Most pricing conversations start with the competition: what does the shop down the road charge for a mixed bouquet? That question has its place, but it cannot tell you whether the work in front of you pays for itself. A costing sheet answers a smaller, more useful question first: what did this arrangement cost me, line by line?
Cost first, price second
Cost and price are different numbers with different jobs. Cost is evidence: invoices, stem counts, hours, a share of the delivery run. Price is a decision: the amount you ask a customer to pay. When the two get mixed together, a busy week can feel profitable while the bank account disagrees.
The useful habit is to finish the cost side before opening the price side. Once the cost is settled, every pricing choice becomes visible: you can see how much of the ticket is recovering materials, how much is recovering your time, and how much is left over.
What belongs in the cost of one arrangement
A recipe can carry five kinds of cost, and leaving any of them out flatters the margin:
- Flowers. Stems multiplied by the price you paid per stem. If a bunch cost a fixed amount and yielded a known number of usable stems, the per-stem figure is the bunch price divided by usable stems — not by the stems that arrived.
- Waste. Broken heads, bruised petals, trimmed foliage and stems that never make it into a piece. Waste is charged on the perishable flower cost, because hard goods and labour do not shrink when a rose is discarded.
- Hard goods. Vase, foam, ribbon, wrap, card, pins, care tag. One combined figure per piece is enough for a working sheet.
- Labour. The hours this piece actually takes, multiplied by the rate you choose. The rate is a business decision; the multiplication is not.
- Delivery allocation. If a run costs money, each arrangement on it can carry a share. Optional, but leaving it at zero does not make the cost disappear.
Keystone is a convention, not a law
A common retail convention is keystone pricing: double the cost. It is easy to remember and easy to apply at a bench. It is also worth knowing exactly what it produces. Doubling the cost gives a margin of 50%, because half the ticket is cost and half is gross profit. If your actual margin needs to be higher — after waste, commission or a slow week — keystone will not get you there by itself.
The confusion usually comes from mixing markup with margin. Markup is measured against cost; margin is measured against the price. They are not the same number, and the gap widens as the numbers grow:
| Markup on cost | Equivalent margin on price |
|---|---|
| 25% | 20.0% |
| 50% | 33.3% |
| 100% (keystone) | 50.0% |
| 150% | 60.0% |
StemCost asks for a margin and solves the price directly: price = cost ÷ (1 − margin). At a 60% target margin the divisor is 0.4. A total cost of $38.48 therefore suggests a retail price of $96.21, not a doubling of the cost.
Commission changes the ticket
Wire services and marketplaces usually take their percentage from the retail price. If you quote a normal target-margin price and then pay commission out of it, the money that reaches you is below the margin you planned. The arrangement has not become more expensive to make; the payout has become smaller.
The correction is a second division. With a margin m and a commission c:
commission-adjusted price = cost ÷ ((1 − m) × (1 − c))
On the example recipe, a 20% commission moves the ticket from $96.21 to $120.27. The payout after commission is $96.22, cost is $38.48, and the margin achieved is 60.0% — the target, not a discount to it. The higher ticket is not extra profit; it is the same profit with the intermediary's share priced in.
The example, end to end
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Flowers (16 stems) | $16.95 |
| Waste at 12% | $2.03 |
| Hard goods | $6.50 |
| Labour (0.5 h × $18.00) | $9.00 |
| Delivery | $4.00 |
| Total cost | $38.48 |
| Suggested retail at 60% | $96.21 |
| Profit per piece | $57.73 |
These are placeholder costs chosen to make the arithmetic easy to follow. They are not market prices, and the tool does not pretend to know what flowers cost where you work.
Rounding, minimums and delivery
Two small decisions cause most of the drift between a sheet and a till. The first is rounding: a price rounded down by a few cents on every order is a real amount over a month. StemCost rounds retail up to the next cent for that reason. The second is the delivery share: if it is left out of the recipe, the margin on the sheet is better than the margin in the bank.
Minimum order values and delivery charges are business decisions, not arithmetic. If you use them, keep them visible and separate from the recipe so you can still see what the arrangement itself earns.
When costs change
Supplier prices move. A recipe sheet is only useful if it is cheap to update, which is why each flower line stores its own per-stem cost rather than a total. Change the stem price, and every derived number — cost, retail, commission-adjusted retail, profit — follows. Recipes saved in the browser can be loaded, corrected and saved again in a minute.
The point is not to achieve a perfect price. It is to know, before the invoice arrives, which arrangements pay for themselves and which ones quietly do not.
StemCost is a calculator, not advice. It applies the formulas in How it works to the numbers you enter and makes no claim about suitable margins, market rates or tax treatment.