Material categories and how they drive your quotes
Surfacely groups paint into categories — interior acrylic, interior enamel, roof coating, epoxy floor, and so on. Each category has a cost per L, a spread rate in m²/L, and a default product selection.
Every surface in the library is mapped to a default category. Walls use interior acrylic inside and the exterior paint outside. Doors and windows use interior enamel inside and the exterior trim paint outside. Roofs use roof coating. When you build a quote, Surfacely looks up the right material for each surface automatically.
The 10 built-in categories
You get 10 categories out of the box, matched to the top paint brands in your market. You can customise cost, spread rate, selected product, and default sheen for each. You can also add your own custom categories (premium primer, specialty coating, etc.) and assign them to surfaces.
Exterior paint and exterior trim paint
Outside work uses two categories. The exterior category is your wall paint: weatherboards, render, brick, cladding, soffits and gable ends. The exterior trim category is the gloss or semi-gloss for outside doors and windows, frames included. Fascia, barge boards, gutters, downpipes and posts start on your exterior paint. It is called Exterior trim & doors, or Exterior woodwork & doors in the UK, and starts on a trim enamel from the top brands in your market. Change its product, sheen or cost like any other category, or pick a different paint on any single surface.
Cabinet coating
The Cabinetry surface takes its paint from the cabinet coating category, which is named for your market: 2-pac / Cabinet Coating in Australia and New Zealand, Cabinet Enamel (Urethane) in the US and Canada, and Cabinet Paint / Lacquer in the UK. Set its cost and spread rate like any other category. See Painting cabinets.
Cost per L
Enter the cost you actually pay, not the RRP. Include trade discount. If you buy in different container sizes, enter the blended average across the sizes you typically use — Surfacely handles the buy-size rounding when it calculates litres per job.
Margin
Materials have their own margin % (default 30%). Applied the same way as labour: sell = cost ÷ (1 − margin ÷ 100). You can override this on an individual quote if you need to be more competitive on a specific job.
Why it matters: most painters mark materials up at different percentages by gut feel. By codifying it here, you get consistent margin across every job and every painter in your team. Your business becomes price-discipline-by-default, not price-discipline-by-luck.
Review your material costs every 6 months. Paint prices move. Stale cost numbers are the silent killer of margin — the quote looks right but the actual paint bill has crept up.
→ Go to Pricing & rates → Advanced pricing → Materials