Partnership profit sharing: when one partner pays a bill
A partner who paid a shared bill was never repaid at settlement. How to split shared costs fairly, with a worked example, and what our fix left open.
Topic
Pricing & Quoting
Formula engines, configure-price-quote, and why made-to-order businesses live in Excel.
15 articles
About this topic
Pricing is where the business logic of a made-to-order manufacturer actually lives, and it is almost always in a spreadsheet that one person maintains. That is not incompetence: the spreadsheet can express what the business does, and the software usually cannot. A system that only lets you pick a price from a list has not understood the trade.
So the work here is about giving the formula back to the people who own it — a pricing language the business can read, rates that are dated, a calculation whose working is stored rather than only its answer, and the same expression evaluated twice so that cost and selling price never get mixed. The recurring discovery is that once the working is stored, features nobody had asked for become nearly free.
Billboard rental cost: why a 3-month quote came out wrong
A three-month billboard quote came out at one month's price because the total ignored duration. How to price a multi-month booking, and what we fixed.
Booking confirmation message showed the wrong amount
A WhatsApp greeting told a customer to bring 18,725 rupees when the screen said 23,725. Three faults, one of them the last booking's leftovers.
3D product configurator for made-to-order quotes
Can customers see a 3D picture before accepting a made-to-order quote? Yes, if it is drawn from the quote's own sizes. How ours works and what it leaves out.
Unit conversion in quoting software: inches to mm
Pricing in inches, customer wants millimetres. Keep one unit inside and convert at the edge. The other two designs corrupt old quotes, and how we nearly missed one.
Size based pricing: when a part's price depends on width
How to price a product when one part's price depends on its size. Thirteen of 362 rules needed it; the usual nested IF in one cell was readable by one person.
Configure price quote: pricing a product with 62 variants
How to price a made-to-order product with many variants: price each feature once, not each product. 24 features and 62 variants became workable.
Quoting spreadsheet: twelve pricing formulas never written
What auditing a fabricator's quoting spreadsheet found: twelve formulas referenced but never defined, with a person quietly patching the gaps.
Quotation format wrong? Why a correct quote went unsent
Our new system priced every item right yet nobody would send the quotation. What a professional quotation format needs: grouping, line keys, specification lines.
Job costing: the quote shows price, not your margin
A quote that shows only the price hides your margin. Running the same pricing rules on selling and cost rates gives the profit on every feature of every job.
Takeoff software: can quoting read sizes off drawings?
Can quoting software read sizes off shop drawings? All 14 of ours were stamped not to scale. What a drawing can and cannot tell a quote.
Pricing errors: 1,081 missing prices, every quote right
Our system said 1,081 prices were missing while every quote was correct. About 33 were real. How to tell which price list warnings to trust.
Stainless steel price: why changing grade changes more
Why changing the steel grade changes more than the sheet price in a quote: sometimes only the rate changes, sometimes the calculation does. How to handle both.
Pricing engine where the business owns its formulas
Can a pricing system let the business own its formulas without a developer? 362 formulas live outside the code. What to check before you choose one.
Manufacturing pricing: why made-to-order shops use Excel
Made-to-order manufacturers price in Excel because the rule owner can edit it. What goes wrong with copies and rates, and what a governed engine replaces it with.