You asked the right question: are we actually making money on each piece? Here is everything you need to answer it yourself, with a working calculator built right into this page. Type your numbers in and it answers you now. Keep it, change it, share it. It is yours.
The situation
When rent, labor, and insurance are your big bills, profit is not about the cost of powder. Those bills land whether the oven runs once or a thousand times. So the whole game comes down to one thing: how much each piece earns above its material cost, multiplied by how many pieces go out the door, set against that wall of fixed cost. The steps below put that on one screen.
How to find out
Enter last year's totals. See exactly where every dollar goes, how many pieces a year just pay the rent, where your break-even line sits, and whether the fix is price or volume. This is the calculator built into this page.
The true cost to coat one piece, including the lines most shops never count: labor minutes, oven energy, rejects, and a slice of overhead. It hands you the lowest price you can quote a job at and still come out ahead.
A touch pad at each station, so the crew taps each piece through the shop from intake to finish. When a job is done, the invoice writes itself. And because every tap is a timestamp, the system records how long each piece spends at each station, which is the one number missing from your cost math today. The tracking you want for billing is the same tracking that answers the profit question above.
Step 1 · live tool
Fill in last year's totals, or one normal month and the figures scale. Round numbers are fine. The one rule that matters: put a real wage for yourselves in the Labor line, or the profit number will flatter you.
Step 2 & the worksheet
What the numbers will likely tell you
The system you described
You want a touch pad at each station so the crew taps every piece through the shop, and an invoice that builds itself the moment the work is done. That instinct is right, and it solves more than billing. The flow runs through your numbered stations:
Every tap is a timestamp. String them together and you know how long each piece sat at each station, the one number that has been missing from your cost math. So the system that speeds up invoicing also hands you a true, per-piece cost without anyone touching a calculator. Billing and profit fall out of the same taps.
This page is the first piece of a bigger picture. The math here tells you whether each job makes money. The system you pictured, a touch pad at every station so each piece is tracked from intake to finish and the invoice writes itself the moment the work is done, is the real goal. The part most people miss: that same tracking is exactly what reveals your true cost per piece. The operating system you want and the profit answer you need are the same build.
I would genuinely like to help you figure this out. If it is useful, I can build it with you.
Lesli Rose
[email protected]