Quote Calculator

The problem

Noah's Navy was a printing and graphic design company, run by my mother. Every job that came in had to be priced by hand before it could be answered — and most of that arithmetic was the same arithmetic as the last job. Paper, film, plates, printing, trimming, packing, transport: the rates barely moved between jobs, but all of them were recalculated every time.

The cost wasn't difficulty, it was repetition. The sum sat between an enquiry and a reply, and it had to be redone before every answer.

What it does

Ten cost inputs, a 35% margin, quotes rounded up to the nearest 200, and 16% VAT, with total, profit and profit percentage recalculating live as the numbers change. The rounding rule is the part worth keeping: it isn't a tidy-number heuristic, it's how the shop already quoted — encoded rather than replaced.

Where it stands

The calculator works, and it does cut the arithmetic down to one screen. What it doesn't do yet is the thing that motivated it: it still asks for every cost on every job, including the rates that rarely change. The next version splits stable rates from per-job quantities, so a quote only asks what's actually different this time — and files finished quotes under client accounts as dated documents.