I posted an Excel worksheet to my website which you guys can download and check out.

I built this worksheet to help me derive an hourly shop rate that would profit myself and my business.

I added a few other things to the worksheet this morning, like extra spaces for future equipment and even epmloyees, thinking they would make good examples of information to be included in such a worksheet.

The sheet I uploaded may or may not work for you but you can customize it to fit your needs. The main point behind it is that it forces you to sit down and figure out every little expense you have, whether it's a personal expense or business expense.

All the calculations are done for you, all you have to do is plug in values.

I should make a couple notes about this worksheet though.

1.) The items and numbers listed in this version are made up - ie: I took out my personal stuff and just put in basic examples.

2.) In the "Staffing" section, if you insert or delete rows to add or remove Employees, you then need to click on the number that represents the "Billable Hours" (found directly below the staffing section) and check the "formula bar" at the top of the Excel window to make sure the proper cells are still included in the calculation. If one of the cells is missing from the calc, your numbers could be off by a substantial amount.

3.) About that Billable Hours box: I figure from an 8 hour day, we're actually productive about 4 hours, hence the 50% Productivity value. If you want to change that, you click on the number that represents the billable hours, then look at the formula bar at the top of the window and change the 50% to whatever number you feel is more appropriate.

4.) About the Profit Margin on Labor - I picked 30% as a random number. If you want to change it, just click on it and do so. Excel will then update the associated calculations for you.

Oh yeah... here's the link to the file..

http://stickerpimp.com/documents/

OOPS almost forgot..

You'll see an interesting item in this worksheet too.

It's the "Take Home Pay" Line.

This is basically the amount of money you want to take home in your pocket, either for your family, to spend on toys, or for your wife to blow on shoes and dresses <zipping up flamesuit now>.

I threw that in there with the intention that you'll enter all your personal expenses in the upper portion of the worksheet, so the "take home pay" is literally extra money for you, as all your bills have already been (or should have been) included with the rest of the overhead.

[ October 23, 2001: Message edited by: Mike Pipes ]

Now, if you work only out of your home, do you just fill in only the home part? Does the formula assume that if you are home-based that you are using '50% of your home/utilities for the business'?

So should I put in my entire mortgage payment , or half? Do you get what I'm saying?

Maybe once we get these sheets down, and maybe we can refine the one I came up with, they could be bundled together in one file.

Anyway, Cool!

Any bills you have, whether they are business related or personal, contribute to your overhead.

Any monthly bills you have that are not listed there should be added. Anything that IS there should just be ignored if you dont have that expense.. or you can delete it.

And when I say any montly bills, I do mean ANY! Food, gas, vitamin supplements, auto detailing if you pay someone else to wash your car, uhhhh....... internet access whether its for personal use or business...

ATM usage fees.. (help me, Im really digging for more bills)

anything!!

This way all your bases are covered, if you can maintain the number of hours you actually wish to work per month your bills will be covered and whatever you specified as your "take home pay" is YOURS to keep..

If you specified a rate in the "shop owner" field consider yourself paid - TWICE! Just be sure to keep a number in there for the hours/month you plan to work, the program needs that to figure out a shop rate.. but if you dont have employees, be sure you specify $0.00 for their rate and 0 for their hours so they do not get figured into the total.. that is, unless you wanna get paid for employees too when you dont have any.

[ October 23, 2001: Message edited by: Mike Pipes ]