How to build a shop rate, and why VenturusEQ ships none
A shop rate is dollars per hour that recovers what a work center and the people on it cost, over the hours you expect to sell. You build one by separating setup from run, labor from machine, and surcharges from the base. VenturusEQ ships no rates; it resolves each operation to one of yours through a rate ladder and records which arm answered.
What a rate is for
A rate turns hours into dollars. It has to recover everything the hour costs you, the person, the machine, the roof over both, and it has to do that over the hours you actually sell, not the hours in a year. A rate built on 2,000 hours when the machine cuts for 1,400 under-recovers every job.
Setup against run
Setup hours are paid once a lot: loading the program, fixturing, first-piece inspection. Run hours are paid once a piece. Keep them apart even if the rate is the same, because setup is what a price break amortizes. A rate structure that lumps setup into a per-piece figure makes every quantity wrong except the one it was built for.
The two often carry different rates. Setup may be a senior person at a labor rate while the spindle is idle; run may be the machine at full rate with one operator tending two of them. If that is how your floor works, your rates should say so.
Labor against machine
A labor rate is the cost of the person per hour: wages plus benefits, payroll taxes and any other on-cost, divided by the hours they are productive.
A machine rate is the cost of owning and running the machine per productive hour: depreciation or the lease, power, tooling and consumables, maintenance, floor space, and the share of overhead you choose to carry here rather than in its own bucket, divided by the hours the machine is expected to sell in a year.
For run time the two are usually added. For an operation where one person tends two machines, the labor share per machine halves, and a rate structure that keeps labor and machine separate can say so.
A run rate built from its parts, with example figures
These figures belong to no shop and are here to show the arithmetic. Change every one of them for your own.
| Component (example) | Figure | Working |
|---|---|---|
| Machine cost a year: lease, power, tooling, maintenance, floor space | 60,000.00 | Sum of the annual costs |
| Productive hours a year the machine sells | 1,600 | Hours cutting, not hours open |
| Machine rate | 37.50 an hour | 60,000.00 divided by 1,600 |
| Operator wage | 28.00 an hour | From payroll |
| On-cost at 30 percent | 8.40 an hour | 28.00 times 0.30 |
| Labor rate | 36.40 an hour | 28.00 plus 8.40 |
| Run rate, one operator to one machine | 73.90 an hour | 37.50 plus 36.40 |
| Run rate, one operator to two machines | 55.70 an hour | 37.50 plus half of 36.40 |
| Hard-material surcharge | plus 12.00 an hour | Applied only when the condition holds |
Overhead is left out of this example so the machine and labor parts are visible. Put it in the machine rate or in its own bucket, never both.
Surcharges
A surcharge is a per-hour adder for a condition: a hard material that eats tooling, a five-axis setup, a clean-room, a certified welder. Keeping it separate from the base rate means the base stays honest and the surcharge shows on the line when it applies. Folding it into the base rate makes every ordinary hour dearer to pay for the occasional hard one.
Why VenturusEQ ships no rates
Every number above is a fact about your shop. A quoting product that ships rates is shipping a stranger's shop and inviting you to quote with it until you notice. The worst version is a rate buried in a template where nobody looks. VenturusEQ ships fifteen system templates to clone and twelve governed lookup tables to review, and no rates at all. Your work-center rates, your material price list and your templates are entered once at onboarding, and every price is built from them.
How the rate ladder finds a rate for each operation
When an operation is costed, VenturusEQ looks for a rate in a fixed order and stops at the first arm that answers:
- An override on the operation. A rate typed on this operation for this quote, for a reason.
- The work center's quoting rate. One rate per work center, the common case.
- Setup and run hours times labor and machine rates. The built-up form, for shops that keep the parts separate.
- A fallback rate kept for older records. So a historical line still prices.
A surcharge per hour is applied on top. Whichever arm answered is recorded on the line, so a quote can always say which rate it used and why. Rates are tenant data: nothing in the product supplies one, and no formula can invent one. Material is priced the same way, from your own effective-dated price lists with minimum buys and stock sizes.
Bring your rate sheet to a walkthrough
We enter your work-center rates in the real product and price one of your own packages through the ladder, so you can see which arm answers on each line. If you would rather look first, the interactive demo is open, with no form in front of it.