The Trades Pricing Bundle

Twelve tools in one folder, for the price of five. Almost nobody needs twelve trades, and that is not the point: the point is that most trade businesses price two or three kinds of job, and every one of them depends on two numbers almost nobody has worked out.

The first is what an employee actually costs per billable hour. A wage is not a cost, and the Labour Burden Calculator works out the difference: payroll taxes, insurance, benefits, holiday, training and the hours you pay for and cannot invoice. That percentage goes into every other tool here, and getting it right makes all of them more accurate at once.

The second is whether the percentage you add is a markup or a margin. They are not the same number. If you have been adding 30% believing it was your margin, you have really been making 23.1%, on every job, for as long as you have been doing it. The Markup vs Margin Fixer takes a minute and it is free on the site anyway.

Then ten trade calculators: contractor, plumber, electrician, HVAC, roofing, painting, flooring, landscaping, lawn care and mobile detailing. Each is the same engine with the vocabulary and the cost lines of that trade, and each does the thing a calculator does not: it tells you what it thinks you have got wrong. Overhead charged twice, a wage used as a cost, a margin so thin that one return visit turns the job into a loss.

Two of them price repeat work rather than one-off jobs, and they calculate the annual figure from your real season rather than by multiplying a month by twelve. On the same weekly price that is a difference of about forty per cent, and it is how a seasonal business signs a contract it cannot deliver.

Everything opens in a browser. Nothing installs, nothing signs in, nothing needs an internet connection, and there is no subscription. An index page opens first and says which tool to reach for. The readme explains the one extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.