It's now more critical than ever to control your costs and your pricing strategy.

OnCall Air's connected pricing engine keeps your costs on thousands of equipment and accessories automatically updated for products sourced from our partner suppliers.

This means you don't have to manage outdated price books, PDFs, or spreadsheets. You're always working with the latest costs.

But the pricing capability in OnCall Air goes way beyond that!

In this article, we'll look at:

And at the end of the article, we've included some resources and tips on managing pricing in a rapidly changing environment.

OnCall Air's pricing engine keeps your pricing automatically optimized based on your gross margin target (whether you are targeting a profit percentage, dollars, or both).

This means that if your connected supplier changes any of their costs, the proposals you create with OnCall Air will automatically pick up the new cost, and automatically adjust your pricing to keep you on target for your profitability goals.

But what about other fees or surcharges that are not part of the cost of the equipment?

OnCall Air's multiple markup buffers allow you to instantly add an additional markup to cover those costs. You can make small changes to these markups, and fine tune it based on the timing and the market conditions.

The screen below shows where these adjustments can be made.

What's more, using multiple Pricing Profiles helps you to dynamically select which set of adjustments you want to use "on the fly".

Once you have added the buffers, the OnCall Air pricing engine will automatically markup the cost of your full equipment bundle to ensure that your are not absorbing additional costs, like surcharges from your manufacturer or supplier.

This article includes a video walkthrough of our Pricing Engine.

There are multiple ways that OnCall Air helps you view and monitor your costs and pricing. And when prices change quickly, these tools can help you and your team stay nimble and efficient.

First, let's review OnCall Air's automatic snapshot history of proposals.

Making a change to a proposal that you already presented is easy with OnCall Air.

But what if you need to go back in time and see a previous version of the proposal?

Easy!

You may be familiar with OnCall Air's event log, which lets you see when your customers are viewing your proposal -- and which option they looked at.

But this feature also lets you see every time a proposal is edited and then re-presented.

You can click on the previous versions of the proposal, so that you can see how your price may have changed. This offers peace-of-mind to know how a price or other aspects of a proposal may have changed over time.

Now, let's review OnCall Air's Daily Admin Email Reports.

OnCall Air provides daily reports that arrive automatically in your inbox each morning with useful information to run your business.

So instead of clicking around a site and pulling up individual reports, we've put all of the key information at your fingertips, in a couple of easy to read email reports!

A particularly useful report for managing your pricing is the Operations Product Email.

This report will show you the recent cost changes to the connected equipment and accessories that you offer, so you can be aware of what's happening to costs that can impact your sales.

You can read more about the contents of this report, and the daily sales email here (and also a useful personalized performance email for your consultants).

Finally, let's look at OnCall Air's Inspector

Proposals built with OnCall Air are very flexible and can be customized quickly to meet the needs of your customer.

So how do you know exactly how a proposal is being priced?

The Inspector is your window into the details of a Proposal!

At any time or stage in a proposal -- whether you're building it, presented it, or it's been accepted by your customer -- you can pull up the Inspector and see all of the details, including the product costs and the formulas that were applied.

Here's a walkthrough of the inspector.

You may be wondering what happens to existing consultations and proposals when the system adjusts the pricing based on changes to your equipment costs?

Once your consultation is presented to a customer, OnCall Air locks the proposals in a "digital snapshot".

So even if the underlying equipment costs change, that change won't impact existing proposals that you've already presented to your customer.

If you do want to refresh the pricing on a pending proposal, however, you can easily accomplish that by reverting the consultation to draft and re-presenting it.

And because your customer is looking at a digital, interactive proposal, you don't have to worry about outdated Printouts, PDFs, or Word Documents that can easily get stale.

OnCall Air's digital proposal shows only the latest version of your quote to your customer, avoiding errors and confusion!

We think that presenting the value of your service before the price is essential.

OnCall Air gives you unique ways to position your company brand, your unique team advantage, awards, testimonials, or even your virtual business card, right inside the proposal.

You can read more specific tips about this in this article.

And since many customers these days are interested in alternatives to paying for the entire job up front, you can easily present financing so that the customer can see affordable options for the system and any add-ons you are offering.

A popular feature that can automatically show a cash discount when you present financing gives you the best of both worlds, making your proposal more attractive to more customers -- and removing the focus on price.

When your costs increase, whether it's equipment or labor, it's critical to have a strategy for how you incorporate those costs into your business.

And HVAC businesses are not alone in dealing with this problem.

We've scanned the web for some expert advice, and found a few that are worth your time.

Strategic Pricing Video (Youtube link)

The presentation offers thoughtful advice on increasing your prices:

6 Strategies to Combat Inflation (Harvard Business Review article)

This brief article covers useful tips, such as "Differentiate between strategic and nonstrategic spending" and "Unpack the drivers of spending".

Of course, one of our personal favorite tip is to "Automate" your pricing.

12 Pricing Strategies (Intuit Article)

When pricing becomes so central to your business, it's a great time to review and perhaps rethink some of your assumptions about how you set your price.

This article from the makers of QuickBooks walks you through 12 different strategies that can help you gain fresh perspective on price.

We know pricing is a tough subject, and there's often no one silver bullet to make it simple.

But we're confident that the techniques we covered in this article can help you bring some sanity to the ever changing pricing dynamics in the world of HVAC.