Costing and pricing in your own shop rates
VenturusEQ costs a part two ways, side by side: your estimator's worksheet in your own rates, and a cost built from confirmed geometry that shows where each number came from. Every entry is a quantity times a unit cost or hours times a rate, in five buckets, and the product ships no rates of its own. A geometry number enters a price only after an estimator confirms it.
How a price is built
A rate is found in a fixed order
A rate is found in order: an override on the operation, the work center's quoting rate, then setup and run hours at labor and machine rates, and finally the work center's standard cost rate. A surcharge per hour can sit on top. The arm that answered is recorded on the line.
Every cost sits in one of five buckets
Material, labor, subcontract, overhead and other. Every entry is a quantity times a unit cost or hours times a rate. No hidden multipliers.
Up to 30 quantity breaks per line
Up to 30 per line, one marked primary. Setup is amortized per break, so a hundred pieces carry a hundredth of the setup each and a single piece carries all of it. Lead days accumulate along the method.
Margin or markup
A house default of target margin or markup, with a per-line override. When both are supplied, margin wins. Pricing at cost is allowed, and the line warns.
A pricing stack on top of cost
Ordered per-company pricing items apply markup or margin per cost category. Then add-ons, required or optional to the buyer; a line discount where your company has enabled discounts; and an expedite ladder of days faster for a percentage more. Totals print as exact, a range, a maximum or not at all, and pricing copies between revisions with a toggle per layer.
A milled bracket at 1, 10 and 100 pieces
The arithmetic is plain, and it is the same shape the product uses. The rates are example shop rates for the sake of the sum; VenturusEQ ships none.
| Per part | Qty 1 | Qty 10 | Qty 100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Material: one blank at $20.00 | $20.00 | $20.00 | $20.00 |
| Setup, amortized per break: 2.0 h × $90/h = $180.00 per break | $180.00 | $18.00 | $1.80 |
| Run: 0.4 h × $90/h (labor $40 + machine $50) | $36.00 | $36.00 | $36.00 |
| Cost per part | $236.00 | $74.00 | $57.80 |
| Price per part at 20% target margin (cost ÷ 0.80) | $295.00 | $92.50 | $72.25 |
| Extended price for the break | $295.00 | $925.00 | $7,225.00 |
| For comparison, 20% markup instead (cost × 1.20) | $283.20 | $88.80 | $69.36 |
Setup is what moves the price between breaks. Margin is not markup: the same $74.00 cost prices at $92.50 one way and $88.80 the other. In the product, each line is a quantity times a unit cost or hours times a rate, with the rate arm recorded beside it.
Formulas, templates and tables you control
Governed formulas
Locked engine variables plus variables your shop declares. Functions: min, max, round, ceil, floor, abs, lookup, table_var and IF, with runtime, runtime_setup, setups and no_quote. Anything unknown fails closed.
Templates with an activation gate
Drafted, then every operation validated and smoke-evaluated before activation. Versioned, and cloned into your company. Fifteen system templates ship: mill, turn, fabrication, sheet, assembly, purchased, outside process, tooling, geometry-driven mill, turn, drill, bend and laser, and two weld models.
Twelve lookup tables
Removal rates, drill and tap minutes, bend minutes, laser feed, setup minutes, heat treat, finish, tolerance, inspection and weld constants. Typed columns, CSV in and out, governed like a formula.
Material price lists
Effective-dated, per vendor, from four sources: entered by you, uploaded by the vendor, a market feed, or a per-quote override. Minimum buys and stock sizes are part of the record.
Geometry is priced only after it is confirmed
A formula that reaches for a geometry value the estimator has not confirmed fails. A required input needs a real source, never a default.
Method proposals
One proposed operation per detected setup, its fingerprint frozen, with confidence bands. Never auto-selected: the estimator accepts or ignores each one.
What a confirmed fact can become
Holes become drilling and tapping time
Confirmed hole count times minutes per hole from the governed table gives drilling and tapping time. A missing table row refuses rather than pricing zero.
Sheet nesting
Parts per sheet, sheets per break, utilisation and a minimum-buy floor for flat stock. A part that does not fit refuses, and stock allowance is never counted twice.
Weld costing
Deposited pounds from fillet geometry or typed by the estimator, priced with governed constants per weld category. A weld figure read off a drawing never prices by itself.
Print call-outs become priced operations
Heat treat and finish call-outs become subcontract legs priced per lot, piece or load. Tolerance, surface roughness and inspection call-outs become in-house hours, re-parsed on the server.
Assemblies become a costed bill of material
Components created from STEP with their quantities roll up recursively, 25 levels deep. A node that could not be costed is disclosed with the cause. Whole-set charges cost once across all parts.
Vendor quotes on the line
Fire a sourcing request from the line, capture any vendor's price with its currency and lead days, and select one. Make-or-buy on the line, not in a side spreadsheet.
The manual worksheet
The estimator's own spreadsheet, reproduced: hours times rate times markup by department, with an AI-proposed hole row. The engine never reads it.
Try the arithmetic
Pick a sample part, confirm its geometry facts, set the quantities, the margin and the example rates, and watch the breaks recompute with the same build-up shown in the table above.
1 · Pick a part
Two pockets, four through holes, one tapped hole from the print.
2 · The facts the product measured
| Bounding box | 160 × 100 × 25 mm | exact |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | 213.4 cm³ | exact |
| Volume removed | 186.6 cm³ | exact |
| Holes | 4 through Ø8.5, 1 tapped M10 (from the print) | estimated |
| Setups | 2 | estimated |
3 · Your shop's numbers
Rates resolve through the same ladder as the product: an operation override, else the work center's quoting rate, else setup and run × labor and machine. Here the Granular arm is in use.
4 · The price, and where each number came from
Confirm the facts above to price. The product refuses to evaluate a geometry variable an estimator has not confirmed.
Setup is spread across each break's quantity, run and machine time scale with quantity, material carries the scrap allowance, and the margin is applied once at the end: cost ÷ (1 − margin). Hover any cell for its arithmetic. Example shop rates; the product ships none.
Common questions
Does it come with rates or industry benchmarks, or do we enter our own?
Your own. The product ships no rates, no benchmark hours and no price list. Your work-center, labor and machine rates, your material price lists and your process templates are entered once, and every price is built from them. Fifteen system templates and twelve lookup tables ship as starting points; clone them into your company and change any number before a template goes live.
Can my estimator override what the software worked out?
Always. The two cost lines sit side by side, the estimator's worksheet in your rates and the cost built from confirmed geometry, and the estimator picks per line. Margin, markup and any rate can be overridden on the line, and the override is recorded.
Can I write my own costing formulas?
Yes, within limits. A formula uses locked engine variables plus variables your shop declares, with min, max, round, ceil, floor, abs, lookup, table_var and IF, and functions for runtime, setup and setups. Anything unknown fails closed, and a template using the formula must validate and smoke-evaluate every operation before it can be activated.
How does an outside process like heat treat get priced?
Two ways. A heat-treat or finish call-out read from the print becomes a subcontract leg priced per lot, per piece or per load from your tables. Or you fire a sourcing request from the line, capture a vendor's price with its currency and lead days, and select it. Either way the cost lands in the subcontract bucket with its source.
See it on one of your own RFQs
Send us a drawing and a model you have already quoted and we will walk through it with you in the product, in your rates. If you would rather look first, the interactive demo is open, with no form in front of it.