Monthly Budget Planner
Plan monthly income and spending across 12 categories. Compares budget vs actual spend, calculates savings rate, and flags over-budget months. Simple enough for first-time budgeters, detailed enough for serious savers.
Excel • Personal FinanceOverhead is the money that leaves your account whether you book ten jobs this month or none. Most small shops know theirs roughly. "About seven grand a month." And that rough number is where the pricing starts to drift, because two things get calculated off it: your monthly break-even, and the overhead rate applied to every job you quote. Get it wrong by $700 a month and you give away roughly $8,400 a year across your jobs, spread thin enough that it never appears as a line item.
This workflow builds the number once, then pushes it into both of those places. One example runs the whole way through: a three-person service contractor with two vans.
Step 1: List the fixed lines, and be strict about what counts
A cost belongs in overhead if it does not move when your job volume moves. Rent is overhead. Insurance is overhead. The materials on Tuesday's install are not. Those are direct cost, and they belong on the variable side of the next step.
Two things get misfiled more than everything else combined: field wages and advertising. Field labor stays direct cost even when you pay the tech a salary, while your office manager's wage is overhead. A fixed monthly agency retainer is overhead. Ad spend you throttle up because you want more calls this week is not.
Then convert everything to a monthly figure. Annual premiums, bond renewals and yearly software plans get divided by twelve, even if the money actually leaves in one lump in March. If your office manager is hourly rather than salaried, run a real month through the Time Card Calculator and use that instead of a guess.
| Fixed line | Monthly | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Shop / yard rent | $1,450 | Lease rate including CAM, not last month's bank debit |
| Liability + commercial auto insurance | $610 | Annual premium ÷ 12 |
| Van loan | $870 | Computed in Step 2 |
| Equipment loan | $295 | Computed in Step 2 |
| Admin wage + payroll tax | $2,850 | Office and dispatch only; field wages are direct cost |
| Software (CRM, accounting, scheduling) | $180 | Annual plans ÷ 12 |
| Phone + internet | $145 | Contract rate |
| Utilities + waste | $210 | Twelve-month average, not this month's bill |
| Accounting, legal, filings | $220 | Annual ÷ 12 |
| Licences, bonds, memberships | $70 | Annual ÷ 12 |
| Advertising retainer | $400 | Fixed retainer only; variable ad spend is excluded |
| Total fixed overhead | $7,300 | $87,600 per year |
Step 2: Turn financed vehicles and equipment into exact monthly lines
Two of those lines are loan payments. Guessing them is where the total starts to rot: you remember the sticker price and the term, divide principal by months, and the figure that falls out ignores interest completely. It can understate the line by hundreds. Compute both.
Monthly payment = $869.83 → overhead line: $870
Straight division would have said $700, a $170/month error
Equipment: $9,000 at 11% over 36 months. Run it again: loan EMI for $9,000 / 11% / 36 months.
Monthly payment = $294.65 → overhead line: $295Use the payment, not the depreciation figure your accountant books. Overhead here is a cash-out planning number, so what counts is the money that actually leaves the account each month.
Step 3: Feed the total into your monthly break-even
The $7,300 total is the fixed-cost input for break-even. You also need an average invoice and the average variable cost sitting inside it: materials, field labor and fuel on a typical job. For this shop that is a $480 average invoice against $295 of variable cost, leaving $185 of contribution per job.
Break-even = 7,300 / 185 = 39.5 → 40 jobs/month
With $3,000 profit = 10,300 / 185 = 55.7 → 56 jobs/monthIf you bill by retainer or day rate rather than per job, the Service Business Break-Even Calculator takes the same four inputs.
Forty jobs is what the dispatch board has to clear before a single dollar of profit exists. This shop runs about 62 a month, so there is real headroom. Watch the 40-to-56 gap, though. Sixteen jobs a month is what the $3,000 target costs you.
Step 4: Convert the same overhead into a rate you can charge per job
Break-even counts jobs. It says nothing about what to charge for one of them. For that, overhead has to stop being a monthly lump and become a percentage that rides on top of every job's direct cost:
Overhead rate = annual overhead ÷ annual direct costAnnual overhead = 7,300 × 12 = $87,600
Annual direct cost = labor 132,000 + materials 76,000
+ subs 11,000 = $219,000
Overhead rate = 87,600 / 219,000 = 0.40 = 40%Direct cost, not revenue. Divide by revenue and you get a smaller number that will not recover your overhead once you apply it to costs. Pull the direct-cost figure out of last year's books: everything you spent that a specific job caused. Anything you cannot trace back to a job is overhead, and it belongs up in the numerator.
Step 5: Price a real job with the rate applied
A bathroom rough-in: $640 in materials, 11 labor hours at $38 loaded, no subcontractor, 20% target margin.
Direct cost = 640 + (11 × 38) = $1,058
Overhead @40% = 1,058 × 0.40 = $423
Total cost = $1,481
Price @ 20% margin = 1,481 / 0.80 = $1,852Cross-check the same job as a markup rather than a margin in the Contractor Markup Calculator. A 20% margin is a 25% markup. Quote 20% markup on a $1,481 cost and you lose about $75 on this job alone.
That $423 covers this job's share of the rent, the insurance, the two loan payments and the office wage. None of it is profit, and none of it is padding. Skip it, quote at direct cost plus margin, and the $423 comes straight out of what you thought was profit.
Step 6: Re-run the rate every time a fixed cost changes
This is the step that gets skipped.
An overhead rate is a snapshot of a ratio. The moment either side of it moves while the rate sits still, every quote you send out is wrong, and nothing in your quoting process will tell you. Say the shop takes a bigger unit. Rent up $300, insurance up $150, a third van loan at $300. Overhead goes from $7,300 to $8,050 a month, or $96,600 a year, while direct cost holds at $219,000.
New rate = 96,600 / 219,000 = 44.1% (was 40%)
Same bathroom job: 1,058 × 0.441 = $467 recovered, not $423
Break-even: 8,050 / 185 = 43.5 → 44 jobs/month, not 40The denominator moves too. Hire a tech and annual direct cost rises, so the rate falls; hang on to the old higher one and you are overpricing every bid you send. Lose a tech while overhead stays put and the rate has to go up, or you under-recover across a smaller base of work.
Sanity-check your own hours against it
If you are the one in the van, that $87,600 is also what your billable hours have to carry. Put it into the Billable Hours Calculator as business costs, alongside your target take-home. If the hourly rate that comes back sits well above what your market pays, go back to the fixed-line list and cut there before you touch the margin.
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If the business is seasonal, don't spread overhead flat
Everything above spreads the annual overhead total evenly across twelve months, which works fine for a business that runs at roughly the same pace all year. It breaks down for a real off season. Landscaping, HVAC install, and anything weather-dependent can see direct cost drop close to zero for two or three months a year, and forcing that same flat overhead rate onto the slow months demands a recovery percentage no winter quote could survive.
The fix: recover a heavier share of annual overhead during the months you're actually working. A landscaper doing 80% of the year's volume in seven active months should recover roughly that same 80% of overhead inside those seven months, not an even twelfth spread across all twelve. The annual overhead total from Step 1 stays correct either way, it's only the monthly spread that needs to bend to match when the business actually earns its revenue.