Free pricing spreadsheet for retail
A ready-made spreadsheet that builds the price from what your operation charges inside it — taxes, commissions, working capital and the contribution margin you choose — and shows, item by item, the contribution and the result of the price you already charge.
It opens with eight items filled in and the formulas ready. You swap six numbers on the parameters tab for your operation's, paste in your product list, and the spreadsheet returns the price the math calls for — and what is left of the price that is on the shelf today, before and after overhead is allocated.
It is the same math as the free calculators here: the markup comes from what the operation charges inside the price, not from a margin added on top of cost. Fixed expense is left out of the divisor on purpose — it is allocated afterwards, over what was sold — and that order is what separates contribution, which decides discounts, from result, which tells you whether the month closes.
Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx), in Portuguese · free
What is inside
The whole file, tab by tab, before you decide whether it is worth your email.
- Operation parameters
- The six numbers that drive the whole list, written once: taxes on sales, commissions and fees, working capital and desired contribution margin — the four that build the price — plus allocated fixed expense and the contribution floor, which act after it. Every row in the table reads from here.
- Item-by-item pricing
- Sixty rows with formulas: total cost, total committed in the price, divisor markup, multiplier markup and suggested price. Blue cells are yours; gray cells are math.
- The contribution and result of the price you charge
- Next to the suggested price there is a column for the price on the shelf today. The spreadsheet returns its contribution in reais and as a percentage, then deducts the allocated overhead to show what is left as result — both numbers, because they decide different things.
- The floor alert
- A status column that lights up red when an item's contribution falls below the floor or does not cover the allocated overhead, warns when the price charged is below the suggested one and tells you when the rates add up to 100% — which is when the math stops having an answer.
- The "Onde ela quebra" tab ("Where it breaks")
- Six limits written by whoever handed you the spreadsheet: the cost that goes stale, the thousand rows nobody redoes by hand, the erased formula that gives no warning. Worth reading before betting the whole operation on it.
How to use it
Four steps, in the order they happen in the first half hour with the file open.
Replace the six parameters
Taxes, commissions, working capital, desired contribution margin, allocated fixed expense and contribution floor. Percentages are percentage points — 24 for 24% — and the spreadsheet rejects any number outside the 0 to 100 range. If the four price rates add up to less than 1%, it warns you right there: it is the sign that someone typed 0.24 instead of 24.
Paste in your product list
Name, code, purchase cost and freight. If you need more than sixty rows, select the last one and drag down: the formulas follow.
Write down the price you charge today
This column is what turns the spreadsheet from a calculator into a diagnosis: without it you see the price the math calls for, with it you see the distance between that and the price on the shelf.
Start with the items that light up
Sort by the status column. What shows up in red tends to be a short list that accounts for a large share of revenue — which is where any price review starts to pay off.
Where this spreadsheet stops being enough
It solves the math. What it does not solve is the day after — and that is not a formula flaw: it is the limit of any file that someone has to open and update by hand.
- Cost goes stale before you reopen the file
- The spreadsheet does not know a new invoice arrived. The cost written in it is the one from the day someone typed it, and the price built from it stays on the shelf after the supplier raises prices.
- Nobody redoes a thousand items by hand
- With thirty items the math is laborious; with a thousand, it does not happen. In practice the price is inherited from the previous month with an adjustment on top — which is exactly what the spreadsheet shows does not work.
- An erased formula gives no warning
- Typing over a calculation cell is enough for the row to show a number that is not a calculation at all. Nothing flags it, and the error shows up at month-end close.
- Competitor prices don't come in here
- The math goes from the inside out: it tells you the price your operation needs to charge. If the store next door charges less on the item customers use to compare, the spreadsheet never finds out.
Download the pricing spreadsheet
Fill it in and the file opens on the next page, ready to download right away. It takes less than a minute.
Further reading
The blog covers the same subjects with the whole story: the operation, the numbers and what changed afterwards.
The other material
The two complement each other: one builds the price, the other tracks what happens to it afterwards.
Want to see this in your operation?
A conversation with people who calculate retail margin every day, with your numbers on screen.