Running a Painting & Decorating Business: Surface Takeoffs, Production Rates, Coats & Coverage, Crew Days, Job Pricing and Profit per Job

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Measure up a fictional six-room flat: net wall areas after doors and windows, ceiling areas, skirting metres for the trim and the total area the quote will be built on.
• Rate every surface of the fictional flat, look up a prep rate for its condition with XLOOKUP, turn minutes per m² into prep hours, add the filler patches and see how much of the prep time the poor surfaces eat.
• Look up a fictional production rate for each surface and method in a two-way table, turn area × coats into painting hours, total the hours per room and work out the blended rate of the whole job.
• Turn areas and coats into litres using fictional label coverage, add a waste allowance, round up to whole cans, price the paint and add the sundries that every job needs.
• Turn each fictional job's hours into crew working days, add drying gaps, find the finish date with WORKDAY around weekends and closure days, flag jobs that miss the promised date and size the order book in painter-days.
• Build the full cost of a fictional job from labour, materials and overhead per crew day, set the price for a target margin, compare it with the old markup method and express the price per m².
• Compare six fictional jobs after completion: hours variance in percent, actual profit from actual hours and materials, total hours over quote, and a highlight for every job outside the tolerance.
• Turn a quarter of fictional quotes into a business dashboard: profit per crew day by job type, the value win rate, the average won job and a chart that shows which kind of work pays best.