Price the room, not the surprise underneath it
The reality of the job
Tiling has a narrower margin than it looks, because material is such a large share of the job.
The substrate is the risk, and you can’t see it when you quote
You price a bathroom floor, pull the old tile, and find a soft subfloor or a failed membrane. That’s a real change in scope and cost — but only if it becomes a documented variation instead of an afternoon you quietly absorb.
Waste factor is money, and it isn’t optional
You never buy exactly the square footage you lay. Ten percent on a straight lay, more on a diagonal or herringbone, more again on a small room full of cuts. Quote the bare area and the overage comes straight out of your margin.
The customer changes the pattern after you’ve priced it
Switching from a straight lay to a herringbone doesn’t change the square footage at all, but it can change the labour and the waste dramatically. If the quote only recorded an area and a price, there’s nothing to point at when the price has to move.
Material is most of the job cost, so a bad estimate hurts twice
On a lot of tiling work, tile, thinset, membrane and grout are the majority of what the job costs you. That means small errors in material estimating do more damage here than in trades where labour dominates — and you usually find out weeks later, if at all.
How Voiczer changes it
What changes when the area, the pattern and the material all live in the same record.
Say the area, the pattern and the prep
Describe the job as you’d describe it to the customer — “forty square feet of floor, twelve-inch porcelain, straight lay, plus removing the old vinyl” — and it becomes an itemised quote priced against your own per-square-foot rates.
Rates that already know pattern costs more
Keep separate rates for straight lay, diagonal and herringbone, plus removal, levelling and waterproofing, so the difference between two layouts is a line in the price book rather than a number you have to justify from memory.
Turn the surprise under the floor into a variation, not a favour
When you pull the old tile and the subfloor is rotten, add the repair on-site as its own priced line. It updates the same quote the customer already accepted, so the extra work is agreed before you do it rather than explained after.
Every tile run photographed against the job
Snap the receipt at the tile shop or the builders’ merchant and Voiczer pulls the total, supplier and date off it and files it against that bathroom. The overage you actually bought is recorded, not estimated.
See the margin where material dominates
Because the material receipts and the invoice sit on the same job, you can see what a job really kept — not just what it billed. That’s the number that tells you whether your per-square-foot rate still works at this year’s tile prices.
What it looks like on a real bathroom
A customer wants a bathroom floor retiled — about forty square feet, twelve-inch porcelain, straight lay over an old vinyl floor that has to come up first.
You describe it on site. Voiczer prices the removal, the levelling, the tile area and the waste against your own rates and sends an itemised quote before you leave. The customer can see the removal as its own line, so it doesn’t read as padding.
On the day, the subfloor under the vinyl turns out to be soft in one corner. You add the repair on-site as a variation — priced, described, and sent for approval while you’re standing in the room. They approve it from their phone, and the job that would have cost you an unpaid afternoon is billed as the extra work it actually was.
Built for tilers — priced from your own rates
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