The Hours You Don't Bill: Pricing the Time Away From the Laser

Ask most laser owners how long a job took and they’ll tell you what the timer said. Six minutes cutting. Fourteen minutes engraving. But the timer only measures the beam. Public engraving forums are full of the same warning in different words: pricing on laser time alone loses money on most jobs. This post is about the rest of the clock.

Where the other hours hide

Run one ordinary order and write down everything you touch, from the first message to the parcel leaving the building. For a typical custom job it looks something like this:

• The enquiry. Reading the message, asking what size and material, replying with a price, answering the “can you make it bigger?” follow-up.
• The file. Cleaning up a blurry logo, setting out a name list, getting a proof approved. Often the longest part of a small order.
• Setup. Loading and squaring the sheet, setting focus, a test fire on scrap.
• The run. The only part the beam measures — and the only part most people charge for.
• After the beam. Peeling masking, cleaning smoke residue off acrylic, sanding edges, gluing layers together.
• Packing and handling. Boxing, labelling, printing the address. One engraver on a woodworking forum pointed out that repacking a part can take around two minutes while engraving it takes seconds — and nobody quotes the two minutes.

None of that is wasted time. It’s the job. It just isn’t on the quote.

What it does to a price

Take the job the calculator at the bottom of this page opens on: a custom name plaque on a 150W machine. The laser cuts for six minutes (seven with travel moves) and the material is $8. Price just that — laser time plus material, at a 30% margin, including GST — and you get roughly $29.00.

But the whole job also has 8 minutes of setup, a $20 design fee, and 30 minutes of assembly and packing with $5 of packing materials. That’s 45 minutes of machine and hands-on time, not the six the beam was cutting. Put all of it on the quote and the same plaque is $128.00. Same job, same customer. The difference isn’t padding; it’s the time you were already spending.

Put the invisible time on the quote

You don’t need a new spreadsheet column for each kind of time. Three places cover almost all of it:

1. Setup time on each layer. Every new material load is another setup, so it repeats per layer. Count the sheet loading and the test fire here.
2. Design fee. A flat charge for file clean-up, layout and proofs. Make it visible and expected rather than absorbing it.
3. Assembly / Packaging time. Charged at your labour rate. This is the catch-all for everything after the beam stops — and it’s a good home for the customer messages, masking and handling that don’t fit anywhere else.

A short time audit makes the numbers honest. For your next three jobs, jot down start and finish times for each stage above. You’ll quickly see which kind of time you consistently forget, and you can set a standard allowance for it.

Check what the price pays you

A total on its own can’t tell you whether a job was worth doing. So we added a small check to every quote: “This price pays you”, with an hourly figure. It takes the price you’re charging before GST, takes off the material and packaging costs, and divides what remains by the hours of machine, setup and assembly time on the quote. That remainder pays for your labour, your machine and your profit.

Two things to know. It leaves out design time, because a design fee is a flat amount with no hours attached — so a job with heavy design work will pay you better than the figure suggests. And it reflects the price you actually charge, so if a minimum charge or your own adjusted price applies, the figure changes with it. If the hourly figure feels low for the effort the job took, that’s your cue: add the time you left out, or charge more.

A rule of thumb for what to count

If you did it because this customer ordered this job, it belongs in the price. If you’d do it anyway — tidying the workshop, learning a new feature, posting on social media — it belongs in your overheads, not on a single quote. (Our post on the real cost of running a laser cutter covers the second group.)

Try it on a job you’ve already priced

Pick a recent job and rebuild it in the calculator below, adding every stage you actually did. Compare the result with what you charged. If you’re close, you were pricing well. If you’re well under, you’ve just found where the hours were going. Looking for more on getting the basics right? Start with How to Price Laser Engraving Jobs and Common Pricing Mistakes Laser Engravers Make.