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Bullet Pricing Software on CD-ROM
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Establishing reasonable yet profitable pricing for dealer, distributor and retail clients for your custom bullets is made easier with this automatic Bullet Pricing Calculator on CD-ROM. It's easy to make mistakes and forget about hidden costs, but the DC-SALES bullet pricing software remembers and makes sure you include both labor and material factors, such as the bullet box, the label, any inserts or special bullet materials, and the replacement cost of your time for packaging and making the bullets. Click for instructions.

DC-SALES runs on any Windows operating system including XP, NT, 2000, and 95/98. The CD-ROM has a simple, self-starting menu that asks if you want to run the program directly from the CD-ROM with no installation required, or if you want to install it on your hard drive. It also offers to install Adobe Acrobat Reader, which it uses to display or print a bullet box label that fits the Corbin bullet packaging (charcoal foam insert pads in a triple end wall display/shipping box, for 25 to 50 bullets of any caliber up to and including the 50 BMG).

The software can also calculate the price of a core based on the core material price per pound and number of grains used in making a bullet, the cost of a bullet jacket based on the material price per pound and grain weight of the jacket, and the total cost of the bullet material as well as the cost of labor to form a single bullet and a box of bullets with your selection of bullet count. Calculates the actual cost of a box of bullets, the retail price at your indicated markup, and the dealer and distributor pricing at standard or any other discount structure. At the price, no bullet maker should be without a copy to help set realistic, profitable pricing that includes all the costs and allows for future labor expenses for the one-person shop.

The DC-SALES CD-ROM can be ordered on-line, via Corbin's secure server shopping cart with your VISA or MasterCard. Price list

Corbin Manufacturing & Supply, Inc.
PO Box 2659
White City, OR 97503 USA

Phone 9am-5pm Mon-Thurs: 541-826-5211
Fax 24-hrs: 541-826-8669
Website: http://www.corbins.com
E-mail: sales@corbins.com

The following text is a copy of the built-in instructions for DC-SALES, which pops up when you select the HELP menu choice within the program:

DC-SALES: Bullet Pricing Calculator for custom bullet makers.

The Bullet Pricing Calculator helps you determine distributor, dealer, and retail pricing for your custom made bullets. The information it uses includes the cost per pound for your core material, the number of grains of core material per bullet, the cost per pound of your jacket material (if known), the weight of jacket material in grains per bullet (if known), or instead of these figures you can enter the cost per core and the cost per jacket.

If you know the grains per bullet, and cost per pound, the program will calculate the cost per bullet for the core and the jacket. To calculate the cost per core or the cost per jacket, put a zero in the cost per core, or cost per jacket text box. This tells the program to use the weight and cost per pound, and calculate the cost per bullet from it.

With commercial bullet jackets, you may know the price per jacket already but not the cost per pound or the weight in grains of the jacket. Or, perhaps you know the cost for each core but not the weight or cost per pound. If this is the case, then enter zero for cost per pound and grains per bullet, and fill in the cost per bullet instead. The program will see that you have zero for the weight/cost per pound blanks but have entered a number other than zero for the cost per bullet. It will simply use your entry without calculating a new figure.

If you do not want to include a jacket or a core (for example, if you are making a solid copper bullet, a lead bullet, or if you want to make a powder metal bullet without a jacket) then you can enter zero in all three spaces (cost per pound, weight in grains per bullet, and cost per bullet). If all of the blanks are left at zero, the program knows you are not using anything for the jacket, or the core (depending on which set you left at zero). Therefore it will leave out the jacket or the core.

If you leave both sets of data blank, then there is no jacket and no core, and that means no bullet! In that case, the program will reset to default values just as if you had pressed the RESET button.

When you click the CALCULATE button, the program will calculate the distributor, dealer, and retail pricing based on the retail markup percentage, and the dealer and distributor discount percentages that you enter. If you don't enter anything, the default values will be used.

The price for a box of bullets depends not just on the core and the jacket cost, but also on the labor for making the bullets, and the labor for packaging them as well as the material costs for the package. The package cost is applied to the number of bullets in the package, so you must enter this number. The package cost includes these items, which you need to add up and enter in the blank:

1. The cost for a label, if used on the package.
2. The cost of the box or container.
3. The cost of any packing materials.

The bullet pricing is divided into two sections, the material and the labor. The labor questions include the labor cost per hour. This is the amount you either pay yourself for the work, or the amount you would have to pay to get someone else to do the same work. Note that you do not actually have to pay this to anyone, but you still need to figure your cost based on the amount you would need to pay to get someone else to do it.

This is NOT the same as your profit. It is an expense, whether you pay it to yourself or to someone else. In the long run, if you pocket this labor cost yourself, it has the effect of adding to your personal income from operations, but you should always keep the labor cost separate from the operating profit. If you want to expand and grow, suddenly you will find that the labor you have been considering income is a real expense. If you have always treated it as an expense, it is not a shock. You will have the income built into your pricing to cover it and still pay you a reasonable profit for managing and putting together the business, replacing equipment and expansion.

Another figure under labor is the number of minutes it takes to make one bullet. You can find this out most accurately by starting the clock, making about 100 bullets, and then stopping the clock. Write down the number of minutes it took to make 100 bullets. Divide this by 100, and you have the time in minutes that it takes to make one bullet. This makes it much easier to get an accurate figure, because it averages your slower first bullet with your faster ones as you get familiar with the routine and your fingers start to automatically do the right thing, as well as factoring in those where you get ahead of yourself and make a couple of mistakes that slow you down. Over a run of 100 bullets, the net result is a good average speed, which could be badly skewed if you just made one and timed it. Just starting and stopping the timer adds time of a significant percentage when you make one bullet. Yet compared to the time for 100 bullets, it becomes insignificant.

Based on the labor cost per hour, the program knows how much it costs in labor to make one bullet, and how many bullets you put in a box. It multiplies the cost per bullet, by the number in one box, for total cost for a box of bullets in labor. It adds the material cost per bullet times number of bullets per box to this labor cost, and then adds the packaging cost and the packaging labor. You enter the time in minutes that it takes to put the bullets in the package and have it ready to be sold or shipped.

If you do mail-order sales, your customers should be paying for the shipping cost and the cost of labor for preparing the shipping documents, any box or shipping carton needed, mailing label, and other expenses that you need to pay for in some way. You can include these costs in your packaging cost if you wish, if you only sell by mail order.

Note that there is a distinction between the dealer and distributor discount percentage, and the retail markup percentage. The dealer and distributor discounts are based on the retail price, not on your cost. The retail price is based on the markup from cost. Typically, your markup from cost is at least 40%, and the discount from retail is typically 15% for dealer and 25% for distributor. This does NOT mean the distributor gets more profit than the dealer, because the distributor sells the package at the dealer price to dealers, and only keeps the difference.

Also, the retail price is not 40% of the cost, in our example, but is actually the cost plus 40% (mark-up) which is the same as 140% times cost. The program automatically converts the markup from 40% to 140% before multiplying times cost per box, and figures the dealer and distributor pricing by multiplying the retail price times 100 minus the discount percentage times 0.01.

You can print the form by clicking on the print menu item, which gives you the option of printing any number of copies of the information you see on screen.




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