New Feature: Cost and Margins!

Our top requested feature is finally here – the ability to associate costs with your Items and see their margins on your Quotes. Before we dive in, it’s worth mentioning that by default, all Users except Reseller Users can see the margins associated with a Quote. You can, however, disable margin visibility for Sales Manager and Salesperson roles on the User add or edit screen:

You can also disable margin calculations at the Quote Template level, under the Settings tab:

Also, this functionality is only available on Tower plans and above.

Onto the fun part! To start seeing margins on your Quotes, the first step is to modify your existing Items and provide a cost for each. This can be done using the updated Item importer, or Item by Item. For the latter approach, if we take a simple, fixed per unit Item as an example, you can see the new cost field beside the price. You can enter your costs as a dollar amount, or percentage. Once you’ve entered a cost, the margins are automatically calculated and displayed to the right:

Beyond providing a cost for an Item’s base price, we also offer the ability to provide a cost for your Item’s Options, in a similar fashion:

If you are using any type of percent-based pricing, for either the base price or the item options, you will not see a margin estimation, as this cannot be done until the cost of the entire Quote is calculated.

Once your Items are updated, you can see your margins while previewing or viewing a Quote:

All margin-related content is denoted by light grey text and shows the supplied price, and the margin in dollars and percentage, below. For a simple Item without options, this is shown directly below the Item:

For Items that have options, however, we show the margin breakdown for the base price and each option below their respective totals, as well as a total margin for the line item:

Finally, we show the margin grand total at the bottom of the Quote in both the totals area and at the bottom of the Cost Breakdown. You may notice that the Cost Breakdown is now always shown on Quote preview, even if you have it turned off on the Quote Template – this is to handle the display of any recurring margins, if applicable. If you have it disabled, it will still be hidden on the Quote PDF.

If you don’t see a margin grand total at the bottom of the Quote, but a question mark icon instead, this is because one or more elements of the Quote did not have a cost supplied. This is part of the reason why we show the breakdown on a per Item and option level – you may not have all costs associated with a Quote, but may still be able to glean some information from what you’ve supplied. Here’s an example:

Because a cost was not supplied for “Option 3 – no cost”, Socket couldn’t calculate a margin for that line item, nor could it calculate a margin for the entire Quote.

Our last addition was to show the margins on the dashboard and Quotes overview page, assuming a margin was calculated for the entire Quote:

That about covers it! For a more in-depth look, you can check out our knowledge base article, and if you have any questions, please contact us.