How to price a flooring job from a dealer price list

What a dealer price list actually is

A dealer price list is the schedule a mill or distributor issues to an account that buys to resell. It is the cost side of your business written down, and it exists because the supplier needs one document that states what your shop pays for every product it stocks.

The same plank commonly carries three numbers. The retail or list price is the shelf figure a homeowner sees. The contractor price is a published discount off that list, offered across the counter to trade buyers who hold no supply agreement. The dealer price is what your account pays under the agreement behind it, and the gap between the first and the third is the room your business operates in. A quote priced off a retail sheet gives that room away before the job starts.

Dealer sheets are issued to a named account and stay inside it. Two dealers on the same street can hold different numbers for an identical SKU, because their volumes, their tiers and their freight terms differ. That is why no public database of them exists.

The anatomy of a sheet

Formats vary by supplier, and the same nine elements turn up on nearly all of them. Read the header and the footnotes before reading a single price, because everything above and below the grid is what makes the grid mean something.

Two of these deserve a second look. Unit of sale is where quoting errors start: a price quoted per carton and read as a price per square foot inflates the line by whatever the carton covers. Promotional columns run on their own clock, so a sheet that is current in October can still hold a program price that expired in August.

Reading the right column

Three coordinates pick the number: zone, tier and date. Fix all three and the sheet gives one figure.

Zone follows the delivery address on the job, which is worth saying out loud because a shop near a zone boundary delivers into both. Tier follows your account, and it moves — a shop that hits a volume threshold in January may be reading a different column by March, and nobody outside your supplier's sales desk will say so unprompted. Date follows the sheet, and the rule that keeps quotes honest is that the sheet in effect when you quote is the sheet the quote is explained by.

Building the material line

The sheet gives one of the six inputs. The rest come off the plan set and out of your own commercial decisions, in this order.

1. Measured square feet. The floor area itself, taken off the drawings or the site. This is the only figure in the chain that describes the building.

2. Waste. Applied to the measured area as a percentage, and the percentage follows the laying pattern. Straight and plank layouts are commonly ordered at 10%, diagonal around 15%, herringbone and chevron at 20%. Waste goes on first, because it belongs to the floor.

3. Carton rounding. The vendor ships whole cartons or whole bundles, so the waste-adjusted area is divided by the carton coverage and rounded up. Carton coverage is a packaging decision that varies widely between products, and the only figure that counts is the one printed on the carton you are buying. This second rounding raises the real waste above the percentage you entered, sharply on small floors.

4. $/sqft from the sheet. Multiply the square footage you are actually ordering — the whole-carton figure — by the price in the correct column. The measured area sizes the order and the carton figure prices it.

5. Freight and minimums. Add the delivery charge, the fuel surcharge, the broken-pallet fee or whatever else the footnotes impose on an order of this size.

6. Markup or margin. Turn cost into price. These are two different operations and the arithmetic is worth stating plainly.

Markup is a percentage of cost added on top: price = cost × (1 + markup). Margin is the percentage of the selling price you keep: price = cost ÷ (1 − margin). A 30% markup produces a 23.1% margin, because the profit added sits inside the larger number it created. To hold a 30% margin you need a 42.9% markup. Convert with margin = markup ÷ (1 + markup) and markup = margin ÷ (1 − margin). Shops that set a margin target and apply it as a markup run several points light on every job of the year.

A worked example, start to finish

Fictional vendor, fictional SKU, fictional numbers, chosen round so the arithmetic stays visible.

The job: one floor, straight plank layout, 940 sq ft measured off the plan.

Two things fall out of the table. The order covers 1,040 sq ft against 940 measured, an effective waste of 10.6% rather than the 10% entered, because the carton rounding added 6 sq ft on top of the waste. And the last two rows differ by $570.21 on one floor, which is the whole markup-and-margin distinction expressed in money.

The 1,200 sq ft freight threshold is worth one more look. Ordering 60 cartons brings the order to 1,200 sq ft, removes the $200 delivery charge and costs $320 in extra material, so it loses money here. On a job already close to the line, the same check gains it.

Five ways the material line goes wrong

Quoting off a superseded sheet. The most common and the most expensive. A sheet in a downloads folder looks exactly like the current one, and an increase of a few percent across a large order disappears entirely until the invoice arrives. Check the effective date before the price.

Reading the wrong zone. Shops delivering into more than one zone pick up this error on whichever job is the exception. The zone follows the job's delivery address, so the address is what to check, every time.

Treating a per-carton price as $/sqft. A line that reads $80.00 against a carton covering 20 sq ft is $4.00 per square foot. Entered as a rate per square foot, a 1,040 sq ft floor prices at $83,200 instead of $4,160. Large errors like this get caught; the same mistake on a bundle price close in magnitude to a square-foot price often does not.

Forgetting minimum order rounding. Pallet quantities, minimum carton counts and broken-pallet fees live in the footnotes, and they turn a quantity you calculated into a quantity the vendor will actually ship. Price the quantity that will ship.

Applying markup to freight inconsistently. Marking up the full landed cost of $4,435 at 30% gives $5,765.50. Marking up the material alone and passing $275 of freight and handling through at cost gives $5,683. The $82.50 difference is 30% of the freight. Either approach works as policy, and switching between them job to job makes a year of margin reporting meaningless.

Keeping the sheets current

The filing system that works is simple enough to survive a busy week. One folder per vendor. Inside it, one file per sheet, named with the vendor, what kind of sheet it is and its effective date, so the current one sorts to the bottom without being opened.

A superseded sheet is kept rather than deleted. It is the evidence behind every quote already priced from it. A customer who accepts in November a quote you wrote in March will want to know where the number came from, and the March sheet is the answer. Supersession is a label on the old file, and quoting always happens from the current one.

Ask your rep to send reissues as they happen and to flag mid-cycle page revisions, which are easy to miss because the cover date on the sheet does not change. Re-confirm your tier annually. When a vendor changes carton coverage on a product line, the change reaches your ordering arithmetic before it reaches any conversation about price.

Doing this without the paper

Every step above is manual, and all of it is repeatable. SquareTally holds the sheets your own reps send you: upload the vendor PDF, and the vendor, sheet label and effective date are read off the first page for you to agree with or correct. The sheet is stored whole, which is what makes the next part work.

Search a product and a lookup returns the matching $/sqft figures with the source page and the quoted line, beside a rendering of that page. You confirm the figure against what the page says before it fills the project's visible $/sqft field, and the field stays editable through quote review. That confirmation step is the one described in the third mistake above, made into a habit the software insists on.

A reissued sheet supersedes the one it replaces without erasing it, so a quote priced in March keeps its link back to the March page. What the software contributes is the paper trail and the arithmetic; the zone, the tier and the markup stay yours, because they are commercial decisions. See how this works for hardwood dealers for the full path from uploaded sheet to finished quote.