Field Service Pricing That Follows Your Rate Card, Not a Template
Pricing is where most field service software quietly simplifies your business. Products tend to assume one model: a flat-rate book, or an hourly rate with materials on top. Real operations run several at once, often on the same job, and the differences are commercially significant.
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Book demoThe pricing models a real operation runs at once
- Flat rate from a price book, where speed is the margin
- Time and materials, where the clock is the margin and it has to be captured honestly
- Fixed-price quoted work, with variations priced separately once the job opens up
- Contract and framework rate cards, agreed per client and often below list
- Call-out bands and after-hours multipliers
- Per-client material mark-ups, which can differ by an order of magnitude
- Warranty and goodwill work priced at zero but costed properly
Why a single pricing model is expensive
When the system can only express one model, the others get approximated. A contract rate is applied by hand and sometimes forgotten. An after-hours job is invoiced at the day rate because the multiplier lives in somebody's head. A warranty visit is recorded as zero revenue and zero cost, so the true cost of warranty work is invisible for as long as anyone cares to look.
Individually each is small. Together they are the difference between the margin you think you have and the one that arrives, and because the errors are systematic rather than random they do not average out.
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Book a demoPricing rules that are yours
Fieldproxy holds pricing as a set of rules rather than a single template — your price book, your contract rates, your bands and multipliers, your mark-up policy. Which one applies is decided by the job, the client and the time, rather than by an engineer remembering. Pricing the work is one half of the job and putting it in front of the client is the other: DocuDeal writes the quote or proposal from your notes and computes every figure from a price list you control.
Things usually fixed elsewhere and yours here:
- Which pricing model applies, and when
- Contract and framework rate cards per client
- Call-out and after-hours bands
- Material mark-up rules
- How variations are priced against a fixed-price job
- How zero-charge work is still costed
Two approaches to the same problem
| A fixed product | A configured platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing models | Usually one, with workarounds | Several, chosen by rule |
| Contract rates | Applied manually | Applied automatically by client |
| After-hours | A note on the invoice | A band the system applies |
| Warranty work | Zero revenue, zero cost | Zero revenue, real cost |
| Best when | One simple pricing model | Contract work, or several models at once |
What you can run on it
- Price books, contract rate cards and client-specific terms
- Flat rate and time-and-materials on the same job
- Quoting with options and variations
- Automatic application of bands and mark-ups
- True job costing including zero-charge work
- Reporting on margin by job, client, contract and engineer
Common questions
Should we price flat rate or time and materials?
Most operations end up doing both, and the useful question is which applies when rather than which is better. Flat rate rewards efficiency and gives the customer certainty; time and materials protects you on work whose scope is genuinely unknown. The systems that cause trouble are the ones that force you to pick one.
How do contract rates get applied?
By rule, based on the client, rather than by an engineer or an office manager remembering. This is the single most common source of quiet revenue leakage in contract-heavy operations.
Can we price the same job two ways?
Yes, and in several trades it is normal — a fixed price for the specified work and time and materials for whatever is found once it opens up. Both are tracked against the same job so the real profitability is visible.
How should warranty and goodwill work be handled?
Priced at zero and costed properly. If the labour and parts are not recorded, the cost of warranty work is invisible, which is how operations end up with a callback rate nobody has ever quantified.
Does it handle after-hours rates?
Yes, as bands applied by the system according to when the work happened, rather than as an adjustment somebody has to remember to make at invoicing.
See it priced your way
Bring your most awkward rate card. If it can be expressed, it can be enforced.
Book a walkthrough