Migrating your price book to Housecall Pro

Why migrations stall at the price book

Moving customers and job history is one thing; the price book is where imports usually break. Your previous tool exported items in its own shape — different column names, an industry field that doesn’t match Housecall Pro’s list, long item names, prices with currency symbols, duplicate codes. Housecall Pro imports a CSV or Excel file and validates every row, so any of those mismatches stops the import.

What Housecall Pro expects

• For services: an Industry, Category, and Name on every row (Price is optional — a blank price becomes $0).
• Industry that matches one of Housecall Pro’s industries exactly.
• Item names of 190 characters or fewer.
• Clean numeric prices (no stray symbols, no negatives), and unique SKUs if you use them.

A clean migration, step by step

1. Export your price book / service catalog from your current system as CSV or Excel.
2. Map its columns to Housecall Pro’s fields (industry, category, name, description, price, cost, taxable, unit, SKU).
3. Fix the mismatches: align industries to HCP’s list, shorten long names, clean prices, de-duplicate SKUs, strip hidden characters from copy-paste.
4. Validate the file before you upload — catch the failing rows on your computer, not in Housecall Pro.
5. Import into Housecall Pro and test with a few rows first.

Common migration mistakes

• Uploading the old system’s export as-is and letting Housecall Pro reject half the rows.
• Keeping the previous tool’s industry/category names instead of matching HCP’s.
• Carrying over invisible characters and inconsistent formatting from years of edits.
• Skipping a small test import, then discovering errors after loading everything.

Do the cleanup before you import

The price book checker reads your export in the browser, flags every row that would fail a Housecall Pro import — unmatched industries, names over 190 characters, bad prices, duplicate SKUs, hidden characters — and gives you a corrected, import-ready CSV. It never uploads your data and never invents values. Starting from scratch instead? Use the price book template, and see the full list of import errors for each specific fix.

FAQ

Can I import my price book from another system into Housecall Pro?

Yes — export it as CSV or Excel and import it into Housecall Pro, matching your columns to HCP's fields. The catch is that the export rarely matches HCP's format, so cleaning it first is what makes the import succeed.

What usually breaks a price-book migration?

Industries that don't match Housecall Pro's list, item names over 190 characters, prices with stray symbols, duplicate SKUs, and invisible characters carried over from the old system. Fix those before uploading.