Excel file. No email, no signup. Yours to edit.
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Read Me | How the sheet works and which cells to edit. Read it once before your first quote. |
| Rooms | One row per room. Enter length, width, ceiling height, doors and windows; it returns net wall area, ceiling area and trim linear feet. |
| Estimate | Pulls the room totals and prices the job: paint and primer gallons, materials, labour lines, overhead, profit and tax. Reports price per square foot and gross margin. |
List your rooms on the Rooms tab: length, width, ceiling height, doors and windows. The sheet works out gross wall area as 2 × (length + width) × ceiling height, then deducts 21 sq ft per door and 15 sq ft per window. Both deductions are editable. You get net wall area, ceiling area and trim linear feet for every room.
The Estimate tab pulls the totals. Set your coats, spread rates, paint prices and labour rates, and it builds the price: materials, labour, 10% overhead, 10% profit, then tax. It also reports price per square foot of wall and your gross margin, so you can sanity-check the number before you send it.
There is a worked example in the file. A 16 × 14 room with 9 ft ceilings, 2 doors and 3 windows comes to 540 sq ft of gross wall, 453 net, 224 sq ft of ceiling and 60 linear feet of trim. At 2 coats and 350 sq ft per gallon, that is 3 gallons of wall paint.
Filling, sanding, caulking and masking are invisible in the finished job, so they are easy to under-count. Nobody pays extra for a wall that was rough before you fixed it. They just see paint. The template gives prep its own labour line, so you have to put a real number on it instead of hoping your painting rate absorbs it.
Materials get the same treatment. Masking, plastic and tape have their own line, so do caulk, filler and sandpaper, plus a sundries line for the rest. Small items, but they add up across a whole house.
Same warning on coats: dark colours over light walls usually need three coats, not two. Change the wall coats cell before you quote, not after you have bought the paint.
The sheet adds 10% overhead first, then 10% profit on top of that, then tax. Overhead is the cost of running the business: insurance, the van, the phone. Profit is what is left after the business is paid for. Mix them up and you quote jobs that pay you a wage but never pay the business.
Here is the bit most people get wrong: 10% overhead plus 10% profit is not a 20% margin. Because the second markup applies to a larger base, the result is a 17.4% gross margin. The sheet reports the actual margin next to the total, so you can see what you are really making. Both percentages are editable if your numbers differ.
Most manufacturers quote 350 to 400 sq ft per gallon on smooth, sealed surfaces. The template defaults to 350 for finish paint and 275 for primer, because primer soaks into unsealed surfaces. Rough or porous walls cover less, so lower the rate for those jobs. Gallons are always rounded up, because you cannot buy 2.6 gallons.
The template defaults to 10% overhead and then 10% profit on top. That works out to a 17.4% gross margin, not 20%, because the percentages stack rather than add. Both figures are editable. Whatever you set, judge the job by the margin the sheet reports, not by the markups you typed in.
Multiply the room perimeter by the ceiling height: 2 x (length + width) x height. Then subtract the openings. The template deducts 21 sq ft per door and 15 sq ft per window, both editable. A 16 x 14 room with 9 ft ceilings is 540 sq ft gross; with 2 doors and 3 windows that nets to 453.
Two coats on walls is the usual default and what the template starts with. Dark colours over light walls, or big colour changes, usually need three, which means roughly 50% more wall paint and wall labour. Change the coats cell before you quote. Ceilings default to one coat and trim to two, all editable.
Yes. Upload the .xlsx file to Google Drive and open it with Sheets. The 125 formulas use standard functions like ROUNDUP that Google Sheets and LibreOffice both support, and there are no macros, so nothing breaks in the conversion.