ElectricalBossPro Blog — Estimates & Quotes

Pricing Your Own Electrical Services Before You Build the First Estimate

Software can add up line items, apply sales tax and send a clean quote. It cannot tell you what your work is worth. That decision belongs to you, and it is worth making on purpose before you load your first service into an estimate. This guide is not a price sheet. It is a way to think through your own numbers so the estimates you send actually pay for the business behind them.

Where Prices Live in ElectricalBossPro

The list itself is covered in Building Electrical Estimates From Your Own Service List. Each service on that list carries a price you set, and every estimate, job and invoice uses it. ElectricalBossPro does not supply prices or suggest them. The examples in this guide are only examples, and your market may look nothing like them.

Know What an Hour Really Costs You

Before you can price a GFCI replacement, you need to know what an hour of a van on the road costs you. That is more than the tech's wage. It includes the van payment, fuel, insurance, tools, phones, the office person answering calls, and the software you run the business on. Add those up for a month, divide by the hours your techs actually bill, and you have a floor. Anything priced below that floor loses money no matter how busy you are.

Your accountant can help with the overhead side. The point is to have a real number in your head when you set prices, not the number a competitor quoted your neighbor.

Flat Prices for the Small Stuff

Homeowners like knowing the price before the van arrives, and flat prices for common small jobs make quoting fast. Think through the work you do every week:

• A service call that covers the trip and the first stretch of diagnosis
• Outlet, GFCI and switch replacements
• Breaker replacements
• Ceiling fan and light fixture installs on an existing box
• Smoke detector installs

For each, estimate the typical time on site, including the walk in, the talk with the homeowner and the cleanup, then price it above your hourly floor. A shop might land on a $99 service call and a $165 GFCI replacement. Yours will be whatever your numbers say.

Per-Unit Prices for Work That Scales

Some work grows with the size of the job. Recessed lighting grows with the number of fixtures. Dedicated circuits grow with the number of circuits. Rewires grow with the size of the house. For these, a per-unit price is easier to defend than a lump sum, because the customer can see why eight cans cost more than four.

ElectricalBossPro keeps square feet, fixtures and circuits on each property, so a per-unit service can be priced straight from those measurements. That is worth deciding up front: which services should be per fixture, per circuit or per square foot, and which should stay flat. The rewire case is covered in Pricing a Rewire Per Square Foot From the Square Footage Saved on the Property.

Big Installs: Price the Common Version

Panel upgrades, EV charger installs and generator installs vary from house to house, but most of them fall into a common version. A charger install with the panel in the garage and a short run is different from one with the panel on the far side of a finished basement. Price the common version as a service, and add separate lines for the things that change it, such as extra length, a dedicated circuit or a surge protector.

That keeps the main price stable and makes the extras visible. A homeowner who sees “EV charger install, $1,295” plus an extra line for a longer run understands their quote better than one who sees a single number with no explanation.

Revisit Your Prices Regularly

Set a reminder to review prices a few times a year. Look at the services where you keep editing the price by hand on estimates. If you raise the price of a service by hand on most quotes, the list price is wrong. Look at jobs that ran long. If panel upgrades keep taking longer than you planned, the service needs a new price or a clearer description of what it includes.

When you change a price on the list, the estimates you build from then on use it.

Pricing Is Yours; Quoting Is the Software's Job

Once the numbers are set, the software does the repetitive part: building the estimate, multiplying per-unit prices by the property's measurements, sending it for online approval, following up and turning the yes into a scheduled job. You spend your time on the pricing decisions that matter instead of the arithmetic. For how pricing fits into the full quoting process, see the ElectricalBossPro electrical estimate software page.