How to price a ceramic coating

The four variables, in order of impact

1. Paint condition. The dominant variable and the one customers cannot assess. Decontamination, clay, and one, two or three correction stages are the difference between a long day and most of a week.

2. Vehicle size. Panel area drives prep hours and product use together. SUVs and MPVs are around 41 percent of detailing volume, so a flat price across sizes loses money on the most common job. Why you are probably underquoting.

3. Coating spec. A one-year consumer product and a multi-year professional system are different costs and different labour.

4. Extras. Wheels off, calipers, trim, glass, interior coating. Each should be a named add-on with its own price rather than something absorbed into "the coating."

Build the price from your floor

floor = cost per sellable hour
        x realistic block hours (prep + application + cure supervision)
        x vehicle-size multiplier
      + product cost
      + condition band
      + margin

Cost per sellable hour is monthly business costs — including paying yourself — divided by the hours you can actually sell. Not 160. Subtract quoting, driving, admin and empty slots, and for most solo operators it is 60 to 90 hours a month. Run it in the free calculator.

Realistic block hours means the whole booking, not the hands-on time. If the car occupies your bay overnight to cure, that bay is not earning anything else.

Published condition bands

Bands turn the most contentious part of the quote into a lookup, and they let a customer see where their car sits before you have to tell them.

Say plainly that D may be quoted separately after inspection. A band D car quoted as band C is where the money and the goodwill both go.

Quoting without seeing the car

You will be asked to. Do it like this:

Phone photos understate defects almost completely. They flatten swirls and hide marring, and a customer photographing their own car is not lighting it to reveal problems. A range plus an inspection step is honest, and it removes the argument that otherwise happens in the driveway with the car already there.

The deposit is not optional on this job

A four-hour detail that no-shows costs you four hours. A two-day coating booking that no-shows costs you two days you cannot refill, plus product you may have already opened.

Mobile-detailing software vendors consistently report no-show and cancellation rates of 15–25 percent without deposits, dropping under 5 percent with deposits plus reminders. Those are vendor figures rather than independent research and should be read as directional — but even at the low end, on a job of this size, one in seven bookings evaporating is not survivable.

Take 20–25 percent, credit it against the final invoice, and put it in the booking confirmation as one line alongside the time and the price. Presented as procedure, it reads as procedure. What a no-show actually costs.

Aftercare, and the thing that costs you later

Write down what the customer must do and must not do, and give it to them. Automatic car washes, the wrong shampoo, and a bird-dropping left for a fortnight are the three that produce a complaint about your coating six weeks later.

A one-page aftercare sheet handed over at collection is the cheapest warranty-dispute prevention available. Have them acknowledge it.

Where Rigsheet fits

Coating jobs are exactly the shape that a generic field-service tool handles badly: multi-day blocks, size multipliers, condition bands, per-service deposits, and a booking that must not be double-booked over.

Rigsheet builds vehicle-size multipliers and per-service deposit rules in as defaults, and blocks the calendar for the real duration rather than the billed hours. From $4/month — four tiers up to $39, flat — no per-user fee, no appointment cap. In development. Every competitor compared.

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