Run a price book audit at least once a quarter, and spot-check the costs of your highest-volume and most commodity-sensitive items every month. A price book audit compares the cost, price and margin on every saved item against current supplier invoices and your target margin, then fixes what drifted. Prices that were typed in by hand are the ones most likely to go stale, because they do not move when a cost changes.
What is a price book audit?
A price book audit is a scheduled review of the saved items your team quotes from: services, flat-rate tasks and materials. For each item you confirm four things: the cost is current, the selling price still earns your target gross margin, the description matches the work you actually do, and the item should still be offered at all.
It is different from repricing after one supplier letter. Repricing answers “this cost went up; what should this price become?” Our guide to adjusting prices when material costs rise covers that calculation. An audit answers a broader question: “which of our several hundred prices are wrong today, including the ones nobody has looked at since they were entered?”
Gross margin here means (price − cost) ÷ price. Markup is (price − cost) ÷ cost. They are different numbers; if your team mixes them up, read markup vs margin for contractors before the audit, not during it.
How often should you update your price book?
Update individual costs whenever a supplier changes them, run a light spot-check monthly, and audit the whole book at least quarterly. That rhythm matches what ServiceTitan's panel of pricebook practitioners described in a 2021 webinar recap: check the pricebook at least monthly, update when vendors send changes, and audit the full book quarterly or every six months. Those are practitioner recommendations, not a measured benchmark.
The right interval depends on how fast your inputs move. The table below uses the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index (PPI), which tracks prices that producers receive, not what your supply house charges you. Treat it as a signal of direction and speed, not as your invoice.
| BLS PPI series (not seasonally adjusted) | Aug 2025 index | Aug 2026 index (preliminary) | 12-month change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inputs to construction industries, goods | 328.295 | 357.475 | +8.9% |
| Copper wire and cable | 473.485 | 602.480 | +27.2% |
| Plumbing fixture fittings and trim | 431.266 | 453.198 | +5.1% |
Source: BLS PPI data retrieved October 12, 2026. BLS marks recent months preliminary and revises them for up to four months, so the August 2026 figures may change. The broad construction-goods index rose 9.3% from December 2025 (327.165) to August 2026 alone. A shop whose price book was last reviewed at the start of the year has had eight months of input movement since then.
The practical reading: an electrical shop selling copper-heavy materials has a stronger case for monthly cost checks than a shop whose catalog is mostly labor. The same index can move very differently by product, which is why one blanket percentage is a blunt fix.
Why do manual prices drift when costs rise?
A manual price is a selling price someone typed in, imported, or set with a one-time bulk edit. It stays fixed when the item's cost changes. That is useful when you deliberately chose a price for competitive reasons. It is also the most common way a price book silently loses margin: the cost goes up on the next invoice, the price does not, and nobody sees the difference until job costing catches it.
The following is a worked example, not customer data. It applies each index's 12-month change from the table above to a hypothetical material item's cost while leaving its manual price unchanged. Your actual supplier cost change will differ.
| Example item | Old cost | Manual price | Old margin | New cost | Margin now | Price to restore old margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copper building wire, per roll (+27.24%) | $120.00 | $200.00 | 40.0% | $152.69 | 23.7% | $254.48 |
| Faucet cartridge (+5.09%) | $18.00 | $45.00 | 60.0% | $18.92 | 58.0% | $47.30 |
| Mixed parts kit (+8.89%) | $50.00 | $100.00 | 50.0% | $54.45 | 45.6% | $108.90 |
The formula behind the last column is new cost ÷ (1 − target margin). For the wire: $152.69 ÷ (1 − 0.40) = $254.48. You can check any row with the margin and markup calculator. The cartridge barely moved; the wire lost more than 16 points of margin. An audit that only looks at average change would miss that spread.
Restoring the old margin is a decision, not an obligation. You might absorb part of the increase on a price-sensitive item. The audit's job is to make the trade-off visible.
What should a price book audit check?
