Owner: Tuning Your Prices
The Settings screen is your control panel. Every price, rate, and fee that SignQuote uses to build a quote lives here, and every one of them is yours to change. This page is for the shop owner.
A few things that make Settings safe to play with:
- Nothing is blank. Every number is pre-filled with a researched default, and under each field there’s a short note saying where that number came from.
- Changes take effect right away. Edit a number and it applies to every new quote from that moment on. Open an old quote later and it re-prices itself at your current numbers.
- You can always go back. Every section has a
Reset to defaultsbutton in its top-right corner that restores just that section’s numbers.
Your salesperson never sees any of the cost numbers on this screen — only the finished prices on the quote. Costs and margins live here, with you. See Understanding the price.
The sections, in plain terms
Per-inch rates
This is the single biggest lever on a channel-letter quote. It’s your headline price per inch of letter height, with one rate for each mounting style:
| Field | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Front-lit, flush mount | Lit letters mounted flat to the wall |
| Front-lit, raceway mount | Lit letters on a raceway box |
| Halo / reverse-lit | Back-lit “halo” letters |
Nudge any of these and a channel-letter price moves immediately. If you only change one thing on this whole screen, make it these.
Channel-letter materials
What your raw materials cost — return coil, acrylic faces, ACM backing, trim cap, LED wiring and studs, raceway, and a small scrap / waste allowance. These numbers feed the behind-the-scenes margin check (the colored badge on a quote), not the price the customer sees. Set them to your real costs and the margin badge becomes a trustworthy gut-check.
LEDs & power
A small table of the LED products you stock, with the Cost $/module, Watts/module, and Modules/ft for each:
- Generic 12V module — a plain placeholder module
- SloanLED Prism 12 — the default; this is what new quotes use
- SloanLED high output — a brighter, pricier option
Below the table are the power-supply settings (cost each, max watts, and the derate). Edit the row that matches what you actually buy.
Labor
Your shop’s hourly rates — CNC / bending and Assembly — plus a labor burden percentage and a Default markup. The default markup is the starting point a salesperson sees in the Advanced area of a quote; they can nudge it per job, but this sets the norm.
Install & fees
Your job-level charges and the margin-badge colors:
- Install crew, $/hr and an Install minimum (covers a short trip)
- Crane fee, Permit fee, Engineering (PE stamp) fee, and a Design fee for channel-letter jobs
- Minimum job charge — shipped turned off (set to
0). If your shop won’t take a job under, say, a few hundred dollars, type that number in here so no quote ever lands below it. - Margin badge thresholds — the red-below and amber-below percentages that decide when a quote’s margin badge turns red or amber for you.
Dimensional letter price grid
A table of price-per-letter at 6″ / 12″ / 18″ / 24″ for each material (routed PVC, flat acrylic, flat aluminum, cast aluminum, cast bronze), plus the finish and mount multipliers below it.
Notice the amber tag on this card: “Reseller list pricing — dealer-net is lower.” The seeded grid is full list price. Your dealer almost certainly charges you less, so adjust these numbers down to what you actually pay — otherwise your dimensional-letter quotes will run high.
Shop info
Everything that prints at the top and bottom of your PDF quotes:
- Shop name, Address, Phone, Email
- Logo — click
Upload logoto add a PNG or JPG; it appears in the PDF header. UseRemoveto swap it out. - Quote validity (days) — how long a quote stays good; this sets the valid-until date on the PDF.
- Terms — your terms-and-conditions text, printed above the signature line.
Fill these in once and every quote comes out on your letterhead. See The PDF quote.
Pricing preview (owner only)
At the very bottom, “Pricing preview — full cost breakdown” lets you pick any quote and see its complete breakdown — materials, labor, your margin, and the quoted total — laid out line by line. It recalculates live as you edit the numbers above, so you can watch a change ripple through before you trust it.
This is the one place in the whole app where costs and margins are shown, and only you ever see it.
Demo data
The “Reset demo data” button (its own card) restores the two example quotes — #1001 “CAFE” and #1002 “LAW OFFICE” — and every default price on this screen. It asks you to confirm first, and it does delete quotes you’ve created, so use it to start fresh between demos, not on your live shop data.
Setting up your shop for the first time
The fast path. To make these numbers truly yours, do these four things and you’re 90% there. Everything else you can fine-tune later.
Set your per-inch rates
In Per-inch rates, enter your real channel-letter prices for flush, raceway, and halo. This moves the most money, so start here.
Bring the dimensional grid down to your cost
In the Dimensional letter price grid, lower the numbers to your dealer-net pricing (remember, the seeded grid is list price, not what you pay).
Enter your fees
In Install & fees, set your install rate and minimum, crane, permit, engineering, and design fees — and, if you have one, your minimum job charge.
Fill in your shop info and logo
In Shop info, type your name, address, phone, and email, then upload your logo and set your quote validity and terms.
When you’re done, open the Pricing preview at the bottom, pick a quote, and confirm the breakdown and margin look right. Then hand the Quotes screen to your counter staff — they’ll never see any of this.