ServiceM8 Pricing Strategies: tiered markup explained

Quick answer: ServiceM8 15 introduces Pricing Strategies, a way to turn a material’s cost price into a sale price automatically. You can use a fixed markup that applies one percentage to everything, or a tiered markup that charges a higher percentage on cheap parts and a lower one on expensive ones. A strategy can be applied during a supplier price list import, set directly on a material, made the default for new materials, or applied in bulk to items you already have. Supplier price lists, supplier quote import and material history have also been reworked in the same update. This is one part of a much bigger release, covered in full in our ServiceM8 15 launch roundup.

The launch video below is cued to the supplier price lists and Pricing Strategies segment (18:28). It is the source for everything in this post.

Why does flat markup under-price small parts?

Materials don’t sit still on price. A supplier reprices a fitting overnight, and if the change doesn’t make it into your job templates and proposal templates, you’re quoting last month’s cost on this month’s job. That alone eats margin.

The other problem is simpler. A single markup percentage applied across the board treats a $10 cable tie pack the same way it treats a $500 pump. The dollar cost of buying, tracking, storing and fitting a small part is roughly the same whether it cost you $10 or $100, but a flat 25% markup on the $10 part only adds $2.50. That barely covers the admin of having it on the van. Meanwhile the same 25% on genuinely expensive gear can price you out of a job. ServiceM8 built Pricing Strategies to fix both ends of that problem at once.

What are ServiceM8’s Pricing Strategies?

A Pricing Strategy is a rule for turning cost price into sale price, so you don’t have to set every sale price by hand and don’t have to guess at a margin that works for every part.

Fixed markup applies one percentage to every material using it. A 25% fixed markup turns a $100 material into $125. Simple, and it’s still there if that’s all you need.

Tiered markup applies different percentages at different cost levels. The strategy shown at the ServiceM8 launch used 100% below $50, 60% from $50, and 35% from $200 upward. Under that strategy, a $25 elbow becomes $50, and a $100 circulation pump becomes $160. The cheap part carries a much higher percentage, the expensive part carries a much lower one, and both end up priced sensibly.

Where do you apply a pricing strategy?

Pricing Strategies aren’t locked to one workflow. You can set one in four places:

• During a supplier price list import. Choose the strategy at setup, and sale prices are calculated from the imported cost prices as they come in.
• Directly on a material, in the new material editor. Pricing fields update instantly as you change the strategy, so you can use Pricing Strategies even if you never import a supplier price list at all.
• As a default for new materials, so anything you add from now on follows the same rule automatically.
• In bulk, by selecting several existing materials in the materials list and applying a strategy to all of them at once.

What’s changed with supplier price lists and quotes?

Supplier price list importing already let you update material prices automatically from a supplier’s CSV and apply a flat markup. In ServiceM8 15, that setup moved and got simpler: you now access supplier price lists directly from materials, and ServiceM8 has streamlined supplier setup and field mapping to cut down the errors that used to stop a price import going through cleanly.

Supplier quote import is new alongside supplier invoice import. Where invoice import has extracted materials from a supplier invoice for a while, ServiceM8 now does the same with supplier quotes, and you can apply the quoted materials to a job individually or as a bundle. ServiceM8 also says it has kept improving the extraction model behind both, so it reads supplier documents correctly more often.

Will my templates update automatically when prices change?

There’s a new preference to keep job templates and proposal templates updated when a material’s price changes. Previously, a template could sit on an old price indefinitely even after the material itself was updated, which is exactly the kind of gap that quietly under-charges a job. Turning this preference on closes that gap without you having to open and re-save every template by hand.

How do you know who changed a material’s price?

From the job diary, click history to see every material added, changed or removed on that job, when it happened, and whether the change came from a staff member or an integration. With staff, technicians and integrations all able to touch the same job, this is the quickest way to work out why a quantity or price on a job doesn’t match what you expected.

What else changed for materials and bundles?

A few smaller changes round out the materials update:

• Barcode lookup from the job camera. Point the camera at a material’s barcode and ServiceM8 shows the matching material, price and stock details without leaving the camera.
• Materials and bundles are fully editable in the app. Search materials, view and update their details, and view, create and edit bundles from the field, not just online.
• Bundle images in proposals. Add an image to a bundle and it shows when that bundle appears in a proposal, so a customer choosing between options can see what they’re picking. For now, bundle images only show in proposals.
• A new materials list view, with custom columns, column sorting, and settings that are remembered next time you open it. You can sort by when a material was last modified or by how many times it’s been used. The same list view upgrade applies to jobs, clients and bundles too.

A worked example: tiered markup on four parts

Here’s the launch’s tiered markup strategy (100% below $50, 60% from $50, 35% from $200 and up) applied to four typical parts on a plumbing or electrical van.

The small parts carry the biggest percentage but the smallest dollar margin. The big-ticket item carries the smallest percentage but the biggest dollar margin. That’s the point of tiering: it spreads your margin across the range instead of applying one number that’s wrong at both ends.

How to set your tiers

This part is Web Blend’s suggestion, not ServiceM8’s. ServiceM8 doesn’t tell you what percentages to use, and the launch example was just that, an example.

A sensible starting point for a plumber or electrician:

• Put your highest percentage on small consumables, cable ties, fittings, screws, tape, the stuff that costs almost nothing but takes a trip to the supplier or a line on the van stock sheet to keep available.
• Put your lowest percentage on big-ticket items, hot water systems, switchboards, pumps, anything where a high percentage would make your quote look expensive next to a competitor’s for no good reason.
• Check the result against your charge-out model, not just against the percentage. Run a few real parts through the strategy and look at the dollar figure it produces, not just the tier it landed in. If a $400 part under a low tier still doesn’t cover its share of overheads, the tier boundary needs moving, not the whole strategy scrapped.

Three tiers is enough for most trade businesses. Adding more rarely earns its complexity.

Need a hand setting this up?

If you’d rather have someone who sets up ServiceM8 for a living configure your pricing strategies and supplier price lists correctly the first time, that’s exactly what a ServiceM8 consultant does.

This post is based on ServiceM8’s 2026 launch livestream, and some details may change as ServiceM8 15 rolls out.