Work through these checks in order. Each one finds a different kind of wrong price.
- Stale costs. Pull your last 60–90 days of supplier invoices and compare unit costs on your top-selling items. Compare like units: a 250 ft roll and a 500 ft roll are different items.
- Missing costs. Items with a price and no cost have no margin you can measure. Do not enter $0 just to fill the cell; leave the item flagged until you know the real cost. Our missing-cost audit explains why blank and zero are different states.
- Manual prices on costed items. List every item whose price is fixed but whose cost is known. Recalculate the margin at today's cost, as in the table above, and decide item by item.
- Margin outliers. Sort by gross margin. Anything far below your target is a candidate for repricing; anything far above may be a typo or a cost that was never updated downward. If you mark up by cost range, confirm the bands still fit, using the approach in material markup by cost band.
- Labor assumptions. Flat-rate prices bake in an hourly rate and a time estimate. If your loaded labor rate or typical task time changed, the price is wrong even when materials are current. Job costing results show where time estimates are drifting.
- Dead and duplicate items. Items nobody has sold in a year, or two names for the same task, make technicians pick the wrong line. Retire them deliberately instead of deleting in bulk.
How do you run a quarterly price book audit without losing a week?
Limit the full review to the items that carry the money, and sample the rest. Most shops sell a small share of their catalog most of the time, so start with the top items by revenue or frequency over the last quarter, then the commodity-sensitive materials such as copper wire, refrigerant and fittings.
Take a dated copy of the price book before you change anything. Record the old cost, old price and reason for each change, so a mistake can be found and reversed. Make changes in one batch, review the before-and-after list, and only then send the new prices to your field software.
Existing quotes are a separate decision. In Jobber, for example, changing a saved item updates new line items, not lines already on quotes, jobs or invoices. Decide whether to honor open quotes at the old price, and tell customers about any change to agreement pricing; our guide to raising prices without losing customers covers notice periods.
If you keep the price book in a spreadsheet, these checks are sorts and formulas. A dedicated catalog tool such as Pricebookr keeps cost, price and pricing mode on each item. It labels prices as following a markup schedule or fixed by hand, filters items with no cost data, previews bulk changes before saving, and takes a catalog snapshot first. Pushing reviewed prices to Jobber is a separate step you confirm.
What triggers should start an audit early?
Do not wait for the quarter if one of these happens:
- A supplier or distributor sends a price-change notice on a product line you sell regularly.
- Your loaded labor rate changes: a raise, new hire, benefits renewal or insurance change. See how to calculate labor burden.
- Job costing shows the same task finishing below target margin on several recent jobs.
- You change a markup schedule or target margin, which affects every item that follows it.
- You import or merge a catalog, where costs often arrive blank and prices arrive fixed.
FAQ
How often should a contractor audit their price book?
Audit the full price book at least once a quarter and spot-check high-volume and commodity-sensitive item costs monthly. Update individual costs whenever a supplier notifies you of a change. Shops whose catalogs are heavy in copper wire, refrigerant or other fast-moving materials have a stronger case for monthly cost checks than shops whose prices are mostly labor.
What is the difference between a price book audit and a price increase?
A price increase changes selling prices, often by a set percentage. A price book audit checks whether each item's cost, price, margin and description are still right, and may lead to increases, decreases or retired items. An audit can find a price that is too high because a cost fell, which a blanket increase would make worse.
Why do some prices not change when I update a cost?
Prices that were set by hand, imported, or applied with a one-time bulk edit are usually fixed and do not follow cost. Prices calculated from a markup schedule or per-item markup recalculate when cost changes. During an audit, list fixed prices on items with known costs and recalculate their margin at today's cost before deciding whether to change them.
What gross margin should I use when repricing during an audit?
Use your own target, set from overhead, labor cost and profit goal, not a borrowed benchmark. Price equals cost divided by one minus the target margin, so a $152.69 cost at a 40% target margin needs a $254.48 price. Check each item's result, because restoring every margin is a business decision, not a rule.