ServiceTitan Pricebook Template: What a Clean Pricebook Structure Looks Like
There is no single official template your pricebook has to match. But books that work well in the field share the same basic structure, and books that frustrate technicians almost always break it in the same few places: categories, codes, and the difference between services and materials.
The basic structure
A pricebook has two kinds of rows, and keeping them straight is the foundation:
| Type | What it is | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Service | The work you sell. Has a price, usually labor time, and is what a tech adds to a job. | Drain clearing, capacitor replacement, water heater install |
| Material | A physical part or supply, usually with a cost, that services consume or that gets sold on its own. | 45/5 MFD capacitor, 3/4" ball valve, condensate pump |
Each row needs the same core fields:
- Code — a short, unique identifier. Every item has one, no two items share one.
- Name — written the way a tech searches for it on a phone, in a driveway, in the rain.
- Description — what the customer is getting, in plain language.
- Category — exactly one, spelled exactly one way.
- Cost and price — plain numbers, price higher than cost.
- ID — leave blank for new items when importing. ServiceTitan generates IDs; filling that column in for new items is a common source of import problems.
Categories: few, consistent, predictable
Categories are how a tech navigates. A workable list for a residential HVAC/plumbing shop is usually 6–12 top-level categories — Plumbing, HVAC, Drain, Water Heaters, Electrical, General — not 60. The rules that matter:
- One spelling, forever. "Water Heater," "Water Heaters," and "WH" as three categories means three places a tech has to look. Pick one form and normalize everything to it.
- Categories describe the work, not the person. Categories named after techs, trucks, or "miscellaneous 2023" stop making sense within a year.
- An item lives in one category. A capacitor in both HVAC and Electrical eventually gets two prices — effectively two items, and one of them is wrong.
Codes: short, unique, boring
Codes do not need to be clever. They need to be unique and stable. A simple pattern — a category prefix plus a short name slug, like HVAC-CAPACITOR-455 — is easy to read on an invoice and hard to duplicate by accident. What breaks books is the opposite: blank codes, codes reused for different items, and codes with stray spaces. If an item has no code, give it one before import, not after.
Structural mistakes we see most often
1. Duplicates with slightly different names
"AC Tune-Up," "A/C Tune Up," and "Air Conditioning Tune-Up" at three different prices. Techs pick the one they find first, so your pricing is effectively random. Merge them to a single row, and document every removal.
2. Services and materials mixed together
Parts entered as services (or the reverse) wreck cost reporting, because materials carry cost and services carry labor. If margin reports look wrong, mixed types are a common cause.
3. Money stored as text
Prices like $1,250.00 look fine in a spreadsheet and fail or mis-parse on import. Prices and costs should be plain numbers: 1250.00.
4. Prices at or below cost, hiding in the book
Almost every book of a few hundred items has a handful of rows priced below what the part or labor costs — a cost went up and the price did not. A clean structure makes these rows easy to audit and flag.
5. Dead items left active
Discontinued parts and last year's promotions stay searchable, and sooner or later a tech sells one. A cleanup is the time to review what should still be active.
How clean is your book, in numbers?
When we ran our cleaner over a 60-item sample book, it came back with 52 items: 8 duplicates removed, 20 missing codes generated, and 5 rows flagged for a price at or below cost, or a missing price or cost. Roughly one row in six needing something is typical of books that "basically work."
FAQ
Is there an official ServiceTitan pricebook template I should download?
ServiceTitan provides import formats and category tools inside the platform. What matters more than any single template is consistency: unique codes, one category spelling, services and materials kept separate, plain-number prices, and blank IDs on new items.
How many categories should I have?
For most residential shops, 6–12 top-level categories. If a tech scrolls through dozens, the categories have become a filing cabinet instead of a navigation tool.
Can I fix structure without changing my prices?
Yes, and you should insist on it from anyone who touches your book. Structural cleanup should never silently change a price. Rows with price problems should be flagged for your decision, not "fixed" for you.
See your own book's structure — free
Send us 25 rows of your messiest pricebook and we will clean them free and send back the change report: duplicates, missing codes, rows priced at or below cost. If you like what you see, the full clean (up to 1,000 items, Services and Materials) is a $99 founding service, 48-hour turnaround — and if our clean file will not import, we fix it free or refund you.
Pricebook Clean-Up is an independent service and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ServiceTitan.