Price a pack job before the boxes eat your margin. Free, no signup.
Pack jobs die on the labor rate alone. Boxes at $4.50 each, dish packs, wardrobe boxes, tape, paper, and wrap can run $500 to $900 on a full pack, and burying them inside the hourly line is how the margin disappears. Start with your bar (60), margin percent (20), minimum job fee ($150), and daily goal ($400). Pick a job preset: Kitchen, 1-bed, 2-bed, or 3-bed, each filling box counts, pack minutes, fragile items, dish packs, wardrobe boxes, disassembly, and labeling as editable starting points. The materials card prices every box type, tape and paper as a flat, and a markup percent, with a live note when materials top 35 percent of the quote. Getting there counts drive, miles, stairs (time plus dollars), and unpacking (60 percent of pack time). Results show pack time, your time at bar, materials at cost and billed, vehicle, helper, true cost, the recommended quote (cost plus margin, rounded up to $25, never below the minimum), and your effective rate. Verdicts are PRICED RIGHT, CLOSE, BUT LEAKING, WORKING TOO CHEAP, or LOSING MONEY. The gut check grades your instinct quote; the day planner turns your goal into jobs.
Example only, not typical pricing. 1-bed preset at a $60 bar with 20 percent margin: 35 boxes at 8 minutes each, 12 fragile items at 5 extra minutes, 30 disassembly plus 20 labeling minutes, 40 drive minutes, 30 miles, boxes at $4.50, 2 dish packs at $9, 2 wardrobe boxes at $12, $35 tape and paper, 25 percent material markup. Pack time is (280 + 60 + 30 + 20) / 60 = 6.5 hours; your committed time is 7.17 hours at $60 = $430. Materials at cost are $234.50, billed at $293.13 with markup. Vehicle is $20.10. True cost is $430 + $234.50 + $20.10 = $684.60. Recommended quote is max(150, ceil(684.60 x 1.20 / 25) x 25) = $825. Effective rate is ($825 - $234.50 - $20.10) / 7.17 = $79.59 per hour, which clears the bar, so the verdict is PRICED RIGHT. A $400 gut quote would pay $20.29 per hour and leave $425 on the table. The day planner turns an $825 quote into 0.5 jobs and 3.5 hours for a $400 goal: the quote, not the headcount, does the work.
Why are materials the signature leak?
They are bought before the job starts. One bad box-count guess or an extra room wipes the margin before any labor is billed.