You don't know which jobs made money.
Most shops finish a job and never compare what it cost to what they quoted. So the next quote is the same guess, made with more confidence.
Job costing for shops that quote every part. Built in Italy's precision engineering district — the one that supplies Ferrari, Ducati and Lamborghini.
The calculator is free and works now. The full tool opens this autumn.
Three things every shop owner already knows
You are the bottleneck
Quotes pile up waiting for the one person who can price them. That person is usually you, and usually at night.
Your material prices are old
Updating the sheet takes time, and the time goes to the quote that's due tomorrow.
Nobody checks whether the quote was right
The job ships, the file closes, and the number that would have made the next quote better is never written down.
Your spreadsheet tells you to raise prices when work slows down
Take your fixed costs and divide them by the hours you sold last year. That's what almost every shop does, and it's the number that ruins you.
Sell fewer hours and the same costs land on fewer hours, so your rate goes up, so you lose the next bid, so you sell fewer hours still.
Cooper and Kaplan named it in 1988: the death spiral. The fix isn't complicated. Divide by the capacity you actually have, and put the cost of the idle hours somewhere you can see it — because that isn't the cost of a part. It's a sales problem, and raising prices makes it worse.
Their worst example: a new machine running at 20% of capacity, with all its cost charged to the few hours it ran, comes out five times more expensive than it is. So you stop using it. And then it really is a cost.
What it does
You put in your machines, your real hourly costs and your materials. It gives you what a part actually costs — material, setup, machine minutes, outside treatments, freight — and what to charge for it, with the reason written next to the number.
Every figure opens up, line by line, down to the single setup. Nothing comes from a percentage.
No AI guessing
Run the same job twice and you get the same number twice. Every figure can be opened and checked. Nothing is estimated by a model that can't tell you why.
That isn't a philosophical position. On a shop floor a number nobody can explain is a number nobody will use — and a wrong one costs a job.
Your real shop rate, in two minutes
Free, no account. Put in your fixed costs, the hours you can actually run, and what you charge today. It gives you the rate you should be charging, and the gap between the two in money.
Not «here is a number», and not an example from someone else's shop either. Most shops have never done this math. Do yours — it takes about a minute, and the number is yours.
When it opens
30 days free. No card. The set-up walks you through it: it asks for your numbers one at a time, tells you what it does with each one, and says so when a number you've entered doesn't look like it belongs to a real shop. It won't stop you or overrule you.
Then $199 a month, or $1,990 a year — 2 months free if you pay yearly. More than 15 machines? Email me.
And 30 days after you pay: if it hasn't found you a job you were pricing wrong, email me and I'll refund everything. I won't ask you to prove it. If you say so, I believe you.
I can promise that because the program knows whether you costed real parts, and how far its number was from yours. If it found nothing, it didn't do its job.
The full tool opens to US shops this autumn. The calculator works today and it's free — no account, nothing to install. If you want the rest when it's ready, leave your email and I'll write to you once.
I'd rather tell you it isn't finished than pretend it is.
Email: hello@truepartcost.com