Prices, markups and GST

An item’s Price is the cost per unit — what the work costs you, before any margin. Markup is applied on top, and is kept separate on purpose.

Where a rate comes from

Source	How it behaves
A price list	Linked, so it can be refreshed later
A supplier’s product	Linked to that supplier’s pricing
A received quote	Fixed at what the subcontractor quoted
Typed by hand	Fixed until you change it

Items carrying a Link to Pricelist are the ones you can update in bulk. Typed rates are invisible to every refresh, which is fine for genuine one-offs and a liability for anything recurring.

Keeping rates current

The Items menu carries several refresh commands:

Command	What it does
Renew prices	Updates the selected items from their linked source
Renew all below prices	Updates everything below the current point
Renew all the products of this costing	Refreshes the whole costing
Alert Price Changes	Flags items whose source price has moved

Alert Price Changes is the setting worth turning on. It tells you a rate has moved rather than changing it underneath you, so you decide whether to take the new price on a job you may already have quoted.

Do not renew prices on a submitted tender

Refreshing rates on a costing you have already quoted changes what the job says it costs, and your submitted price no longer matches your bill. Duplicate the costing first if you want to see what current rates would do.

Item markup

Item Markup applies to a single item. Use it for work you price differently from the rest of the job — a supply-only item you carry less margin on, or a trade you mark up harder because it carries more risk.

Item markup applies before the costing-level markups, so an item with its own markup still picks up overheads and margin on top of that. Setting 10% item markup on a line does not mean that line ends up at exactly 10% over cost in the final price.

If you want most items marked up the same way, do it at costing level and leave item markup alone. See Markups.

GST

The GST field controls whether GST applies to an item, at the rate set on the project.

Most items carry it. The ones that typically do not are statutory fees and charges — council permits, certifier fees, some authority connections. Getting these wrong overstates your price by 10% on those lines, which is usually enough to notice but not always enough to spot.

Showing cost against actuals

Show Actual Costs Columns adds committed and actual cost alongside your estimate, once orders and invoices exist.

This is how you see the estimate holding up as the job runs — allowed, committed, spent, side by side per item. It is worth turning on the moment the job is won, and leaving off while you are still estimating, when the columns are all empty.

A worked check

The Hendricks slab, from cost to sell:

Concrete 18.64 m³ @ $228/m³	$4,250
Mesh 195.72 m² @ $9.40/m²	$1,840
Vapour barrier 205.04 m² @ $3.10/m²	$636
Bedding sand 9.32 m³ @ $62/m³	$578
Pump 1 item @ $850	$850
Slab cost	$8,154
Overheads 8%	$652
Margin 12%	$978
Slab sell, ex GST	$9,784
GST 10%	$978
Slab sell, inc GST	$10,762

The cost line is what you would defend to a subcontractor. The sell line is what the client sees. Keeping them separate is what lets you change one without disturbing the other.