Learning to price a job means building up labour, materials and overhead recovery, then adding margin deliberately. The arithmetic trades get wrong, and why busy years still end flat.
To price a job you build the number up rather than guess down from what you think the customer will accept: hours at a charge-out rate that covers more than wages, materials with waste and delivery, a share of the overheads that exist whether or not you win the work, and then a margin you choose. Trades that skip the third element stay busy for years and finish each one wondering where the money went.
The first is treating the wage as the cost of labour. Someone paid for forty hours is rarely productive for forty, and the gap between a wage rate and a true charge-out rate is commonly a third or more once holiday, employer contributions and non-productive hours are counted. The second is recovering overheads as a flat percentage of materials, which silently overprices material-heavy jobs and underprices labour-heavy ones — the pattern behind a business that always seems to win the wrong work.
Price the variations as deliberately as the original job. Most of the lost margin on a project appears in extras agreed verbally on site and invoiced at cost, and the fix is a written instruction before the work, however small.
Ettex Sheets fits this directly: a rate build-up per person, a materials list with waste factors, overhead per hour calculated from last year, and an estimate-versus-actual column filled in at completion. Feeding those actuals back is what turns the next quote from an opinion into a calculation, and it is the same data a job costing exercise needs anyway.
It varies widely by trade and risk, so take the number from your own overheads and target profit rather than from a figure quoted online. What matters more is that margin is added deliberately and defended.
Per productive hour is usually fairer, because overheads are driven by time and capacity rather than by what you spent on materials. Percentage recovery distorts pricing between labour-heavy and material-heavy work.
Quote with a validity period, state which materials are subject to change, and agree in writing how increases are handled before work starts. Absorbing them silently is the most common way a profitable job becomes a break-even one.
Production scheduling software turns orders into a sequence of jobs against real capacity, materials and changeovers. What it must model, and why most schedules fail on the constraint nobody entered.
Job estimating software builds quotes from labour, materials and margin rather than from instinct. What it needs to do, where estimates go wrong, and how to feed actual costs back into the next quote.
Job costing software assigns labour, materials and overhead to each job so margin is visible per job rather than per month. What it must capture, and how to job cost properly before buying anything.