A lot of service business owners hit the same wall: the work never stops, the crew runs all day, but at month-end the money isn’t there. The problem isn’t too few jobs — it’s that each job makes less than they think, and some lose money without anyone noticing, because the price never covered the real cost.

Pricing by feel, by a number you set two years ago, or by copying what a competitor charges — that’s how you lose money quietly. Here’s how to price on actual cost instead.

Know your true cost per technician-hour first

Before you can price a job, you need to know what one technician-hour actually costs you. Not just the wage you pay the technician — everything. Social security, the vehicle, fuel, tools, the office, the person who answers the phone. Every baht the business spends whether there’s work or not.

Take your total monthly cost and divide it by the hours your technicians actually bill (not the hours you employ them). That’s your real cost per hour, and it’s usually two or three times higher than owners expect. Once you know that number, you stop taking cheap jobs that “still make a little” — because you’ll see they make nothing at all.

Don’t forget the hours you can’t bill

The install job a customer sees is two hours on site. But the real cost is more: travel there and back, the site survey before the quote, the parts run, the phone calls, the paperwork. All of that is time your crew spends that isn’t in the price you charge.

If you price only the two on-site hours when the real total is four, you’re working half the job for free. The fix is to cost the full time and reflect it in the price — whether as a travel charge, a call-out fee, or built into the job rate.

Break out labor, parts, and travel clearly

A quote that lumps everything together — “install with equipment, 8,500 baht” — hurts both sides. The customer can’t negotiate because they don’t know what costs what, and you can’t see where the profit came from.

When you break out labor, parts, and travel, the customer sees what they’re paying for and you see where the margin is. When parts costs rise, you adjust that line without rebuilding the whole price. Itemizing also means that when a customer asks for a discount, you can talk about where there’s room — instead of cutting the whole number and giving away your margin.

Package-price the jobs you do often

Jobs you do frequently with predictable timing — AC cleaning, a standard camera kit, common part swaps — should have a fixed package price you don’t recalculate each time. Package pricing lets you quote fast, makes the decision easy for the customer, and cuts negotiation because it’s a standard rate.

Keep hourly pricing for the repair jobs that genuinely can’t be estimated up front. The more of your work that has a clear package price, the faster your office quotes and the more jobs you close.

Charge for the assessment when you can’t estimate

“AC not cooling” or “camera’s dead” sometimes can’t be quoted over the phone at all — you have to look first. The problem: if you look for free and the customer doesn’t hire you, you’ve lost the time and the fuel.

Charging an assessment or call-out fee is normal, and it filters for serious customers. You can make it creditable against the job if they go ahead. Customers who actually want the repair don’t mind; the ones who just wanted a free number to compare filter themselves out.

Let real work orders tell the truth about price

The best way to know whether your pricing is right is to look at the jobs you’ve already done. If your work orders record the actual time spent and actual parts used, you’ll see which job types you consistently under-estimate and which are more profitable than you thought.

Once that data builds up, pricing stops being a guess and becomes an adjustment based on reality. The jobs that were quietly losing money get caught and re-priced; the profitable ones you take more of. That’s the difference between a service business that grows with money left over and one that grows into working for free. (Pair this with technician utilization — price and billable technician time are the same problem.)

Related feature: see how OnSiteQ’s work orders capture real time and parts per job, so you price from data instead of by feel.

How to Price Field Service Jobs So You Don't Lose Money