5 ServiceTitan Settings That Are Costing You Money (And How to Fix Them Before Q1)

Business owner holding empty wallet

If you're like most home service business owners we work with, you spent a lot of money getting ServiceTitan set up. Maybe you even brought in a consultant or went through their onboarding program. And now? You're using maybe 30% of what the platform can actually do — and the other 70% is quietly draining revenue from your business.

We've audited hundreds of ServiceTitan accounts over the years, and we see the same problems over and over again. Not because owners are doing anything wrong — but because nobody ever showed them where to look.

With Q1 right around the corner, now is the perfect time to clean this up. Here are the five settings and workflows that are probably costing you the most — and exactly how to fix them.

1. Your Technicians Can Change Pricebook Prices in the Field

This one makes us cringe every time we see it. You spent hours (or paid someone good money) to build out a pricebook with proper margins. And then your techs go out in the field and just... change the prices. Maybe they're trying to "help" the customer. Maybe they're uncomfortable with the numbers. Either way, your margins are getting slashed without you even knowing it.

Here's the thing: ServiceTitan lets you lock this down completely. You can prevent technicians from editing line item prices, and you should. If a customer genuinely needs a discount, that should go through a process — not happen at the kitchen table because your tech felt awkward.

The fix: Go to Settings > Technicians > Edit technician, and make sure "Edit service price" is unchecked. Then set up a proper discount approval workflow so you can actually track when and why discounts are being given.

2. Discounts Are Flying Under the Radar

Speaking of discounts — do you know how much money you gave away last month? Not a rough guess. The actual number.

Most owners we talk to have no idea. Discounts get applied to estimates and invoices without any real tracking, and suddenly you're wondering why your margins dropped from 50% to 35%.

ServiceTitan can track every single discount — but only if you set it up right. You need specific discount types in your pricebook, and you need to train your team to use them instead of just manually adjusting line items. That way, you can run a report at the end of every month and see exactly where the money went.

The fix: Create discount line items in your pricebook for every type of discount you allow (senior discount, military, first-time customer, whatever). Make it policy that those are the only way to give a discount. Then create a build a report filtered for these discounts to review weekly. Need help setting this up? We’re happy to help!

3. You Don't Have a Zero Dollar Ticket Process

A "zero dollar ticket" is exactly what it sounds like — a job that got completed with nothing on the invoice. No diagnostic fee. No service call charge. No estimates created. Nothing.

Sometimes there's a legitimate reason (warranty work, a callback, whatever). But more often? It's a tech who ran the call, forgot to add anything to the invoice, and nobody caught it. Or it's a membership visit where the tune-up got done but nothing got documented.

We recently audited a company that had hundreds of zero dollar invoices in a 90-day period. That's not a small oops — that's a systematic breakdown in the process.

The fix: Someone in your office needs to be reviewing completed jobs daily — before they get exported to your accounting software. If an invoice is empty, it either needs to be corrected or there needs to be documentation explaining why. Build this into your dispatcher's or office manager's daily routine. Don’t have a Zero Dollar Ticket report? We can build one for you.

4. Your Techs Aren't Presenting Options on Every Call

If your technicians are only presenting one option to customers, you're leaving money on the table. Period.

Good-better-best isn't about being pushy. It's about giving customers choices. Some people want the basic fix. Some people want to solve the problem for good. If you only give them one option, you're making that decision for them — and you're probably picking the cheaper one.

ServiceTitan makes it incredibly easy to build and present multiple options on estimates. But if you're not tracking whether your techs are actually doing it, you have no idea if it's happening.

The fix: Set a policy that every estimate needs at least two options. Then monitor the Technician Scorecards to see how many options each tech is presenting on average. If someone's consistently at 1.0, you've got a coaching opportunity.

5. Jobs Aren't Getting Properly Debriefed

When a tech finishes a job, what happens next? If the answer is "they drive to the next call," you've got a problem.

The debrief is where the magic happens. It's when your dispatcher or CSR reviews the job with the tech: Did you collect payment? Any follow-up needed? Parts to order? Callbacks to schedule? Membership to sell?

Without a debrief process, follow-ups fall through the cracks. Parts don't get ordered. Opportunities get lost. And you end up with jobs sitting in "scheduled" or "in progress" status for weeks — which, by the way, means those invoices never made it to your accounting software.

The fix: Implement a mandatory debrief process. Use tags on the dispatch board to track which jobs have been debriefed (a simple checkmark tag works great). Create and run an Incomplete Jobs Report weekly to catch anything that slipped through. And make sure someone owns this process — don't assume it's happening. Don’t have reports like this? We can create them for you.

Get Your ServiceTitan Right Before Q1

None of these fixes are complicated. But they do require someone to actually look at your system, identify what's broken, and put the right processes in place.

If you're heading into Q1 and your ServiceTitan still feels like a mess — or you're just not sure what you don't know — that's exactly the kind of thing we help with. We do full audits of ServiceTitan accounts, and we'll show you exactly where you're losing money and how to fix it.