Housecall Pro price book template

What a Housecall Pro price book template actually is

A price book template is just a CSV whose header row matches the fields Housecall Pro’s import wizard expects. There’s no proprietary file type and no API involved — CSV import and export work on every HCP plan. Here are the service columns and what each one does for you.

Materials use the same columns minus Industry, plus a markup flag that lets HCP calculate the sell price for you. Because materials need their own structure, they’re usually a separate file from your services.

Making the template yours

A template you import unchanged is a template that prices your jobs at someone else’s cost structure. Three edits do most of the work:

• Set your real labor rate. Not what you wish you charged, and not what the shop down the road charges — your wages plus taxes plus shop costs divided by the hours you actually bill.
• Update the costs. Parts prices moved since we generated these. Your supplier invoices are the source of truth, and every price in the book is only as good as the cost under it.
• Delete what you don’t sell. A 30-task book your techs use beats a 60-task book they scroll past.

If re-pricing every row by hand sounds like a lost Saturday, upload the template (or your own export) to the free Margin Leak Finder. Enter your labor rate, overhead, and target margin, and it flags every line priced under target and hands back a corrected, import-ready file. It runs entirely in your browser — your pricing never gets uploaded anywhere.

Then import it

Save as CSV rather than XLSX, keep prices as plain numbers, and leave the header row alone. The full walkthrough, including what the wizard’s result screen is telling you, is in the price book import guide. If rows come back red, the import errors guide covers the specific causes. The rest of the Housecall Pro price book guides cover exporting and bulk price updates.

Why the Cost column is the one to get right

Housecall Pro treats Costas optional, so most shops skip it and lose the ability to answer “did that job make money?” In one real 86-service book we audited, 83 services had no cost recorded at all, the worst item was priced at a -20% gross margin, and the estimated undercharge across the book came to $71,888 a year. None of that was visible from inside the app, because there was nothing to measure against. Fill the column in.

Frequently asked questions

Does Housecall Pro give you a price book template?

Not a populated one. HCP gives you the structure — export your price book and you get a CSV with the right headers — but the rows are yours to write. If your book is empty, that export is essentially a blank header row. That’s the gap these templates fill.

What columns does a Housecall Pro price book template need?

For services: Industry, Category, Name, Price, Cost, Taxable, and unit_of_measure, plus optional Description and Subcategory_1 through Subcategory_N for nesting. Materials use the same set minus Industry. The import wizard lets you correct the header mapping, so having every required column present matters more than exact spelling.

Can I use the HVAC template if I run a plumbing shop?

You can, but you’d be deleting most of it. The task lists are trade-specific — the plumbing template covers drain cleaning, water heaters, and repipes, not condenser coils. Start from your own trade and you keep far more rows.

Do I have to fill in the Cost column?

Housecall Pro doesn’t require it, and skipping it is the main reason shops can’t tell which jobs make money. Every template here ships with costs filled in — leave them in and update them from your supplier invoices.

Will importing a template wipe out my existing price book?

Rows that match existing items typically update them and new rows get added, but the behavior depends on how your file is structured. Export your current book first so you have something to restore from.