“It’s just three dollars of filament” is how print shops lose money. This workbook is for the other half of running one — the printer wearing out underneath every job, the prints that fail, the spools that run dry mid-print, your post-processing time, and the price that finally pays you for all of it. It turns the guessing into a calm, repeatable system without getting in the way of the part you love.
One workbook, the whole business side of the shop. Cost any print honestly, charge for the machine, budget for failures, track every gram of filament and resin, queue your jobs, and price your whole catalog from one set of assumptions.
What’s inside:
- ✦ A true print-cost calculator (Excel) — grams, hours, and your rates in; material + electricity + machine wear + a failed-print buffer + labor + packaging out, with suggested wholesale and retail prices
- ✦ Printer profiles & depreciation (Excel) — (price − resale) ÷ lifetime hours + a maintenance allowance = a machine rate per print-hour, for every FDM and resin machine you own
- ✦ A filament & resin inventory (Excel) — weigh a spool and the remaining grams, true cost per kg, and a REORDER flag compute for you
- ✦ A print job queue (Excel) — one row per job, from Queued to Shipped
- ✦ A failed-print log + troubleshooting guide — 11 failure modes (spaghetti, layer shifts, warping, wet filament, resin fails and more) with looks / causes / fixes, and a log that computes the wasted dollars
- ✦ A maintenance log (Excel) — nozzles, build surfaces, belts, FEP film, with print-hours at service
- ✦ A per-model pricing catalog (Excel) — cost a model once; re-price everything when anything changes
- ✦ A Start Here shop guide + printable logs — the cost model, depreciation, failure budgeting, pricing, model licensing, a safe shop, and print-and-use sheets for the shop wall
The working part really works: the Excel workbook has eight tabs and three live calculators — type your numbers and the costs, machine rates, and prices compute for you.
Evergreen — use it any year: the cost model and material references are timeless, and the logs use a date column you fill in yourself.
Instant digital download. Nothing ships. The files are yours to use in your own shop.
Created with AI assistance under Ardent Workshop’s creative direction, then reviewed and edited before release. This is a shop reference, not certification: every figure in the examples is illustrative — your material prices, power draw, printer lifetimes, and labor rates are yours to enter — and printer-lifetime figures are planning assumptions, not manufacturer ratings. Costing and pricing examples are illustrative, not financial or tax advice. Materials and machines carry real hazards; follow your printer manufacturer’s safety guidance and your materials’ safety data sheets. Material temperature ranges are typical published figures — the spool label wins. Selling prints of someone else’s model requires a license that allows it. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any printer, filament, or resin manufacturer, any slicer, or any marketplace.
