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Custom commission quote calculator
Enter the weight, the metal cost, the stones and the hours, and see the quote and the deposit before you say a number out loud.
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Billable bench hours and commission capacity calculator
Studio hours are not bench hours, and the difference decides whether your shop rate covers the year or only the part of it a client pays for.
Ask a designer how many hours she works and she will say fifty. Ask how many hours she was at the bench with a file or a torch in her hand and the honest answer is often half that. The rest went to consultations, sourcing calls, CAD revisions, photographing finished work, packing, shipping, insurance paperwork and the appointment that turned into a conversation about a divorce.
None of that is wasted time. All of it is unbillable time, and your shop rate has to carry it. This calculator takes your studio week apart, shows the billable ratio underneath it, and turns the result into a realistic annual bench capacity and a number of commissions per month you can actually deliver.
Your result
Billable bench hours per week
28.0
The only hours a client is ever asked to pay for directly.
Billable ratio
0.6%
Share of your working week that reaches the bench.
Bench hours available per year
1,316
Your real annual supply of bench time, weeks off already removed.
Commissions you can deliver per month
9.1
How many jobs of your average size the year actually holds.
If your booked commissions run above the monthly figure, you are borrowing hours from evenings, and that debt always comes due at a wedding deadline.
The billable ratio is the number that sets your rate
If a designer works forty five hours and reaches the bench for twenty eight, every studio cost has to be recovered across those twenty eight. Rent, insurance, tools, the CAD seat, the wax printer, the loupe you replaced, the show booth and your own pay all divide by billable hours, never by studio hours. A shop rate set as though the whole week were billable comes up short by roughly the size of the gap.
This is also why raising a rate feels harder than it should. The instinct is to compare your hourly figure against a wage, which is the wrong comparison. Your hourly figure carries the unbillable two fifths of the week, the studio and the risk of a job that goes wrong at the setting stage.
What to do when capacity and the booking calendar disagree
When the commissions per month figure comes out below what you have promised, there are only four moves and all of them are legitimate. Raise the rate so fewer jobs cover the year. Send setting or finishing out to a trade setter. Narrow what you accept so the average job is shorter. Or extend delivery windows so the same work spreads over more weeks.
What does not work is absorbing it. A rush wedding commission taken on top of a full book gets built in the evenings, and evening work at the bench is where mistakes with a client heirloom happen. Look at the number, then decide which of the four moves you are willing to make before you say yes to the next inquiry.
Questions about this calculator
Should CAD time count as billable?
Count it separately from bench hours, since it is design work rather than metal work, and many designers bill it as a design fee or fold it into the quote. What matters is that it is not free. If you put six hours into revisions, those hours came out of the same week the bench needed.
Is a billable ratio around sixty percent normal for a solo studio?
It is a common range for a designer working alone with a steady commission flow. Higher usually means someone else handles client contact or shipping. Much lower often means consultations are running long or that inquiries are not being qualified before a meeting is offered.
How do I lift my billable hours without working longer?
The two biggest gains are usually qualifying inquiries before a full consultation and batching shipping and photography into one block rather than scattering them. Sending setting out to a trade setter converts your hours into a subcontractor cost you can quote.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The commission intake and stage approval checklist
Every commission dispute a designer ever has traces back to something on this list that nobody wrote down.
Now make that figure a document she can sign
The total on this page is one piece worked out once. In BeadInvoice the same math runs on every commission, with the metal line repriced at the current cost per gram and the hold date printed on the quote the client keeps. Book a walkthrough and we will load your alloys, your loss percentage and your shop rate so the first quote is real.