Painting (Maler)
The customer looks at the final coat and pays for that. Three quarters of your work sits underneath it and cannot be seen even up close.
How it is billed
Walls and ceilings go in square metres, trims and profiles in running metres, doors and windows by the piece, masking the room as a lump sum. Surface preparation is its own item — not an afterthought to painting. Every item has its own unit, so the quote shows what the customer is really paying for. Areas and volumes are worked out in the program itself: you enter the dimensions wall by wall and ceiling by ceiling, name every measurement your own way, and the total goes into the quote as a finished item with the breakdown — you can see where the figure came from. The program does not deduct openings; that stays with you.
What gets lost on paper
You do not lose metres — you lose the work nobody sees. Filling, priming, masking windows and sockets make up a third to almost half the cost per square metre, and in the quote they usually vanish into the word „painting". A smooth wall is about twenty minutes per square metre, a wall needing renovation up to forty-five — the same area on paper, twice as much of your time. Then there is the measurement: under VOB/C openings up to 2.5 m² are not deducted, larger ones are. Not knowing that, you either give away metres or argue about them afterwards.
Work out what it costs you
Take the last flat and count the hours for preparation separately from the hours for painting. Then check how many of the first ones appeared in the quote as their own item. Multiply the difference by your hourly rate and by the number of flats in a year. That is not a loss on material — those are hours you worked and gave away.
Five minutes a day
Before you roll out the sheeting: a photo of the wall as you found it. In the evening: your hours and your crew’s, the material issued to this job. The before photo stays with the job and is still there when the customer claims a month later that the cracks are yours.
What the program watches for you
The program keeps quote, job, hours and photos in one place, so the invoice comes from what you actually did, not from memory. It watches the warranty — for work under VOB/B it counts from handover. It watches the reverse charge under §13b when you paint for another construction firm, and the invoicing deadline: for work on a property you have six months, private customers included.
At the end of the year
Sixty per cent of your customers are private individuals, so the annual accounts are hundreds of small items. They are all counted already: revenue, material, hours, kilometres. You look at a finished figure instead of assembling it from receipts in January.
The key is entering your data consistently...
