Every shop has one: the quote that looked healthy on paper and lost money on the floor. It’s almost never the margin that was wrong. It’s one of the inputs underneath it — the material you actually consumed, the pierces nobody counted, the twenty minutes of handling that never made it onto the sheet.
A laser cutting quote comes down to five numbers. Get each one honest and the margin takes care of itself. Here’s how each is built, worked through on a real part, and where the money quietly leaks out.
1. Material — Charge for the Sheet, Not the Part
The most common quoting shortcut is part area × price per square inch. It feels reasonable and it’s wrong, because your customer isn’t buying part area — they’re buying the sheet you consume to make it. A part nested at 60% utilization costs you a third more material than the same part at 80%, and the flat-rate method can’t see the difference.
The honest formula is (sheet cost × sheets used) ÷ parts produced. That means you need to know how the job nests before you price it, not after the PO lands. It also forces a remnant policy: on a small run that uses a fifth of a sheet, do you charge the whole sheet, or credit the usable drop you’ll keep on the rack? Either answer is fine. Not having an answer is how a $40 job eats a $90 sheet.
2. Cut Time — Length, Pierces, and Rapids
Machine time has three parts: cut length ÷ feed rate, plus pierces × pierce time, plus the rapid traverse between cuts. The feed rate and pierce time should come from your tech table for that exact material, thickness, and assist gas — not a shop-wide average. A 1/4" mild steel feed rate applied to 1/2" plate will understate cut time by more than half.
Pierces are the number most quotes skip. A part with forty holes on thick plate can spend more time piercing than cutting. Rapids are the other quiet one: on a nest of small parts the head spends a real fraction of its time just moving; 5–10% of cut time is a fair allowance, more for a sheet of washers.
Take a 1/4" mild steel bracket with 42 inches of cut and 6 pierces. Say your table gives 110 ipm and a 0.9-second pierce (the numbers here are illustrative — use your own). Cutting is 42 ÷ 110 = 0.38 minutes, about 23 seconds. Pierces add 5.4 seconds. Rapids at 10% add another 2–3. Call it 31 seconds per part, or 52 minutes of machine time for a hundred. Quote it without the pierces and you’ve undercounted by 17% before you’ve even started.
3. Machine Rate — What an Hour Actually Costs
Your hourly rate has to cover the machine payment or depreciation, power, assist gas, consumables (nozzles, protective windows, lenses), maintenance, floor space, and the operator standing in front of it. Nitrogen deserves its own line — on stainless and aluminum it can be the single largest consumable, and a rate built around oxygen on mild steel will bleed on every N2 job. Either build separate rates by gas or charge gas as its own line item.
The mistake here is dividing annual cost by 2,080 hours. A single-shift laser might bill 1,200–1,500 hours a year once you subtract setup, maintenance, and idle time. Divide by real billable hours or the rate is fiction. For the bracket: 31 seconds at an illustrative $150/hr is $1.29 per part in machine time.
4. Setup, Programming, and Handling
Loading the sheet, programming and nesting the job, unloading and sorting parts, deburring, packing. These are fixed per job, which is exactly why they get skipped on “quick” work — twenty minutes of handling on a $60 order is a third of the revenue, unpaid. Amortize them across the quantity and you get quantity breaks that are real instead of guessed. On our bracket, an hour of setup and handling at shop rate spread over a hundred parts is about $1.60 each. Over ten parts it’s $16 each, and the quote should say so.
5. Margin — Applied to Cost, Not Guessed at the End
Add the pieces first, then apply margin — and be clear which word you mean. A 30% markup is a 23% margin. Shops that “add 30%” and think they’re at 30% margin are giving away seven points on every job.
Finishing the bracket with made-up but realistic numbers: roughly $3.70 in sheet at 75% utilization, $1.29 in machine time, $1.60 in setup and handling — $6.59 cost. At a 25% margin (cost ÷ 0.75) the price is about $8.80. Now run the shortcuts: quote part area instead of consumed sheet, forget the pierces, skip the handling, and the same part “costs” about $4.70. That quote wins the job and loses money on every piece.
The Mistakes That Hide in a Quote
Quoting part area instead of consumed sheet. The nest decides your material cost, not the part outline.
One feed rate for everything. Thickness, material, and gas each change the number; the tech table exists for a reason.
Ignoring pierces on hole-heavy parts. Count them. On thick plate they can be the majority of the cycle.
Not charging setup on small runs. The smaller the job, the more setup matters, not less.
Confusing markup with margin. Pick one, define it, use it everywhere.
Pricing off the catalog when the rack says otherwise. If you have a remnant that fits, your cost is lower — and if you’re out and have to buy a full sheet, it’s higher. Quote against what you actually have.
Doing This on Every Quote
Done properly by hand, this is twenty or thirty minutes per quote — which is exactly why shops reach for the shortcuts. The fix isn’t working faster; it’s having the pieces already connected. PolygonLogix pulls feed rates and pierce times from your own imported tech tables, runs a true-shape nest on the actual parts before it prices them, and applies your machine rates, setup, and margin the same way every time — so the material number is the sheet you’ll really use and the time number includes every pierce. The quote takes seconds, and it’s the one you’d have written if you had half an hour.