The partner who paid the printer bore the whole cost
On a jointly owned site, one partner paid the printing bill from their own pocket and the monthly settlement never paid it back. The fix, and what it 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.
A three-month booking was quoted at one month's price
Proposal totals ignored how long the campaign ran, then a save that touched nothing re-priced a quote the client had already seen. What the formula was missing.
The message to the customer was 5,000 rupees short
The WhatsApp greeting told a customer to bring 18,725 rupees. The screen said 23,725. The gap was the deposit, and it changed with the operator's last click.
Made-to-order quotes gave customers a price but no picture
A fabrication quote told the customer the price and described the item in words. Drawing it in 3D from the figures already on the quote was cheaper than it sounds.
Adding millimetres to an inch-based pricing engine
Every pricing rule assumed inches. The customer wanted to enter millimetres. Converting at the API boundary was the only change that could not corrupt old quotes.
Pricing a product when one part's price depends on its size
Some products are priced from other parts, depending on width. Thirteen of 362 rules needed that, and a nested formula only one person could read.
Quoting a product with 24 features and 62 variants
One made-to-order item had 24 features and 62 variants, so no price list was possible. Pricing each feature once, not each product, made the catalogue workable.
Twelve pricing formulas referenced but never written
What auditing a fabricator's quoting workbook revealed about how bespoke pricing really works, and which parts of it a person was silently holding together.
The quote the new system printed was not our quote
Every figure was right and nobody would send it, because it was not laid out the way customers file a quotation. Three real quotes fixed what a call had missed.
The quote says what to charge, not what you make
Quoting software tells a fabricator the price of a table and nothing about the margin on it. One set of pricing rules, run twice, gives a margin on every feature.
We have every drawing, so why can't it price from them?
A fabricator sent 14 shop drawings expecting the quoting system to read sizes off them. All were stamped not to scale. What a drawing can and cannot tell a quote.
1,081 gaps in the price list, and every quote was right
A readiness screen reported 1,081 missing pricing rules on a catalogue quoting real jobs correctly. About 33 were real, hidden under a warning nobody trusted.
Why your quote is wrong when you change the steel grade
A heavier grade is not just a dearer sheet. Some parts are made differently, so a quoting system that only swaps the rate gets those items wrong.
A pricing engine where the business owns every formula
362 pricing formulas, none of them in the source code. How to evaluate business-authored expressions without eval, and why that boundary matters.
Why made-to-order manufacturers live in Excel
Bespoke manufacturers price in spreadsheets for good reasons. A governed pricing engine keeps the flexibility and removes the drift.