Contract Price-Book & Labor-Rate Applier: Price Every Job by the Contract

The problem this kills

Every customer has their own deal. This account gets a negotiated labor rate, that one is straight time only until 5 p.m., a third has a master service agreement with a fixed parts markup and a holiday multiplier buried in a PDF nobody can find. So when a quote or invoice goes out, someone has to remember which contract applies, pull the right rate card, pick the correct labor category, decide whether the work was straight time, overtime, holiday, or after-hours, and mark up the parts — by hand, under time pressure, across dozens of accounts.

The result is leakage in both directions. You undercharge a contract customer because you applied last year's rate card, or you overcharge them and trigger a dispute, a credit memo, and an awkward call. The negotiated rate lives in one person's head. Expired rate cards keep getting used because nobody flagged them. And when a customer challenges a line, you can't quickly show which contract and which rate produced that number. You don't need a six-figure billing system to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool that prices jobs by the contract, every time. A billing coordinator picks a job and its customer; the tool finds the contract's effective rate card and price book, then prices each labor line by category (journeyman, apprentice, helper, whatever you use) and time class — applying your straight-time, overtime, holiday, and after-hours multipliers automatically. It marks up parts to the contract's terms, totals the quote or invoice, and flags anything it can't price — a missing rate card, an expired contract, a part not in the price book — instead of silently guessing. The coordinator reviews the fully priced lines on one screen, sees exactly which rate card and multiplier produced each number, fixes anything off, and approves. Only then is the document finalized and exported as a clean CSV in the exact columns your accounting or field-service system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your real labor categories and rate names, how your rate cards and price books are structured and where they live, your exact ST/OT/holiday/after-hours rules and multipliers, how a job's hours get classified by time, your parts-markup conventions, and the messy edge cases (mid-contract rate changes, customers with multiple sites on different deals, expired cards, parts not in the book) — and then it tailors the data model, the pricing logic, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through importing your rate cards and price books, the rate-resolution engine, the line-pricing screen with its missing-card flags, the coordinator review-and-approve gate, and the CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no integration to your existing billing software.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This tool decides what customers get charged, so it ships with the controls a billing operation needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's contracts and pricing, a complete audit trail of who priced, re-priced, approved, and exported each document and when, a hard human-approval gate so a quote or invoice is never finalized until a coordinator signs off on the applied rates, and duplicate guards keyed on the customer plus the rate's effective date so the same contract can't be loaded twice and the same job can't be priced and committed twice. Every priced line shows its source — which rate card, which multiplier — so a disputed number can always be traced back to a contract.

Who it's for

Billing coordinators, estimators, and service managers at HVAC, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and facilities-service operations — anyone who turns completed work or a scope into a priced quote or invoice and has to honor different contracts, negotiated rates, and price books across their customer base. If you can describe how your rate cards and multipliers work, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll have your first contract-correct, coordinator-approved quote priced the same afternoon.