Cost, price and margin on a product
How the product page works out unit cost from the recipe, and what the margin figure means.
Every product page shows what one unit costs to make and what you keep when you sell it. The figures come straight from the recipe and your current inventory costs — nothing is entered by hand, so they cannot drift out of date.
How each figure is worked out
| Figure | Formula |
|---|---|
| Material cost | quantity per unit × (1 + waste allowance) × item cost per unit |
| Paper cost | pieces per unit × (1 + waste allowance) × cost per piece |
| Ink cost | millilitres per unit × cost per millilitre |
| Total cost | the three added together |
| Profit | selling price − total cost |
| Margin | profit ÷ selling price × 100 |
Each line is summed across every entry in that section, so a product with three paper types adds all three.
Margin is not markup
Margin divides by the price, markup divides by the cost
A ₱100 item sold for ₱150 has a 50% markup but a 33% margin. PrintERP always shows margin, because margin is the share of your selling price you actually keep — the number that matters when you compare products or work out whether a discount is survivable.
What the figure does not include
This is material cost only. It does not include labour, electricity, rent, machine depreciation or delivery. A 70% material margin is not 70% profit for the business.
Those overheads are tracked separately as expenses, and the Financial Report subtracts them to give a genuine net figure. Product margin tells you which products are worth selling; the financial report tells you whether the shop is making money.
Keeping it honest
- Update item costs when supplier prices change. Costs are read live, so one edit in Inventory Items refreshes every product that uses it.
- Check waste allowances against reality. If jobs regularly log more waste than the allowance, the allowance is too low and every quote based on it is under-priced.
- Re-check after a price rise. A product that was comfortably profitable can quietly stop being so.
Note
For a whole job rather than a single unit — including a target-margin selling price — use the cost estimator.
Open Products
Review cost and margin across your catalogue.
Related guides
Building a product recipe
Tell PrintERP what one unit of a product consumes: materials, paper, ink, and waste allowance.
BOM templates and the cost estimator
Reusable bills of materials, estimating a job's cost, and pricing back from a target margin.
Profit & Loss vs Cash Flow
Two views of the same business, why they disagree, and why buying stock is not a loss.