STOCKSTART · GUIDE

Updating a ServiceTitan pricebook by hand.

This is the routine most shops actually run. Here it is written out properly, what it costs in time, and the point where doing it by hand stops being the cheap option.

The manual routine

1. Export the pricebook from ServiceTitan — materials, and equipment if you stock it. This is the baseline you edit; never build the import file from a blank sheet.
2. Open the week's invoices — PDFs, emailed receipts, photos from the truck, the supply house spreadsheet.
3. For each line, find the part in the export. Search the vendor part number first, then the manufacturer number, then the description. This is the step that takes the time.
4. Convert the unit before writing anything — a box of 25 is not an each.
5. Update the cost on items you found; add a row for items you're sure are new.
6. Import the workbook, then open three or four items in the pricebook and check unit, cost and category.

The pre-flight checks that keep an import from failing are in the import checklist.

What it actually costs

The cost scales with invoice lines, not invoices. Twenty lines is a coffee break. Two hundred lines across six suppliers is somebody's afternoon, every week — and it's the searching that eats the time, not the typing. The expensive part isn't the hour. It's the week you skip when you're busy, then the next, and then the pricebook is three months behind and every quote is built on old costs.

When doing it by hand is fine

One or two suppliers, a clean price file they send you, and a pricebook that rarely gains new parts. If that's you, keep your money.

Where it breaks

1. Duplicates. Under time pressure a part gets added as new because the search didn't find it. Six months on there are three versions of the same fitting and no one knows which is current.
2. Units. A box price written into an each item. Every quote using that part is wrong by a factor of 25 until somebody notices — usually on a job that lost money.
3. Skipped weeks. The routine is the first thing dropped in a busy week, and it doesn't catch up on its own.
4. No trail. "When did this cost change, and from which invoice?" has no answer, because the export you edited was overwritten by the next one.