Most contractors already have a price book. It lives in their head, it changes depending on how the day went, and it cannot be handed to anyone else. Writing it down is the single highest-leverage admin job in a small trade business — and it does not take a weekend.
Start from the jobs you already do
Do not try to price your whole trade. Pull your last twenty invoices and find the repeats. Almost every shop finds that fifteen to twenty line items cover 80% of the work: a water heater swap, a condenser changeout, a panel swap, a service call, a diagnostic fee.
Those repeats are your price book. Everything else can stay custom.
What each entry needs
- A name a customer would recognise — “Replace 40-gal gas water heater,” not “WH-40-G.”
- The unit — each, hour, square, linear foot. Mixing units is how totals go wrong.
- Your price, not your cost — the number that already carries your markup.
- What it includes — haul-off, permit, the first hour of labour. This is the line that prevents arguments later.
What to leave out
Anything you price once a year. Anything where the real cost swings more than 30% job to job. Anything you would have to look up anyway. A price book padded with rarely-used entries stops being a shortcut and becomes another thing to maintain.
Separate the material from the labour
Copper moves. Equipment moves. Your labour rate does not move nearly as fast. If the two are baked into one number, a supplier price rise silently eats your margin on every job until someone notices. Split them, and you only have to update one side.
Keeping it current without a spreadsheet night
Update on contact, not on schedule
Nobody sits down in January to review 60 prices. But when the supply house quotes you a new number on a Tuesday, that is the moment to change the entry — it takes fifteen seconds and it is the only review that ever actually happens.
Review the top ten quarterly
The handful of items you sell weekly deserve four checks a year. The long tail can drift.
Watch what you keep overriding
If you change the same entry on every estimate, the entry is wrong. That is not discipline, it is a signal.
The part most people miss
A price book is also a training tool. The day you put a second person in a van, the difference between a business and a busy person is whether your prices exist outside your head. It is also what lets you take a week off without the quoting stopping.
Where Toolbelt fits
Toolbelt’s Price Book holds your real rates and materials, and the AI prices every draft estimate from them — so the book is not a document you consult, it is the thing doing the quoting. Three free estimates to try it against a job you have already priced by hand.
Pair this with setting your hourly rate and markup vs margin, which together decide every number in the book.