From an Excel sheet to a price book you actually trust

Our price list at MB Helmar lived in a spreadsheet called “kainos 2024 FINAL v3”. It had a tab for pergolas, a tab for verandas, a tab I no longer understood, and prices that were right the day I typed them. Every estimate started by copying rows from it and adjusting by feel. The feel was often right. It was also unrepeatable: two people quoting the same terrace got two prices.

A price book is the same list with three things a spreadsheet does not give you: a unit on every line, a confirmation on every price, and a history when a price changes. The rest of this post is the afternoon it takes to get there.

Step one: export, do not rebuild

Do not retype anything. Export each tab as CSV and keep the columns you have: name, unit, price, and cost if you track it. If a row has no unit, that is the first decision to make, not something to fix later. Everything you price should be per m², m, m³, piece, hour or job; anything else is a story, not a price.

Step two: confirm row by row

Importing is the easy half. The half that makes the book trustworthy is that nothing is active until you have looked at it. Go through the rows one by one and ask three questions: is the unit right, is the price current, and who set it. That last one matters more than it sounds. When the book records who confirmed a price and when, a wrong price is a conversation, not a mystery.

• Delete rows you have not used in a year. They are not history; they are noise.
• Split rows that hide two things, like “decking incl. fixings”, into a material line and a labour line. Margins live in the split.
• Leave prices blank where you are not sure. A blank row cannot be quoted by accident; a stale one can.

Step three: build assemblies

This is the part worth an hour. An assembly is one measurement that expands into every line it needs. A composite terrace priced per m² becomes boards, joists, fixings and labour; a roof area becomes membrane, battens, covering and labour. You measure once on site, pick the assembly, and the quantities fill themselves in.

Assemblies do two things for a small company. They make the estimate consistent between the people who quote, and they make the quantities on the purchase order the same as the quantities on the estimate, so ordering stops being a second calculation done from memory.

1. 01

   Pick your five

   The five things you quote most often. For us: a composite terrace per m², an aluminium pergola per unit, a veranda glazing per m, an awning per unit, site preparation per m².

2. 02

   List what each one needs

   Materials with waste, fixings, and labour in hours per unit. Use your last three real jobs to check the ratios, not a catalogue.

3. 03

   Test it against a finished job

   Run last month’s terrace through the assembly. If the total lands within a few percent of what you actually invoiced, the assembly is ready.

Step four: keep it current without breaking sent estimates

Supplier prices move. The rule that keeps you sane is that a price change is a new version of the book, dated and approved, and that estimates you already sent keep the prices they were sent with until they expire. After expiry you requote at today’s supplier prices in one step; labour stays as it was. Never edit the price under a quote that is out with a customer.

When a wholesaler list changes, the useful question is not “what is the new price” but “what does it do to my margin on the things I sell”. If plywood is up 8 %, the terrace assembly’s margin drops by a known amount, and you decide once whether to raise the price or accept the thinner margin.

Doing it in Helmar.AI

The price book in Helmar.AI is exactly this: import from Excel or CSV, map the columns, confirm each row before it becomes active, build assemblies driven by one measurement, and see cost, price and margin per line with a warning below your floor. Price changes are versioned and approved, sent estimates keep their prices, supplier lists are imported and changes flagged with the effect on your margin, and accepted lines become purchase orders per supplier. Starter services for each trade arrive with units and blank prices, so you never quote a number you did not set.