Where the margin went
The job shipped on time. The customer paid. Nobody made a mistake you could name. And the profit you planned still didn't show up. This is the habit that finds it - plus the same job, quoted against actual, for you to run yourself.
The same guide, live
Run a real job's numbers through the same math as the guide, score your own shop against the same eight habits, and find the one fix worth making this month. Two minutes, right here in your browser.
Pricing isn't math you do once
Ask a shop owner whether they know what they truly made on each job, and the honest answer is almost always no. "I know we're making money. My accountant's happy. But I couldn't tell you which jobs the profit came from, or what I should have made." If that's you, this page is for you.
The margin rarely disappears dramatically. It goes quietly: the job ships on time, nothing breaks, and the profit still lands short of plan. Most owners treat pricing as math you do once, at the desk, before the job. That's the mistake. The number is only as honest as what you feed it, and what you feed it comes from the jobs you've already built. Pricing isn't a formula. It's a loop that runs through the whole job.
Most shops do step one and stop. The margin leaks out through the other three, too small to see until the bank balance does the costing for them. Here's what that looks like on a real job.
Two trailers. Same shop. Different money.
A custom 14×7 tandem-axle flatbed trailer, hot-dip galvanized, quoted at a 35% margin the honest way: cost ÷ 0.65. Trailer #1 is already filled in below, the way the shop first quoted and built it - clear it out and run your own last job through it instead.
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No single line here is big enough to notice on its own - a few extra hours of fit-up, steel that moved between the quote and the buy, one extra cartage run. That's what a quiet leak looks like.
Trailer #2: same design, different customer. Fifteen minutes reading trailer #1's numbers moved three lines - hours, steel prices, a cartage allowance - and margin kept went from 27% to 34%. Same trailer. Same crew. Same shop rate. The only thing that changed was where the quote started.
Winning work at a lower margin while planning your year on a higher one is how a shop goes broke busy. Priced from the truth, you're choosing your margin instead of discovering it after the invoice.
The six leaks I see in every shop
{{ annualNote }} The leaks are silent. The total isn't.
The eight habits that keep a quote honest
One tap per row. 1 means never happens, 5 means every job without fail. Honest answers only.
The whole loop, four moves
Straight answers
No. Nothing you type into the calculator or the scorecard is stored or sent anywhere. Refresh the page and it's gone.
Word for word: the same job, the same six leaks, the same scorecard. This is the interactive version, built so you can run your own numbers instead of just reading someone else's.
No. It's free and works on its own. If it's useful, the demo is there when you're ready, not before.
Margin is the slice of the price you keep. Markup is what you add to your cost to get there. Keep 35% and you need to add 54% to your cost, not 35%, or you'll quietly undercharge every job.
See it on your own jobs.
Bring a job that came in over budget. We'll show you the real cost and the real margin behind it, live, inside Factory - no slides, no gimmicks.
We don't just build the software. We know the work.
Straight-talking advice on running a sharper, more profitable shop - pricing, people, and the floor. Written for fabricators, by people who've done the work.