💶 Costs
In 30 seconds
- Costs is in Settings and only the Owner and Admins can see it.
- You spread your monthly expenses across the hours you actually print and you know what each hour of printer time costs you. To that hour you add material, finish and extra costs (packaging, fixings…), and you have the cost of the piece.
- That cost per hour is used on every piece you create. The ones you already had don't change on their own: in Summary you have Recalculate to bring them up to date whenever you want.
- It never touches a sale price you've set yourself.
The usual mistake is to count only the grams of filament: the material is usually the small part. The rent, the electricity, the printers being written off, the accountant… you pay for all that too, and it has to be passed on.
How it's organised
In the Settings menu, the Costs group has four sections:
| Section | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Summary | The state of your catalogue (what's waiting to be recalculated) and an example with your numbers. |
| Default values | Margins, the price of each material type, finishes and extra costs. |
| Hourly cost | The cost-per-hour calculation, in three tabs: Print hours, Fixed costs and Hourly cost. |
| Cost scenarios | A simulator to see what would happen to your cost per hour at a different scale. |
If you're an owner or administrator, the Work out what each part costs you task in First steps, on the Home screen, walks you through these screens in four parts: Margins and materials (which is Default values), Printing hours, Fixed costs and Cost per hour. Clicking it takes you to the first one you're missing, and it ticks itself off when you've saved them all. See Initial setup.
Remember to save
In Default values and in the Print hours tab, changes aren't saved on their own: the Save button turns orange as soon as you touch anything, and if you switch section or close the window with pending changes, the app warns you. The expenses in the Fixed costs tab and the surcharges in the Hourly cost tab are saved when you accept the window in which you add or edit them.
Summary
Cost summary
Four figures: how many Designs and Pieces you have, how many are To recalculate and how many Outdated variants there are.
Each piece stores the cost per hour it was calculated with, deliberately: if your electricity goes up, you don't want the cost of everything from last year rewritten automatically. To apply it to everything there's Recalculate.
- To recalculate: pieces calculated with a cost per hour different from the current one.
- Outdated variants: SKUs whose stored cost no longer matches that of their pieces. It can happen even when all the pieces are up to date; for example, a variant created before its pieces had a cost stores an old cost.
It's only enabled if there are pending pieces or outdated variants, and it brings both up to date.
| When recalculating | What |
|---|---|
| Changes | The pieces' Cost/h, which becomes the workshop's current cost per hour (even if you had typed it by hand), their sums, and the cost and suggested price of the variants. |
| Doesn't change | Each piece's cost per kg (if you change the price of a material, that's adjusted from the piece itself) or the sale price you've set. |
What you'll see move is the margin indicator, which is exactly what you want to look at after changing your costs.
To fix a single variant, in the product itself there's a Sync link under that variant's Cost field: see Products and Variants.
Example
The Example block takes a sample plate and shows you the full calculation with your values:
| Line | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Material · Printing · Finish · Extra costs | How much each part contributes |
| Cost per plate | The total for the plate |
| Pieces per plate | How many pieces come out of that plate |
| Piece cost | The plate's cost split between its pieces |
| Sale price example | How the margin turns that cost into a sale price |
Printing almost always weighs far more than material: that's what the example is for.
Default values
The blocks appear in this order.
Default margins
- Default margin: the one applied when you create a new variant.
- Red warning below and Orange warning below: the colour of the margin field on variants. Red below the first, orange between the two and green from the second one up.
The three fields follow the order of the bar underneath, which paints those zones and marks with a line where your margin falls; the example line turns the percentages into prices for a piece that costs £10. If you haven't changed them, they are 40%, 50% and 60%.
Default material cost
The reference price of each material type, per kilo in your workshop's currency, in a Filament table (amber icon) and a Resin table (purple icon), the same icons the app uses to mark each family.
- It's per type, not per family: PLA and TPU don't cost the same, so each type carries its own price.
- It's only the default price: if the material comes from the inventory with its real cost (a filament spool or a bottle of resin), the inventory one wins. The table covers what has no inventory behind it, such as a colour picked by hand.
- With several colours, the most expensive one is used, mixing inventory ones and hand-picked ones, so you don't end up short. Details in Pieces (Cost vs. price).
