How Surfacely pricing works
Surfacely's pricing model has one golden rule: you enter costs, Surfacely calculates sell. You never store marked-up prices. This means one change to your margin flows through to every future quote — no rebuild, no risk of stale numbers.
All pricing is set in Settings → Business Settings.
The five cost buckets
- Labour — your cost rate per hour in $, plus your margin %
- Materials — 8 built-in categories with cost per L and spread rates in m²/L
- Hire — templates for scaffolding, access equipment, lifts
- Prelims — setup costs (masking, drop sheets, wash-down labour)
- Overheads — your fixed business costs, applied as a % to every job
Each bucket has its own default margin. Surfacely ships with sensible defaults (labour 45%, materials 30%, hire 15%, prelims 15%, overheads 25%) — change them to match your business and you're done.
The sell formula
For every line on a quote:
sell price = cost ÷ (1 − margin ÷ 100)
This math is consistent across every cost bucket. Change your labour margin from 45% to 50% and every new quote reflects it instantly. Past quotes remain unchanged — the rates used on a quote are locked at the moment that quote was sent.
Why it matters: painters who don't have a pricing system quote by gut feel and win some jobs at a loss. Surfacely's pricing system means you can only quote at the margin you've set — your protection against bad days is built into the software.