Paint wastage allowance
Nobody gets every drop of the tin onto the wall. There's roller loading, the bit left in the tray, cut-pots, drips, and the dregs in the bottom. If you quote the bare coverage figure, you'll always come up short at the paint shop. The wastage allowance fixes that.
What it does
Surfacely takes the bare-coverage paint volume for each surface and adds a buffer on top, so the litres you quote match the litres you'll really go through. The default is 10%: 20 L of bare coverage becomes 22 L quoted.
It only touches paint volume — and therefore your material cost. It doesn't change your labour hours.
Setting it
Open Business Settings → Materials and find Paint wastage allowance. Nudge it up for textured or thirsty substrates and fiddly cut-in work, or down for clean jobs on smooth, sound walls. It applies across every quote from then on (existing saved quotes keep the figure they were priced at).
Why 10% to start: it's a sensible trade default for normal brush-and-roll work. If you keep buying more paint than you quoted, that's your signal to lift it.
A couple of details
- Washdown-only surfaces use no paint, so wastage doesn't apply to them.
- This is the general loss buffer. Spray uses more paint again on top of this, because spraying drops the coverage rate a step — see the spray guide.