- Types aren't created here: they're the same ones you pick on a piece. If we add a new one, it'll appear on its own for you to give it a price. A type without a price of yours uses the indicative one BolloPrint ships with (for example, £20/kg for PLA, £38/kg for TPU or £24/kg for Standard resin), so even if you never visit this screen the numbers come out reasonable. As soon as you save one of your own, yours wins.
Default finishes
The fixed surcharge added to the piece's cost if it's Post-processed or Painted.
Default extra costs
The recommended amount for each extra cost item you can add to a piece: Packaging, Labour, Fixings, Inserts and Magnets, and whether it's charged Per unit (once for each piece that comes off the plate) or Per build plate (just once, whether you print one or twenty).
It's only a recommendation: when you add it to a piece, the amount is copied there and stays fixed. Changing these values never touches pieces that already exist.
Watch out with labour
If your payroll is already in Hourly cost, that labour is already spread across all the print hours. Use the extra cost item only for work that isn't in there: post-processing, assembly, hand finishing.
Hourly cost
Three tabs, which are the three steps of the same calculation.
Print hours
Printers × Hours / day × Days / month. The fourth field, Hours / mo, is the result: it's calculated automatically and isn't editable.
It's the number most people get wrong and the one that weighs the most. Put in what you actually print, not the theoretical maximum: three printers working eight hours a day on average is eight, not twenty-four. It's the divisor: the higher it is, the cheaper the hour works out.
Fixed costs
The Overheads block gathers your workshop's expenses by type; everything is normalised to a monthly cost so it can be divided by the print hours. Each type asks for what it needs:
| Type | Modes and what it asks for |
|---|---|
| Fixed cost | Monthly: the amount per month (rent, internet, accountant…). Depreciation: what it cost and over how many years you write it off. Per print hour: an amount added to each hour printed. |
| Printer | Depreciation: what the printer cost and over how many years you write it off. Per print hour: what it cost and its Working life (hours). |
| Software | Subscription (with a monthly or annual period) or Perpetual licence (what it cost and over how many years you write it off). |
| Staff costs | The amount, Monthly or Annual, and the number of Employees, which multiplies it. |
| Electricity | By usage: the average power in kW × the price per kWh. Fixed monthly: an amount per month. |
There are two ways of passing on an expense:
| Way | What it describes | How it's applied |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly amounts | The whole workshop (the rent is entered just once) | They're added up and spread across your print hours |
| Per-hour modes (Fixed cost or Printer Per print hour, Electricity By usage) | A single printer: enter the consumption or cost of an average machine, not that of the whole farm | They're added directly to each hour printed |
Don't enter the same expense both ways or you'll count it twice; the app reminds you when you choose a per-hour mode.
Right at the bottom you see the calculation: monthly expenses ÷ print hours + per-hour amounts = Fixed costs / hour.
Hourly cost
The fixed costs per hour are the “clean” hour. What you know happens without a fixed invoice (broken nozzles, pieces that have to be reprinted, taxes) goes in the surcharges: percentages on the fixed costs per hour, typically maintenance, failure rate, contingencies and income tax. The result is the Hourly cost, your real number.
Each surcharge is calculated on the fixed costs per hour and then they're added together; they aren't applied on top of one another, so the order doesn't matter. With no surcharges, the hourly cost equals the fixed costs per hour.
The table shows the whole calculation so you can check it by hand: each row carries its percentage, the Fixed costs it's applied to (the same on every row) and the Extra cost it contributes; at the bottom, the sum.
The profit margin doesn't go here: it's applied on the product variant, because it's a commercial decision, not a cost.
Cost scenarios
A simulator for the million-dollar question: should I buy another printer? It starts from your cost items and surcharges and only moves the hours; it doesn't change anything in your settings. Three views:
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Curve | You pick a variable (printers, hours a day or days a month) and see how the cost per hour falls, with your current situation marked. |
| Scenario | Your setup today against a scenario you adjust, with the difference as a percentage and in your currency per piece. |
| Matrix | Every combination of printers and hours at a glance, colour-coded. |
The curve stops falling at some point: going from one printer to five cuts the cost per hour to almost a fifth, but going from twenty to a hundred barely moves it. Expenses charged per hour printed (such as electricity by usage) aren't spread out: they're paid for every hour and set a floor however much you grow.