Stop quoting hourly off the cuff
You already know how to do the work. The hard part is pricing it so it pays — and quoting by the hour punishes your fastest tech, scares the customer with an open-ended meter, and turns every job into a fresh negotiation at the door.
The Flat-Rate Pricing Book for Service Trades is the workbook that fixes that. You build your billable rate once, cost each common task from its parts and book hours, and the workbook turns the two into a clean, rounded menu price you quote with confidence — the same for every customer, every time. It’s for the trades that price by a flat-rate menu: plumbing, electrical, HVAC, appliance repair, and any home-service business that quotes the same jobs again and again.
It all stands on one number — your billable rate
A tech’s wage isn’t what an hour of your business costs. The Billable Rate tab loads the wage with its burden, divides by the hours your techs are actually billable, adds the overhead every billable hour has to carry, and marks the whole thing up to your profit. An illustrative $28 wage becomes about a $127/hr billable rate — the number every task’s labor is priced from. Get it right once, and the whole book is built on solid ground.
Price the whole menu at once
The Price Book Builder is the flagship. One row per task: type its parts cost, your parts markup, and the book hours, and it marks up the parts, prices the labor at your rate, adds them, and rounds the total up to a clean menu number — for every task in the book at once. The worked example’s water heater costs out to an illustrative $1,370 menu price; yours follow the same path. The Task Cost Worksheet helps you cost a task before it goes in the book, and the Trade Task Starter Lists give you a running start with the everyday tasks each trade quotes.
End the markup-vs-margin confusion
The single most expensive mistake in pricing is treating markup as if it were margin — they are never the same number. The Markup & Margin tab clears it up: set the margin you want on parts and it hands you the exact markup to enter (a 30% margin needs a 42.9% markup, not 30%), plus a sliding-scale guide so small parts carry the markup they should.
Hand the customer one clean price
The Service Menu is the customer-facing page. It pulls each task and its menu price from your price book, grouped by trade — your parts cost and markup never show. The customer hears one firm number before the work starts; you know exactly what’s inside it.
Own it — don’t rent it
This is structure you own, sitting between a blank spreadsheet (free, but you build the whole pricing system yourself) and a flat-rate pricing app you rent by the month and can’t take with you. It’s a workbook you keep — your price book, your file, in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice. And if the day comes when a spreadsheet can’t keep up — crews, dispatch, parts across trucks — your priced tasks flow straight into Ardent Seller, the optional living version, where they become quotes and tracked jobs with their real costs and margin. Start with the workbook; reach for Seller only when you outgrow it.
What you get
A six-tab workbook (Excel + Google Sheets + LibreOffice), a one-click native Google Sheets copy, and four PDF guides — a Start Here guide, a pricing method guide, trade task starter lists, and printable field sheets for the truck — yours to use in your own business. A business reference, not licensed accounting, legal, or tax advice — every figure in the examples is illustrative; wages, parts costs, and book hours are yours to enter, and licensing, permits, and code are yours to verify for your trade. Instant digital download; nothing ships.
Try the free version first
Not ready to buy? The free Flat-Rate Task Calculator is a mini version of this workbook — it prices a single task from your billable rate, a part, and the markup — so you can try the method before you build the whole book.
