmetic in a hot attic, your tech reads a number off a page. The customer gets a price before work starts. You get a margin you chose in a calm moment instead of one improvised in a driveway.
Big shops buy their books from national vendors. You don't need that — a 1–5 person shop can build a book that covers most of its calls in a few evenings. Here's the process, start to finish.
Step 1: Pick your top repairs
Don't try to price the whole trade. Pull the last 12 months of invoices and list the repairs that actually happened, most frequent first. Residential service runs on repetition — capacitors, contactors, condensate drains, blower motors, igniters, thermostats, refrigerant leaks. Take the top 20. That short list will cover the bulk of your call volume, and it's a book you can finish this month instead of a project that dies in a spreadsheet. If you're still weighing flat rate against T&M at all, start with that comparison first.
Step 2: Cost each repair honestly
Every price in the book is the same three ingredients:
- Parts, with markup — what the part costs you delivered, marked up to cover sourcing, stocking, warranty risk, and returns. Selling parts at cost is a hobby.
- Labor hours × your loaded rate — realistic hours for an average tech on an average day, times a rate that already carries overhead, wage burden, and profit. If you haven't built that rate, do the labor rate math first — a price book on top of a guessed rate is a well-organized way to lose money.
- The job's own friction — drive time, diagnosis, and the trips to the supply house that a real version of this repair includes. Cost the repair as it actually goes, not as it goes when everything is easy.
Be especially honest about hours. The book should price the average job, not your best tech's best day. If the average capacitor call — drive, diagnose, swap, test, invoice — takes 1.5 hours, the book says 1.5, even though the swap itself is 20 minutes. The customer isn't buying the twenty minutes; they're buying the fixed AC.
A price book that quotes for you.
Load your book into Ventoxy and every quote becomes good-better-best options your customer signs on their phone. $79/mo flat, no contract, 14-day free trial — no credit card.
Start 14-day free trialStep 3: Round to clean numbers
The formula will spit out $237.42. Nobody trusts $237.42 — it looks like a machine's number, and it invites the customer to audit it. Round to clean figures: $235, $245, $250. Clean numbers read like a price you stand behind, they're easier for techs to remember and say out loud, and the rounding gives you a small buffer. Round up, not down — you built margin on purpose in step 2; don't donate it at the last step.
Here's what a few book entries look like assembled. These are illustrative round numbers only, using an example $150/hr loaded rate — your parts costs, hours, and rate will differ:
| Repair (example) | Parts w/ markup | Labor | Book price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Run capacitor replacement | $60 | 1.0 hr × $150 | $215 |
| Contactor replacement | $70 | 1.0 hr × $150 | $225 |
| Condensate drain clear + treat | $20 | 1.0 hr × $150 | $175 |
| PSC blower motor replacement | $350 | 2.5 hr × $150 | $735 |
| Thermostat swap (customer unit) | $0 | 1.0 hr × $150 | $155 |
Step 4: Review it quarterly
A price book is perishable. Parts prices move, fuel moves, wages move, and a book that was right in January can be quietly underwater by July. Put a recurring hour on the calendar every quarter:
- Recheck your five biggest parts costs against current supplier prices.
- Compare booked hours against actual hours on last quarter's jobs — fix the entries that consistently run long.
- Rerun your loaded rate if fuel, insurance, or wages moved this quarter.
- Add repairs you quoted ad hoc more than twice — that's the book telling you what's missing.
Put the book where the quotes happen
A binder in the office helps nobody standing in a customer's garage. The book earns its keep at the moment of quoting — which is why it belongs in the tool that builds the quote. In Ventoxy, your price book feeds a good-better-best quote builder: pick the repair, and the customer gets three priced options to compare and e-sign on their phone. And when a quote sits quiet, the AI drafts a follow-up text for you to approve and send — quotes stop dying of silence. Why three options beats one is its own story: good-better-best quotes.
Twenty repairs, honest costs, clean numbers, a quarterly hour of maintenance. That's the whole system — and it's the difference between pricing your work once, well, and re-improvising it in every driveway forever.