How to create the Ultimate Plumbing Price Book in 2023: A Complete Guide
Knowing how to price your services correctly is one of the most challenging aspects of owning a plumbing business. A plumbing price book template informs consumers about your current installation and repair pricing. The price book would prompt customers to contact your plumbing services. Even if plumbing pricing appears impossible, you can easily set the correct prices with the right tools and processes in place. The issue is that plumbing work is far more complicated than it appears. It has too many variables, like overhead allocation and labor rates, billable and nonbillable hours, membership agreements, and material surcharges.
The long and short of it is that most plumbing contractors who lose money even while their business is booming need to be pricing their services correctly. Finding a suitable pricing model is difficult enough, let alone keeping track of all the details.
The majority of plumbing companies now use flat-rate pricing. Customers prefer flat-rate pricing structures to traditional “time and materials” pricing, and working with predetermined costs makes it easier for your employees to create estimates and proposals.
You may use a free plumbing price book template to generate a master price book that your office staff and field technicians can refer to when preparing estimates and invoices. A plumber pricing manual gives structure and formatting to produce a neat, well-designed list that can be printed or shared digitally among your employees.
We have created a Plumbing Price Book with pictures and a plumbing invoice template that you can download for free.
So, in this article, we will explain how to download and use our free plumbing invoice template and also provide a pricing guide to assist plumbing contractors in avoiding some of the most common pricing mistakes. Thus, ensuring that as they get more business, they can do it as efficiently as possible and get adequately compensated.
How to Access Plumbing Price Book
Fill in the form on the right to request a free template, and check your email.
Here are the detailed steps:
- Click the link in the email to access the Plumbing invoicing template. The invoice template will open in any browser that you use.
- Just put your cursor on the field you want to edit. This way, you can create the invoice for your client.
- Download the invoice after completing the details and send it to your customers.
- We suggest you to Star-Mark the email to create multiple invoices from the template.
- Moreover, you can download and open the pdf into Adobe Acrobat to edit and put your company logo.
- For more guidance, schedule a free call with SmartServ; we shall be happy to assist you.
Calculate your Break-even point
Calculate your break-even point to determine the minimum you must charge to enter a property.
First, total all of your monthly overhead expenses.
You’ll have your overall business monthly overhead expenses once you’ve tallied up all your monthly overhead costs for completing jobs.
Then, multiply these figures to determine your total expected labor costs.
Next, add the previous figures to determine your monthly income requirement (the break-even point).
After totaling all expenditures, you’ll discover your break-even point and the minimum you need to charge to avoid losing money on projects.
Determine suitable project prices
Experienced plumbers must first diagnose the problems and determine what is wrong and what has to be done about it. When plumbers charge by the hour, giving an exact diagnosis may not seem crucial. If a work becomes more complex as it progresses, requiring more time, energy, and materials at higher installation prices than anticipated.
It’s another method to misalign the interests of the homeowner and the contractor, discouraging plumbers from enhancing the quality and efficiency of their job. Plumbers who compete solely on price end up in a race to the bottom. To back up their estimates, contractors require a robust discovery process and a mechanism for estimating pricing based on business specifics.
It would be best if you calculated on-site costs to establish how much to charge for individual projects.
To begin, put up the following data to determine your total project material costs:
- The total cost of parts/equipment per project
- Chemicals' total cost per task
- Expenses for disposal
Make a list of all of the expenditures associated with your project. Then compute your entire project materials cost.
To calculate your overall labor costs, use the estimated hourly rate and number of hours.
You should be able to calculate the overall project labor expenses now.
Set the Right Profit targets
Now that you’ve identified project costs, you must define appropriate profit targets to incorporate into your plumbing price.
- Compute net income
- Calculate your net income and the subsequent profit margins to set achievable profit goals.
- Include profit targets in total service costs
- Input your profit margin numbers in the total cost of your plumbing services to test which targets work best for your plumbing company.
- To stay competitive, compare plumbing pricing to your competition.
- You may guarantee you're remaining inside a suitable cost range by comparing your plumbing pricing to the local competition. You cannot imitate competitors because their expenses and objectives are different. Comparing this pricing, however, provides a primary indicator of whether your prices are reasonable.
Factors to consider while calculating the prices
It might be challenging to track all the components that go into pricing. When plumbers understand what factors must be considered when estimating pricing, the task becomes less intimidating.
