Job pricing calculator
Work out what a job has to cost before you quote it: your real cost per hour, the labour and materials, and the price that leaves the margin you want. Free, and nothing to sign up for.
Price a job
Change any box and the price follows. The example is a one-truck business with one helper.
Price to quote
$409.38
Before tax. You keep $81.88, which is a 25% markup on your cost.
- Your cost per billable hour
- $85.00
- Your time, 2.5 h
- $212.50
- Helpers
- $75.00
- Materials
- $40.00
- Break-even
- $327.50
Anything below $327.50 loses money on this job, however busy the week looks.
Margin is not markup
Margin is the share of the price you keep. Markup is what you add on top of cost. They sound the same and they are not: adding 20% to a $100 cost gives $120, and you keep $20 of $120, which is a 16.7% margin.
To keep 20% you divide cost by 0.8 instead, which gives $125. The calculator does it this way and shows the markup beside it, so the number you quote is the one that leaves what you meant to keep.
Where the numbers come from
Yearly costs are everything you pay whether or not the phone rings, your own wage included. Divide by the hours you actually bill, not the hours you work, and you have the floor under every price. Quoting, driving, fixing equipment and chasing payment all take hours nobody pays for, which is why the floor is higher than most people expect.
The full reasoning is in the guide to pricing a job, with a printable worksheet for the truck.
Checking the guess afterwards
A quote is a guess until the job is done. Compare the hours you priced with the hours the crew actually clocked, once a month, and the pattern shows up fast. Settles does that comparison for you: crews clock in on their phones, every finished job lands on a draft invoice, and each job shows what it made.
Try it with your own jobs
From $79 a month plus $4.95 per employee, cancel any time. Import your clients and be running in an afternoon, with no sales call.
Talk to the person who built it
No sales team, no ticket queue. Petr answers, usually the same business day.