The free spreadsheet system that tells you exactly what every job costs before you quote it — no ERP required.
Your estimator looks at a drawing, guesses materials and labor from memory, adds 20%, and sends the quote. Forty percent of those jobs run over cost — usually by 15–30% — and you don't find out until the invoice goes out. By then it's too late.
If you're a 5–30 person job shop or small-batch manufacturer doing $500K–$3M in annual revenue, you're probably leaving $60,000–$120,000 a year on the table from underpriced jobs. The ERP vendors keep calling — $500, $800, $2,000/month for a 10-person shop. For a business running on 8% margins, that ERP cost alone wipes out 25–50% of your profit. So you keep quoting by feel and hope the next job makes up for the last one.
You don't need an ERP. You need a methodology. Here's the four-part system — all in Google Sheets, all free, all built to stop underpricing by Friday.
If you don't know what each machine actually costs to run per hour — burdened with overhead, tooling, consumables, and maintenance — you're guessing on every quote. Here's the formula the spreadsheet automates:
Total annual facility costs (rent, utilities, insurance, maintenance, tooling, admin salaries) ÷ machine allocation percentage based on floor space or utilization hours. A CNC mill occupying 40% of the production floor at a shop with $180,000 in annual overhead carries $72,000/year in burden.
Loaded wage (wages + payroll taxes + benefits + workers' comp) × annual hours. A $25/hr operator with a 1.3x burden factor = $32.50/hr loaded × 2,000 hours = $65,000/year.
2,000 available hours minus realistic downtime (setup, tool changes, maintenance, breaks, no-work gaps). Most shops run 80–85% utilization. At 85%: 1,700 productive hours/year. $137,000 total burden ÷ 1,700 hours = $80.59/hr burdened rate for that CNC mill.
Most shops discover their actual rate is 20–40% higher than the number they've been quoting against. That means every job for the last five years was underpriced by at least 20%.
The spreadsheet has one tab per machine. Update your overhead numbers quarterly — takes 15 minutes. The rate recalculates automatically.
This is where quoting stops being an art and becomes arithmetic. One tab per quote. Fixed columns, no blank cells.
| Line Item | Qty/Hrs | Unit Cost | Extended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Material: 6061 aluminum plate | 2 pcs | $47.50 | $95.00 |
| Material: stainless fasteners | 16 pcs | $1.85 | $29.60 |
| CNC mill — roughing | 1.8 hrs | $80.59 | $145.06 |
| CNC mill — finishing | 2.2 hrs | $80.59 | $177.30 |
| Manual lathe — threading | 0.7 hrs | $52.00 | $36.40 |
| Setup/teardown | 1.5 hrs | $65.00 | $97.50 |
| Tooling consumables (est. 3%) | — | $17.45 | $17.45 |
| Finishing/deburr | 0.5 hrs | $45.00 | $22.50 |
| Packaging/crating | 1 lot | $25.00 | $25.00 |
| Total Cost | $645.81 |
Now you know the floor. The spreadsheet has a margin slider: set it to 25% and your quote price is $861.08. Set it to 35% and it's $993.55. The "what-if" slider lets you see profit at every margin point in real time.
The critical rule: every line item must have a source. Material prices pull from a supplier pricing sheet (updated monthly). Labor hours aren't guesses — they're based on actual run data from the last time you made something similar, tracked in Part 3.
This is the feedback loop. Without it, the estimator never gets better — every quote is a fresh guess. Here's how it works:
When the job ships, the production lead fills in three numbers: actual material cost (from invoices), actual labor hours (from time cards or the machine log), and any unplanned costs (rework, rush material, expedited shipping the customer didn't pay for). Takes 5 minutes per job.
The spreadsheet shows you exactly which line items ran over and by how much. Pattern emerges within 10 jobs: "We always underestimate finishing time by 30%." Now you know. Next quote, finishing gets 1.3× the historical estimate. The estimator calibrates itself.
After 3 months of tracking, most shops discover 2–3 line items that consistently run 20–40% over estimate. Fixing those three alone recovers $40,000–$60,000/year — without touching anything else.
You don't just need to know what jobs cost — you need to know what the market will pay. The win/loss log tracks every quote you send:
After 20 quotes, the pattern is clear: "We win 80% of jobs under $2,500 and 40% of jobs over $5,000." Or: "We lose to the same competitor every time on aluminum work — they're consistently 15% under us." That intel is worth more than any ERP module. You can't compete on price if you don't know where the line is.
The log also catches another common leak: the quote you never sent because estimating felt too hard and the RFQ sat on your desk for two weeks. Every unsent quote is a lost job with 100% certainty.
"We're a 12-person machine shop. My dad quotes everything from memory. We have no idea if we're making or losing money on half our jobs."
— Real post from r/sysadmin, 2026
This spreadsheet system works — but it's still manual. Someone has to enter material prices, look up the last similar job, fill in the estimator, and log the post-job actuals. For a shop doing 20 quotes/month, that's maybe 4–5 hours/week of spreadsheet work. Worth it — it saves $80K/year. But eventually you'll want the system to run itself:
When you hit that point, the spreadsheet isn't obsolete — it's the exact specification for what to build. Every column, every formula, every workflow is documented and battle-tested. A custom automation build can replicate the entire system with zero manual data entry and real-time integration to your existing stack — QuickBooks for financials, your supplier portals for material pricing, your shop floor system for labor tracking. But you don't need to spend $50K on an ERP to get there. You need the $0 system first to prove the ROI, then automate what's proven.
That's the Jobs Done Labs model: we don't sell software. We build systems that recover documented profit — $30K in 90 days, guaranteed — and you only pay when we hit the number. If you've got your spreadsheet system running and want to know what it would take to automate it end-to-end, request a free Profit Audit. We'll map the dollar figure, build the spec, and tell you if it's worth doing — no obligation.
Request a free Profit Audit. We'll identify exactly where your job costing is leaking and what it would take to recover every dollar — before you spend a cent.
Get a Free Audit →A 10-person job shop doing $1.2M in revenue typically loses $60K–$120K/year. 40% of jobs run over cost by 15–30%, plus rush jobs and change orders are never priced differently. Each overrun is invisible until the invoice goes out — by then it's too late to recover the margin.
Yes — for a 5–30 person shop, a structured spreadsheet system handles it accurately. The four things an ERP gives you — burdened rate calculation, estimating, actual-vs-estimate tracking, and win/loss logging — all run in Google Sheets for $0. An ERP becomes worth it around 50+ employees or 100+ quotes/month. Until then, a structured free system beats quoting by feel every time — and the spreadsheet becomes the exact specification for automation when you're ready.
Take total annual facility overhead (rent, utilities, insurance, maintenance, tooling, admin), allocate to each machine by floor space or utilization, add operator loaded wage, divide by productive hours (available hours minus realistic downtime). Most shops discover their true rate is 20–40% higher than the number they've been quoting against.