1. Your rates: what every quote is priced from

Who this is for: whoever prices work (estimators, the owner, a sales engineer) and whoever answers for quality (a quality lead, a production manager). Lessons 1 to 3 are quoting, 4 to 6 are quality.

Every price BuildTrack gives you for a made part comes from one page: Manufacturing → Quoting rates. The AI never sets a price, and nor does anyone typing a number into a line. If a quote looks wrong, the answer is almost always on this page.

Everyone with manufacturing access can read it; changing it needs the Edit settings permission. Nothing here is a cost: a work centre's cost rate stays on Work centres, behind the cost permission.

Rate cards

One row per active work centre:

• Sell $/hour: what you charge for an hour of that machine or bay.
• Setup min: the setup a part gets on that centre unless its routing says otherwise.
• Minimum $: the least you charge for using it on a quote line.

Press Save on the row.

Cut speeds

For each cutter, one row per Material and Thickness mm: the Feed mm/min and the Pierce s, from the machine's feed chart. Paste a feed chart takes rows straight from a spreadsheet. A thickness with no row uses the nearest one for that material; a material with no row at all can't be priced, and the quote says so in amber instead of guessing low.

Finishes

Powder coat, galvanising, anodising: each Priced per m², per kg or each, with a Rate $ and a Minimum $. Done by is In house or the sublet product of the contractor who does it, and Days is what it adds to the lead time.

Quote settings

• Margin % goes on what you buy in at cost (material and hardware). Work-centre time and finishes are already sell prices, so no margin is added to them.
• Sheet utilisation %: how much of a sheet becomes parts; the rest is priced in.
• Scrap %: extra units cut to allow for rejects.
• Quantity breaks: the quantities every part is priced at, for example 1, 10, 50. The first is always 1.
• Round prices, always up, and a Minimum charge $ per quote line.

Your sheet and plate

The material price comes from your own stock products. On each sheet or plate product, Edit and fill in Material: form, material, grade and thickness. Without it, a part can't be cut from that sheet.