Set one target margin and the spread between your tiers, and every item's prices derive themselves from its cost. Change the strategy and the whole book follows.
One Target, Four Prices
The book carries a target margin — the margin you intend to make — and a spread for each tier relative to it. Standard sits at the target. Cash usually sits below it, finance and premium above, covering the cost of offering those terms.
A preview shows what a hundred-dollar cost sells at across all four tiers, so you can see the shape of your pricing before committing it to a book full of items.
- One target margin drives the whole book.
- Per-tier spreads for cash, finance, and premium.
- Cash can be a negative spread — a discount for paying up front.
- A live preview against a $100 cost.
Pro tip: Set the strategy before you enter a hundred items. Deriving prices from one target is minutes of work; hand-pricing a book and then discovering your margin is wrong is weeks of it.
Markup Rules
Alongside the tier strategy you can define named markup rules — "Overhead 10%", say — that are offered when adding to an estimate. They're optional, and they're named so the line reads as something meaningful rather than an unexplained percentage.
- Named percentage rules, offered at estimate time.
- Entirely optional.
- The name is what the estimate line says.
Margin Versus Markup, Again
The strategy is expressed as a target margin — profit as a share of the sell price — not as a markup on cost. The two are easy to confuse and confusing them is how contractors accidentally price at a loss.
If you're used to thinking in markup, the estimate editor shows you the equivalent as you type, so you can work in whichever you find natural and see the other.
- Strategy is set as margin, not markup.
- A 50% markup on cost is only a 33% margin.
- The editor shows both figures.