Pricing is one of the most difficult aspects when running a service business.
It’s a knife-edge, multi-directional balance of maintaining competitiveness, accounting for the actual running costs of a business, and ensuring you have enough income to meet both your personal needs and grow your business through profitable income – beyond just making ends meet at the end of the month.
We’ve discussed it briefly before in our How Do I: Work out fixed costs article and calculator which focused on just one aspect of this. But with costs shifting all the time, and some real confusion about how to accurately work out pricing based on actual real-world figures, we’ve put together a full pricing calculator to at help you confirm if you’re at least in the right ballpark…
It does demand a lot of figures to get an accurate calculation – some of which you’ll probably have to hunt for – but with a bit of time input up front, you can quickly work out all your individual services on the basis of;
- Actual products used,
- The time and travel costs incurred,
- What you personally need to take home,
- and a variety of other considerations crucial to the final figure.
If you feel; your income isn’t reflecting your outgoings, you’re struggling to justify your prices, or you’re just not sure where to start – give it a go, and let us know if it’s cleared things up for you at all.
You’ll need either Excel on your computer, or an equivalent program that works with .XLS files; such as Google Sheets, Open Office Calc, or free on the Excel online website with a basic Microsoft account.
