Who this is for: Managers
💼 Why this matters
The most common financial surprise in a small service business isn’t a bad month — it’s a good month that still somehow feels like nothing came out of it. You ran the jobs. You sent the invoices. The money came in. And at the end of it you’re looking at your account thinking: where did it go? The answer is almost always the same. The math was wrong from the start — and you didn’t know it.
⏱️ What this used to take
Calculating a real break-even rate requires knowing your fixed costs, variable costs, labor burden, owner’s draw, average job count, and target margin — then doing the math across all of them simultaneously. Most contractors either hire an accountant to do this once a year, skip it entirely, or spend hours in a spreadsheet and still aren’t sure they got it right.
What it takes now
Enter your numbers in the Profit Allocation planner. The app calculates your real rate and recommended markup in real time.
Time back in your week
A one-time 5–10 minute setup replaces hours of spreadsheet work — and produces a more accurate result because every variable is calculated together, not in isolation.
When a contractor says their pricing is “competitive,” they usually mean it’s close to what other people charge. That’s not a bad starting point, but it answers the wrong question. The question isn’t what the market charges. The question is: what do you need to charge to actually make money?
Those two numbers are often very different.
The invisible math problem #
Most contractors price a job by estimating materials, adding labor, and putting a number on top they feel good about. The problem is what’s not in that number: the portion of your monthly rent that this job should be covering, the insurance premium, the truck payment, the 15.3% self-employment tax on everything you pay yourself, the slow weeks that this busy week is subsidizing. None of that shows up in the estimate. It comes out of the margin that was supposed to be profit.
This is the invisible math — the costs that are always running in the background but never make it into the price of the job. You finish a good month and the account doesn’t reflect it because the invisible math ate the difference.
What the Profit Allocation planner does #
The Profit Allocation planner is where you make the invisible math visible. You enter your actual costs — fixed overhead, variable costs, what you pay yourself, your labor burden rate — and the app calculates your real break-even number: the minimum you need to bring in every month just to stay even. Then it calculates the markup you need on every job to hit that number and still have something left over.
That markup becomes the foundation of every estimate you build in PriceRight Pro. You’re not guessing anymore. You’re pricing from a number that’s calibrated to your actual business.
The defaults are a benchmark, not a setting #
PriceRight Pro ships with default values already in the Profit Allocation planner — industry-average costs and a reasonable markup benchmark. Those defaults are useful. They’re based on real data and they’ll produce estimates that are in the right ballpark for most service businesses.
But they are not your numbers. A pressure washer in Phoenix with a paid-off truck and no employees has completely different overhead than a general contractor in New York managing three crews and a warehouse. The defaults get you started. Your real numbers get you accurate.
💡 Tip: Think of the defaults as the benchmark you’re trying to beat — not the target you’re trying to hit. If your real numbers come out better than the defaults, that’s good news. If they come out worse, that’s important news. Either way, knowing is better than guessing.
Pay yourself first — then survive, then grow #
PriceRight Pro is built on one financial principle: your business should pay you first, survive second, and grow third — in that order. The Profit Allocation planner starts with your owner’s draw — what you need to pay yourself — and builds the required pricing outward from there. The goal isn’t to see what’s left after expenses. The goal is to price the job so that what you need is already accounted for before the job starts.
Most contractors do this backward. They cover costs, hope for margin, and pay themselves last. The Profit Allocation planner inverts that — and the pricing it produces reflects it.
🚀 Smart Business Tip
The Profit Allocation planner isn’t a one-time setup — it’s a living document. Run it again after your first 90 days of tracking real expenses. Your actual costs will be different from your estimates, and your pricing should adjust to match. Contractors who review their allocation numbers quarterly end up with pricing that tracks their real business trajectory over time — not the business they thought they had when they first set it up.
How to set up your pricing foundation
Set Up Your Business Foundation: Costs and Overhead (Part 1 of 3) →
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