Spreadsheet for estimating prices

[Alex Franke]

Hi everyone. In the new issue of Woodworker's Journal, the Shop Talk section has some tips on pricing projects by A.B. Petrow, the author of Marketing Your Woodcraft. In the article, he suggests creating a spreadsheet for quick and easy calculations. Well, computer geek that I am, I went ahead and made a spreadsheet.

Modify values for income, work week, overhead, profit, hours spent, etc (the light yellow boxes). Input the dimensions of all your wood and BF price in the middle. Input prices and quantities of other materials on the right. The bright yellow fields are Workbench Price, Wholesale Price, and Retail Price.

It's an *.xlsx file (new version of Excel, open file format), but I had to ZIP it to attach it.

Let me know what you think!

[catta12]

Darn slick work! I haven't played with it much yet, but on first pass it looks good!

[LarryG]

Alex, can you also make this available in the standard XLS format? I use Excel 2000, and get a screenful of gibberish.

[MikeMcCoy]

Larry - I had to download a converter from Microsoft to get it to open.

[Alex Franke]

Alex, can you also make this available in the standard XLS format? I use Excel 2000, and get a screenful of gibberish.

Sure! Here it is (attached) in 1997-2003 Excel format. Saving it this way may have caused some loss of formating or functionality -- I haven't tested it yet in this format.

Let me know if you like it!

[LarryG]

Thank you, Alex. Looks okay to me, although I obviously have no way of knowing what the 2007 version looks like.

Now the trick is to dig up some buyers for a bunch of $2200 rocking horses ...

[Alex Franke]

Now the trick is to dig up some buyers for a bunch of $2200 rocking horses ...

Yeah, no kidding! I don't think I could ever really do this for a living -- I guess I'm just too slow! But it's nice to see how all the numbers add up.

Plus that middle part acts as a handy board-foot calculator.

BTW, the numbers in the "Income and Rate Settings" sections are essentially the numbers given in the article, either as an example, or as an industry average. (e.g. The author used $75,000 and 4 weeks vacation as an example, and noted that the industry standard retail mark-up was 100%, etc.)

You can change all those values to meet your needs.

[oakchas]

Thanks for the spreadsheet Alex... It seems to give a good Idea of what one should expect for pricing... and even at the workbench price you are paying yourself, no?