Set up your account for project management

Overview

Accurate project management depends on the proper setup of your ServiceTitan account. Before getting started, make sure your business units, job types, payroll settings, and pricebook are configured correctly.

Set up business units

Create business units

ServiceTitan uses business units (BUs) to track and organize different segments of your business. You can assign BUs to pricebook items, jobs, technicians, and more, giving you multiple ways to run business performance reports.

Note: If your business does service and replacement as well as new construction, create separate BUs for each. For example, for your plumbing installations, create Plumbing Install - SR and Plumbing Install - New Construction. The residential new construction workflow calculates some key performance indicators (KPIs) differently from service and replacement KPIs.

For more, see Add and edit business units.

Assign BUs to business unit categories

You can also assign BUs to business unit categories to give you additional ways to report on your business. Job tracking uses categories, trades, and divisions. For example, you can assign all your HVAC-related BUs to the HVAC trade so you can get a broad snapshot of that part of your business. Or, you can create a New Construction division for all your BUs that are involved in residential new construction.

For more, see Use business unit categories.

Create job types

Project management uses job types to create project milestones. For example, a typical new construction project has three main phases: rough in, trim out, and start up. Create a job type for each project phase.

For more, see Set up and use job types.

Set hourly rates

When you add hourly pay for your technicians, you can track labor pay in the Budget vs Actual table for the project.

For more, see Manage technician payroll settings and Performance Pay overview.

Set labor burden rates

When adding burden rates (also known as overhead rates) for your technicians, you can track overhead costs in the project's Budget vs Actual table. A burden rate is the hourly cost of an employee that is used to calculate job costing, which is an estimation of the total cost of a job.

You can configure your burden rate with payroll costs included or excluded. We recommend calculating the burden rate with payroll costs excluded to improve your job costing accuracy, since labor pay captures the cost of labor on an invoice. For more, see Calculate technician burden rates.

Tip: If you're unsure whether your account includes actual payroll costs in job costing, go to any posted invoice and view job costing information.

• If performance pay and labor pay are included, your account is configured to include actual payroll costs.

• If performance pay and labor pay aren't included, please contact Technical Support for details.

Create pricebook service items

You can bill customers for specific milestones using progress billing. To implement progress billing, create a specific pricebook service item you can add to an invoice for that project phase.

Create a separate service item for each phase you want to bill for. For example, create two pricebook service items called, Rough in completion and Trim out completion. For more, see Add services to your pricebook.

Note: You don't need to set the prices for the items. You can enter prices on the billing invoice.

The formula to calculate a job or project's margin is (Total Revenue) - (Total Cost) = Gross Margin. See the table below for a further breakdown:

Want to learn more?

• See Project job costing report template