Flat rate price book template

What belongs in a flat rate price book

A flat rate book is a list of the jobs you sell with a fixed price on each one, quoted before the work starts. The customer sees a number instead of a running clock, and your tech stops doing pricing math on a driveway. Six fields carry the whole thing:

The math the prices came from

Every price in these templates was built the same way: loaded labor rate times the hours the task actually takes, plus parts at cost, plus overhead, then divided out to hit the target margin. Written as a formula, price = (labor + parts) ÷ (1 − target margin). At a 60% target, a task with $80 of labor and parts prices at $200.

Two inputs decide whether that produces a real price or a wish. Your loaded labor rate has to include payroll taxes, insurance, the truck, and the hours you pay for but don’t bill — most shops are 30 to 50 percent under on this. And the cost has to be current, because the template’s parts costs were right the day the file was generated and not one day longer. To check a single task against your own numbers, the free flat rate price calculator runs the same formula in the browser.

Re-price the whole file at once

Doing that arithmetic 60 times by hand is how a price book project dies on a Saturday. Upload the template — or your existing 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, so your pricing never leaves your machine.

The Cost column is the one worth being stubborn about. Most software treats it as optional, so shops leave it blank and lose the ability to answer whether a job made money. In one real 86-service book we audited, 83 services had no cost recorded, the worst item was priced at a -20% gross margin, and the estimated undercharge came to $71,888 a year from just the 3 items that had cost data, at 12 sales each per year (the item-by-item working). None of it was visible from inside the app, because there was nothing to measure against.

If you’d rather build your own

A template is a shortcut past the blank page, not a substitute for knowing your numbers. The step-by-step build guide walks through pulling your task list from last year’s invoices and setting rates from scratch, and flat rate vs time and materials covers the tradeoff if you’re still deciding. On the import side, the Housecall Pro template guide lists the exact columns HCP’s wizard expects.