Free garment cost sheet for Excel

What you enter

• Your monthly overhead and productive hours, which give an overhead rate per labour hour.
• Your target margin.
• For each batch: style, pieces cut, rejected pieces, fabric per piece, fabric price, wastage percentage and trims per piece.
• Labour hours for the batch, labour rate, outside work per piece and selling price before tax.

What it works out

• Fabric, wastage, trims, labour, outside work and overhead for the batch.
• Batch cost and cost per good piece.
• Margin per piece and margin percentage.
• The selling price that reaches your target margin.

There are 16 rows, in one currency of your choice. The formulas are open, so you can follow or change them. It opens in Excel, and in other spreadsheet apps that read .xlsx files.

The example row

The lilac row at the top is an example with made-up figures: 20 uniform shirts at 1.6 metres each. It gives a batch cost of 913.20 and a cost per piece of 45.66. At a selling price of 60 before tax, that is a margin of 23.9%. The monthly overhead and hours at the top of the sheet are example figures too. Overwrite them all with your own.

The full working, line by line, is in how to calculate garment cost per piece.

Getting good numbers into it

• Cost a batch you have already finished. It shows how close your usual guess was.
• Put in wastage from real cut records. Start with one batch and refine it.
• Add hours from all stages, including pressing and packing.
• Rejected pieces stay in the sum. Their cost moves onto the good pieces, which is what happens to your money.

When typing it all in gets old

This sheet is as accurate as what is typed into it, and that usually happens after the work is done. In Tailoq, cost per piece comes from issued material, labour and outside work recorded as the job moves, and margin shows at Ready. Overhead is not part of that figure.