Adding New Labor Rates to Price Custom Products

December 17th, 2019

Have you ever had a project where you under-quoted? This is a common problem, especially when it comes to custom products and custom services. You end up losing money on the project or you disappoint and aggravate your client by raising the price in the middle of the project. Neither of these options is wise for business.

One area that custom manufacturers under-price is labor rates. In shopVOX, you can preset labor rates so you don't fall short when quoting projects. Check out our labor rate form!

Here are some helpful features of our labor rate form:


When adding a labor rate to shopVOX, first input what your cost of labor is and then either your price to the customer or your markup rate. If you input your markup rate, your price to the customer is automatically calculated. If you input a flat price to the customer, your markup is automatically calculated. You can choose to charge per hour, minute, or unit.

If you want to add set up charges, machine charges, or any other charges to a labor rate you can do so in the 3rd line.

The next fields are optional. You can add more details to your labor rate if needed. The formula field allows you to tell shopVOX how it should price a unit of measure. The dropdown above shows that there are many options so you can customize for whatever kind of project you are pricing which you can either include in the base price or not.

You can offer a volume discount to labor rates.

One other great feature of our labor rate form is the production rate line. Here you can set up how long it takes to complete a unit of measure. For example, if you charge an hourly rate, the production rate will allow shopVOX to know your output per hour. Therefore the software can calculate the price per item.

shopVOX can be customized to price labor appropriately. Once you set labor rates for each of your products, quotes and invoices are price more accurately.

" Featured image was designed by Quint Creative Signs. This design was a finalist in September's #VOXcontest.