What should you actuallybe charging?

The guided version asks for your real cost structure, your team, and your target margin. Those are numbers you do not want in anyone else's hands. Sending an access link to your email is how we tie a saved session to a verified owner, so you can come back to the same inputs later, see the baseline we captured the first time you reached the diagnosis, and know the session is not shared with anyone who pastes the URL. The short non-gated version at `/calculator` gives you an answer in sixty seconds with no identity attached.

The quick calculator at `/calculator` asks for three numbers: annual overhead, desired margin, and installer count. It returns one figure, the rate you need to charge to cover every cost at that margin. The guided version walks through four steps, takes roughly fifteen numbers, and returns a full diagnosis: break-even rate, charge per hour, monthly target, material profit coverage, cost composition, revenue composition, and two insight cards that describe what that means for the way you price. The guided version is the one to use if you want to see the trade-offs, not just the headline.

It is the percentage of your non-material operating costs that your material margin covers on its own. If your margin on materials is twenty-five percent and the materials revenue is large relative to your operating costs, material profit alone can cover a meaningful chunk of rent, insurance, vehicles, and salaries. The calculator uses that figure to show you two options: charge less on labour and stay competitive, or charge the full rate and pocket the extra. When coverage is below fifteen percent the advantage is small enough that we de-emphasise the competitive card so you do not make a pricing decision on a rounding error.

You enter two inputs that together drive the billable-hours denominator: hours per installer per week (default thirty) and holiday weeks per year (default four). The calculator multiplies those out across your installer headcount to get the annual billable-hour total. We deliberately do not bake in a universal figure because a two-person business in a small town has a very different utilisation pattern than a six-person business doing commercial work in a city. You enter the numbers that match your business, and the answer moves with them.

Not in a true sense, you can add accurate total cost tot the sales person including their commission and the costs will be captured this way.

Yes. On the diagnosis screen there is an Export PDF Summary button that produces a one to two page A4 document containing the three verdict cards, a six-cell metric grid, both insight cards, and a full inputs appendix so your accountant or business partner can reproduce the calculation on their own. The PDF is generated in your browser, so the file never leaves your machine unless you choose to send it. The filename includes the short session identifier and the date, so downloading two versions back to back does not overwrite the first.

The math is exact for the inputs you provide. Every number on the diagnosis screen is computed from the spec formulas with no rounding inside the calculation, so two users with the same inputs will always see the same outputs to the penny. What the calculator cannot do is predict revenue, win rates, utilisation swings, or cost shocks. Treat the charge-per-hour figure as the rate you need to maintain on average across the year to hit your target margin. If you want project-level profitability, overhead allocation, and scenario modelling tied to your real job history, that lives inside the full Specifi platform rather than in this tool.

Every change you make is debounced by four hundred milliseconds and persisted to your session on the server, so closing the browser mid-wizard is safe. Reopening the access link from your email brings you back to the same inputs, at the same step, with the baseline we captured when you first reached the diagnosis still intact. You can reset the whole session from the welcome-back banner if you want to start fresh. Sessions are private to the email they were issued to and are not visible to anyone else at Specifi beyond the support team who manages access requests.