To make things easier, we’ve divided the essential factors into many categories:
- Average Hourly Labour Wage
- The most crucial issue for plumbers in setting flat-rate charges is calculating their labor rate correctly. Contractors that get it wrong may find themselves in a bind when their workload increases. Keeping track of unbillable time is critical because it is a cost of doing company and must be factored into pricing. Billable hours will differ significantly depending on how a plumbing firm is structured, where they are situated in the country, and other considerations such as the time technicians spend each year on training, the time they spend driving, attending meetings, and planning.
- Membership Agreement
- Most plumbing businesses now offer homeowners membership or maintenance agreements, with a 10% or 15% discount as a loyalty incentive. However, plumbing contractors frequently apply membership discounts on top of their base charges, effectively eliminating all of the labor that went into determining viable flat-rate pricing in the first place. Plumbers could instead set flat-rate pricing that includes their 10% membership discount. Outside of a membership arrangement, all services should be paid a premium.
- Overhead
- Plumbers must also include overhead in their costs. Salaries, rent, taxes, automobile repairs and tire replacements, marketing, insurance, utilities, and material carrying costs all add up quickly. Many business owners need help with how to allocate overhead properly. Analyzing manufacturing costs accurately allows contractors to calculate the correct price or budget for profit. There are two fundamental approaches to this: as a function of sales and as a function of labor. The preferable choice is to allocate overhead to manual work. This is because the overhead is driven by labor, and some businesses have more significant overhead than others.
Pricing models
- Time and Material Pricing:
In a nutshell, time and materials pricing is when you price a customer for the technician’s time and any additional costs incurred after the project is completed. However, some clients may need help accepting this pricing plan (especially first-timers).
Some plumbing companies bill consumers for work using time and materials pricing since it helps ensure that their jobs are lucrative.
- Plumbing Flat Rate Pricing:
Flat-rate pricing allows contractors to invest in their teams, ensuring they are well-organized, technically skilled, and efficient. Plumbers no longer need to choose the neighborhood in which they work based on the wages they provide. Making sure that all homeowners receive equal treatment. Simultaneously, flat-rate pricing provides customers peace of mind while allowing plumbers flexibility. Homeowners don’t have to worry about watching the clock or keeping track of every lunch break and a trip to the store for parts because they agreed on a price upfront. Standardized pricing, in effect, reduces friction between tech and homeowner during a job, resulting in a low-stress experience for customers.
Why you should use Plumbing Flat-rate pricing
Flat-rate pricing requires a proper investigation of the plumbing project that would result in valid estimates that provide stable billing hours. If a formal examination is not conducted, then plumbers and the contractor may make a loss since they are now committed to their repair cost estimate.
A well-designed discovery system is required for flat-rate pricing. Before providing a cost estimate, plumbers may need shovel work or low-level demolition. The plumber can only offer a solid flat-rate quote after determining what is wrong, how long it will take to fix, and what materials are required.
Many who use a flat-rate pricing model are unsure how to implement a discovery process. They rely on competitors’ cost structures to set their service prices.
The problem is that plumbers who compete solely on price do not stay in the competition. To make flat-rate pricing work, plumbing contractors need an excellent discovery process to back up their estimates and a finely-calibrated method for calculating prices—one based on the specifics of their business rather than what the competition is charging.
Conclusion
When using the flat rate pricing model, use a plumbing price book to explain your services and plumbing pricing to potential customers.
Using a book or digital tool to help customers understand costs is critical. It also keeps you from answering the same plumbing pricing questions daily. A plumbing flat-rate price book should include the following items in your plumbing flat rate book or tool:
- An invoice number, date, and due date
- Billing Location, Service location, and Company address
- Columns to mention services, material service hours
- Option to check and un-check taxation of line items
- Columns for price and the total amount
- Subheads for sub-total, discount, surcharge, sales tax
- Name and Signature field for customer and technician or owner
By using our free download plumbing invoice template and this simple, all-inclusive plumbing price book guide, you’ll be able to maximize profits and achieve your business goals.
You can also find out how easy it would be to streamline your workflow and increase your productivity by tenfolds by using SmartServ, a one-stop solution to all your business problems.
Sign up for a free demo and get started!
