How to price flat rate jobs from your real costs

What to get right

• Start from your hourly cost, not the wage. Tech pay plus burden plus overhead, per billable hour. If you use wages alone, every price looks more profitable than it is.
• Use your own task times. How long the job takes your techs, from past tickets. Not a guess, and not another shop’s book.
• Know markup from margin. A 50% markup is a 33% margin. Set prices for the margin you want.
• Check member prices too. The member discount comes out of your margin. Make sure the discounted price still covers your cost.

The prompt

This is the Summarize job costing workflow, word for word. Copy it, fill in the [brackets], and paste it into the AI tool your company uses.

Summarize job costing for these jobs.
Jobs: [job #, type (AC replacement, repipe, panel upgrade), sold price, equipment/material cost, labor hours x loaded rate, permit, subs, financing fee]
Target gross margin: [%]

Table with gross profit and margin per job, flag jobs under target, and give the likely reasons (labor overrun, material, discounting, financing fees). Plain English summary at the end.

Fill it in with the prompt builder → Open the full workflow Bookkeeper / Accounting · saves 45 min per batch

How to use it

1. 1Pull a batch of recently closed jobs with sold price, materials, labor hours and other costs.
2. 2Run the job costing prompt to see the margin per job and which ones came in under target.
3. 3Use the real labor and material numbers in the flat-rate price builder, task by task.
4. 4Update your price book, then tell the team with the pricing update prompt.
5. 5Repeat the job costing check every quarter.