List of the Common and Best HVAC Price Books
By My Service Depot on Friday, February 7, 2020A good HVAC price book ensures error free pricing for your techs and customers.
HVAC price books serve two major purposes; they tell you how much parts will cost when you order them for a repair and how to turn labor and time into a fair flat rate price for your services. Your HVAC business can only benefit from the diligent use of price books because they ensure you don’t low-ball your estimates, a practice that will quickly eat into your bottom line.
Flat rate pricing also ensures your customers won’t get charged an exorbitant hourly fee when a new technician takes his or her time to do a simple job correctly, and that customers won’t underpay for the experience and education that allows a veteran technician to do the same job in 30 minutes flat.
Customers also appreciate that you don’t pull numbers out of thin air in order to create their estimates. As a business owner, accurate and easy-to-use price books will end up saving you money by reducing pricing errors and eliminating fruitless page-flipping and product-hunting. That’s why using proven price books is a smart decision. We’ve listed the best, most common HVAC price books below.
Callahan Roach/Profit Rhino
If you’ve been around the HVAC block a few times, you’ll likely recognize the name Callahan Roach. After all, they created the first flat-rate pricing book for HVAC companies back in the early 90’s. In recent times, Callahan Roach has turned digital and teamed up with Profit Rhino to create a digital HVAC price book. You still get the same high-quality information that you came to expect from the Callahan Roach printed price books, just now in an easy-to-access, easy-to-share, and difficult-to-lose format.
Trade Service HVACR Price Guide
Trade Service has managed to fit over 12,000 common HVACR parts and products into a “compact paperback book” that can easily fit into the glove compartment or front pocket of a tool bag for easy storage. Despite its size, you won’t need a magnifying glass to read the well-organized text. Simple pictures also accompany each listing to ensure you order the right part each and every time. Along with flat-rating pricing, this book lists the value of each part next to a suggested resale price to eliminate any confusion about what’s fair. If your team isn’t quite ready to embrace the digital age, this book is a tried-and-true field companion for no-fuss information.
Manage All Your HVAC Price Books with Smart Service 365
You’ve brought other aspects of your HVAC business into the modern world with specialized apps and software, so why not integrate digital price books too? With Smart Service 365, there’s no need to keep each truck or tech stocked with physical price books, call back to the office, or manually update inventory and purchase orders. When you use Smart Service 365 to browse your price books and make a selection, your inventory sheets are automatically updated and a purchase order is created if the item is out of stock.
This allows you to avoid costly errors in inventory management and prevents pricing mistakes on your invoices and estimates. In addition, the intuitive design makes it easy to browse products with a few taps or clicks, and you can pull up multiple options on your tablet to show images to the customer and talk them through the advantages and disadvantages of each, if needed. Add customized flat-rate pricing to quickly pull up estimates on common repairs.
All of this adds up to create a happy and satisfied customer who is impressed by your professionalism. That’s the kind of customer who is more likely to recommend you to friends and family, leave a positive review, and remember to call you for future HVAC services. In other words, Smart Service 365 can give you a competitive edge and will easily end up paying for itself.