How to document the way you price jobs

Document your pricing in four explicit layers: the base rate for each common job type, the modifiers that adjust it (access, difficulty, timing, customer type), the judgment calls only you have been making, and the exceptions that break the rules. Capture it without stopping work — write two or three sentences on how you reached the number every time you quote a job, and turn every pricing question a staff member asks into a written rule. Give one person the explicit job of keeping the document current, and make each edit a thirty-second task, because pricing documentation goes stale faster than anything else; put a "last reviewed" date on it and check it monthly. To make it usable in the field, keep it searchable in plain language so an estimator can get an answer from a phone between stops instead of scrolling a twelve-page PDF.

Pricing is usually the last thing a service-business owner writes down and the first thing a new hire gets wrong. It lives in your head as a feel for the job — a base number, a set of adjustments you make without thinking, and a handful of exceptions you have learned the hard way. This guide is a framework for getting that onto paper in a form your crew can actually use.

The four layers of a price

Almost every job price is built from the same four layers. Documenting pricing means writing down each layer explicitly.

1. The base rate

The starting number before any adjustment. Depending on your trade this is a flat-rate book entry, a fraction-of-truck breakpoint, a menu price, a per-unit rate, or an hourly rate with a minimum. Write down the base for every common job type. If you price from a book, note which book and which version. If you price by volume or time, note the breakpoints and the minimum charge.

2. The modifiers

The adjustments you make to the base for the specifics of this job. These are the ones a new estimator does not know to apply:

• Access — stairs, long carries, tight parking, no elevator, distance from the truck.
• Difficulty — disassembly, heavy items, hazardous or messy conditions, disposal or recycling fees.
• Timing — after-hours, weekend, holiday, same-day, peak season.
• Customer type — member or plan discount, repeat customer, commercial or fleet rate, property-manager turnover rate.

For each modifier, write the amount or the percentage and the condition that triggers it. "Add 50 per flight of stairs." "After-hours multiplier applies to bookings after 5pm and before 7am." Be specific about the boundary — a 5:45pm booking is exactly the case someone will ask about.

3. The judgment calls

The places where the price depends on a decision only you have been making. These are the highest-value thing to document because they are the hardest to guess:

• When to hold firm on an in-person estimate versus honor the phone quote.
• When a repair stops making sense and the visit becomes a replacement quote.
• When to present good-better-best options versus a single number.
• How much latitude a crew lead or a service writer has to discount without calling you.
• When to decline a job entirely.

Write these as "do X when Y, do Z when W." The conditions matter more than the outcome.

4. The exceptions

The specific cases that break the general rules — the items that price on their own regardless of the usual method, the accounts with negotiated terms, the jobs you have decided you no longer take. Keep this as a plain list. It grows over time, and that is fine.

Capturing it without stopping work

You do not need to write the whole thing in one sitting. Two practical methods:

Narrate real quotes. For the next two weeks, every time you price a job, write one or two sentences on how you got the number — the base, what you added, and why. At the end you will have most of your modifier list and several judgment calls, drawn from real jobs rather than from trying to remember them cold.

Answer the questions you get asked. Every pricing question a staff member asks you is a gap in the documentation. Write the answer as a rule, put it in the document, and point them there next time.

Keeping it current

Pricing documentation goes stale faster than anything else — fee schedules change, a supplier changes terms, you adjust a rate. Two things keep it alive:

1. One owner. Someone whose explicit job is to update the pricing document when a rule changes. Without a named owner it decays.
2. Low friction to edit. If updating it means reformatting a spreadsheet, it will not happen the day the rate changes. It needs to be a thirty-second edit.

Put a "last reviewed" date on it and check it monthly. If a rate changed and the document did not, that is the process failing, not the person.

Making it usable in the field

A pricing document that lives in a drawer at the office does not help the estimator standing in a customer's garage. The knowledge has to be reachable from where the quoting actually happens, and searchable in plain language — nobody wants to scroll a twelve-page PDF on a phone between stops.

This is where making it queryable pays off: a crew lead asks "what do we charge for a single hot tub with a 40-foot carry" and gets your answer, pulled from the document you wrote, with the section it came from. Xandite is built for that — a private, isolated workspace per business that ingests your pricing documents and answers your team's questions grounded in them, with citations. In production nothing real is sent to a public AI service. It is an internal tool for your crew, not a customer-facing bot.

Related guides

• How to stop being the bottleneck in your service business — the broader delegation problem this sits inside.
• Is it safe to put your business data into ChatGPT? — why the tool holding your pricing needs to be private.
• Trade-specific pricing detail: junk removal, HVAC, auto repair, plumbing.

To talk through your pricing setup, email the founder directly.