Your first configuration

This article walks you through your first configuration, from template to first publish. A configuration is everything Quotometry needs to price a job for one process: which machines you have, which materials you stock, how the process is set up, what you charge, and what you will not go below. It is one document, it is versioned, and it is yours.

Before you begin

• The process you want to quote first, from the processes Quotometry prices: FDM, resin, a powder process, metal, CNC, cutting or moulding.
• Your machine hourly rate, or the figures to work it out.
• A recent material invoice and the material’s data sheet.
• Two or three parts you have already made and priced, to check the result against.

1. Start from a template

Every process comes with a worked configuration: real machines, real materials and plausible rates. Create your configuration from it and change what is wrong. An empty form asks you forty questions in no particular order; a template asks you to correct the ten that are actually about your shop.

2. Get the three numbers that matter most

If you only get three things right, make it these.

1. Your machine hourly rate. Not the number that sounds about right. Add up depreciation over billable hours, the space, maintenance, wear parts, energy, and an allowance for failed prints, then divide by the hours you really bill, not the hours the machine is available. Most shops that work this out properly find it is 50-100 % higher than their instinct.
2. Your material price and density. These are on an invoice and a data sheet, so there is no need to guess either, and material is usually the second-largest line.
3. Your minimums, per part, per line and per order. They stop an eleven-minute job quoting at eleven minutes’ worth of machine time. A minimum is arithmetic, not greed: the handling on a tiny part is most of its cost.

3. Leave the process settings alone at first

The process settings arrive with sensible defaults and a typical range beside each one. Leave them. Change a setting when you know something specific about your shop that contradicts it, not to explore.

The exception is anything marked calibratable. Those are the numbers nobody can know from outside your shop, so rather than guessing, fit them from jobs you have already run. That is far more accurate than any amount of careful adjustment.

4. Decide where machines and materials live

Put machines and materials in the Library if more than one configuration should share them, which is usually the case as soon as you run two processes or two price lists. A material in the library is edited once, and every configuration that uses it follows.

Keep them in the configuration when they really are specific to it.

5. Choose what a buyer is offered

Only what you decide to offer. Layer heights, materials, colours, infill levels and finishes are each a list you control, and the first entry is usually the default. A shorter list quotes faster and confuses fewer people; you can always add the unusual material later.

6. Check it, then publish

Publishing is what makes a version quotable. Before you publish:

• put a real part in the sample-quote panel beside the editor and read the breakdown;
• pin two or three golden parts, jobs whose right price you already know, and see whether the engine agrees with you;
• run the publish checks. A configuration that cannot produce a sane price will not publish, and it tells you which setting is the problem.

Next steps

• Calibration how-to: fit the calibratable settings to your machines.
• Simulator and golden parts: test a change before anyone is quoted from it.
• Widgets and theming: put the configuration in front of buyers.