Pull up your flat-rate book and look at the price you charge to swap a run capacitor. Odds are that number hasn't moved since last winter, maybe longer. The part costs more now, and so does the fuel to get there and the tech turning the screwdriver.
Your flat-rate book is just your menu of fixed repair prices, the sheet every tech quotes from so each truck charges the same thing for the same job. It only works when the numbers behind it are current. Set it once and forget it, and it drifts quietly out of date while the supply house keeps nudging prices up.
By July, when the heat has your phone going nonstop and your trucks are stuck on the Loop all day, you're selling that capacitor job at a winter number and eating the gap on every ticket. Repricing is a short, boring afternoon you do once or twice a year. It pays better than almost anything else sitting on your desk.
What climbs while the book sits still
Costs don't announce themselves. They creep, a few dollars at a time, until the spread between what a repair costs you and what you charge has quietly closed.
Here's what tends to move between repricings:
- Parts. Capacitors, contactors, fan and blower motors, igniters, control boards. Copper line sets and anything with a chip in it have jumped hard in recent years.
- Refrigerant. R-410A pricing swings with the season and the phasedown, and a pound in July isn't a pound in February.
- Labor. What you actually pay a tech, loaded with payroll taxes, insurance, and drive time, not just the hourly wage on the stub.
- The truck roll itself. Fuel, vehicle insurance, and the plain cost of a van sitting in a parking lot while a tech diagnoses.
None of these asks your permission. That's the whole problem: the book stays still while everything under it moves.
Start with what the job costs you today
Before you can set a fair price, you need the real cost of the job as of this week, not as of whenever you last looked.
For each repair, build the number from the ground up:
- Pull the current price on the part from your actual supplier invoice, not a list from two years ago.
- Add your loaded labor rate times the honest hours the job takes, including the half hour of driving nobody logs.
- Add a slice of overhead: the truck, the phone, the office, the insurance.
- Then add your margin on top. That last number is your business, not your break-even.
Do this for your diagnostic fee too. The trip charge is the one line that touches every ticket, and it's usually the most out of date.
Reprice the jobs that pay the bills first
You don't need to redo all four hundred lines in the book. Most of your revenue comes from a short list of repairs you run over and over, and those are the ones worth your attention.
Start with the usual summer suspects:
- Run capacitor, and the common capacitor-plus-contactor combo
- Contactor on its own
- Condenser fan motor and blower motor
- Igniter and flame sensor for the shoulder-season heat calls
- TXV or metering device work
- Refrigerant by the pound
- Compressor replacement, your biggest ticket and your biggest exposure
- The diagnostic or service-call fee
Get those right and you've covered the bulk of what rolls across the counter in a hot week. The long tail of oddball repairs can wait for the next pass.
Flag the ones now underwater
Some lines won't just be thin. They'll be losing money, where the current part cost plus your labor meets or beats the price you're still quoting.
Those are the ones to catch first. A quick way to find them:
- Lay your current cost next to your current price for each common job.
- Mark anything where the gap is under your target margin in yellow.
- Mark anything where cost is at or above price in red. Those you're paying customers to let you work.
Red lines get fixed today. Yellow lines get a decision: raise the price, or accept the thinner margin for a reason you can say out loud.
Push one number to every truck at once
A reprice only helps if every tech is quoting from it. The old failure mode is a printed book in each truck, three different vintages, and a new hire working off a photo of someone's page from last spring.
Keep one source of truth. When you update a price, it should change in one place and show up on every tablet the next time a tech opens the app, with no reprinting and no "which version are you on."
This is where a little automation earns its keep. Software can watch your supplier invoices, flag when a part you buy often has climbed past a threshold, and nudge you that the capacitor line is due for a look. It can line up cost against price across your whole book in seconds and hand you the red and yellow list.
Be clear about the limits, though. No tool knows what your market will bear, what your reputation is worth, or whether you want to be the cheap option or the one that answers at 9 PM. It can tell you a line is underwater. It can't tell you how much to charge. That call is yours, and it should be.
Setting up the plumbing so new numbers land on every tablet at once, and so you get a heads-up when costs drift, is the kind of quiet back-office fix we help Houston shops put in.
Worth doing this week
You don't need a whole system to start. You need an afternoon and this week's invoices.
- Pick your top twenty repairs by how often you run them, and ignore the rest for now.
- Pull the current part cost on each from a recent supplier invoice.
- Rebuild each price from cost, loaded labor, overhead, and margin, and flag every line that's gone red or yellow.
- Push the corrected numbers to every tech's tablet, and confirm the old printed sheets are out of the trucks.
- Put a recurring reminder on the calendar to do this again before next summer, with a shorter check at midseason.
Do it before the first real heat wave, not during it. The afternoon it takes is cheap. A whole summer of capacitor jobs sold at last winter's price is not.