STOCKSTART · GUIDE

Keeping a ServiceTitan pricebook current from vendor invoices — without the duplicates.

Supplier prices move every month and new parts arrive every week. If the pricebook doesn't keep up, techs quote from stale costs and the office builds duplicates. Here is a routine that keeps one clean pricebook, run from the invoices you already receive.

Why pricebooks drift

• Costs change silently. The supplier's price on this week's invoice is the real cost; the pricebook still has last spring's.
• New parts get typed by hand. Different people, different naming — "3/4 copper 90", "Copper elbow 3/4in", "ELBOW CU 3/4" — three items for one part.
• Units get mixed. The invoice says a box of 25; the pricebook item is each. Cost per unit is off by 25×.
• One-time cleanups don't stick. A big pricebook cleanup fixes today's list; next week's delivery starts the drift again.

The fix is a routine, not a project: every invoice gets read against the current pricebook before anything is added.

The weekly routine

1. Export the current pricebook from ServiceTitan. Materials (and equipment if you stock it). This export is the source of truth for the week — everything is matched against it.
2. Collect the week's supplier documents. PDF invoices, emailed receipts, photos from the truck, the supply house's spreadsheet. One inbox.
3. Read each line. Part number, description, quantity, unit, unit cost, vendor.
4. Match against the pricebook. Existing item → link it, compare cost. No match → propose a new item. Ambiguous → hold for review.
5. Review the flagged lines (see below). Decide; don't let uncertain lines through.
6. Export the update — new items and cost changes in the layout ServiceTitan's import expects — and import it.
7. Next week, export again. The pricebook you export now already includes what you approved, so the baseline stays current.

Matching rules that keep one item per part

Rule of thumb: a part number match with a matching unit is a link; a description-only match is a suggestion; anything else waits for a person.

What ends up in review

• New item proposals — confirm it is really new and not a naming variant of something you have.
• Cost changes over threshold — accept, or investigate the unit/quantity first.
• Unit mismatches — set the conversion once; it applies next time.
• Duplicates in the invoice batch — the same invoice received twice (email and portal), or the same line photographed twice.
• Unreadable values — OCR on a creased photo is a guess; the source image stays attached so a person can read it.

Invoice quantities are purchases, not stock on hand. Receipts, credits and returns change the picture; don't treat an invoice history as an inventory count.

Importing back into ServiceTitan

• Use your own exported workbook as the template: patch approved changes into it rather than building a new file, so column names, IDs and categories are exactly what ServiceTitan expects.
• Import in small batches the first time and spot-check a few items in the pricebook after each.
• Keep the export you started from and the update you imported for each run — that's your audit trail when someone asks "when did this cost change?"
• Nothing should write to your ServiceTitan tenant automatically; a reviewed file you import yourself is safer than an integration you can't see.

Weekly checklist

• Fresh pricebook export taken before reading any invoice.
• All of the week's supplier documents in the inbox, none read twice.
• Every line matched, proposed or held — none skipped.
• Units converted; cost deltas over threshold reviewed.
• New item proposals checked against near-duplicates.
• Update exported in ServiceTitan's layout and imported.
• Export + update files kept for the run.

Download this checklist as a one-page PDF ↓

Questions people ask

Does ServiceTitan do this itself?

ServiceTitan holds the pricebook and has import/export tools; the work of reading invoices, matching lines and deciding what is new is still on the office. This routine is about making that part fast and consistent.

How accurate is invoice OCR?

Good on clean PDFs, weaker on photos. The point is not perfect reading — it is that uncertain values are shown for review with the source image, rather than silently written into the pricebook.

Can I start with a messy pricebook?

Yes. The first pass builds a clean baseline by matching your invoices against what you have and surfacing the duplicates; after that, weekly runs keep it clean.