Get help with your MarginForge product.
Find answers about file access, documented features, product use, licensing and suspected issues with an unmodified MarginForge product.
Product support is available by email at support@marginforgetools.com
30 days of product support are included with eligible MarginForge products.
The Contractor Labor Cost & Labor Burden Calculator, Contractor Job Pricing & Profit Calculator, and Home Service Pricing & Job Profitability Pro each include 30 calendar days of product support beginning on the original purchase date.
What product support includes
What product support does not include
MarginForge provides product support, not professional business, accounting, tax, payroll, legal or financial advice.
MarginForge workbooks are designed and tested for Microsoft Excel (.xlsx).
Google Sheets compatibility is not guaranteed and may alter workbook formatting, validation, charts or formulas.
Confirm the inputs applicable to your product, such as wages, productive hours, payroll burden, workers' compensation, benefits, direct job costs, contingency, margin targets, and overhead where applicable, before assuming the workbook is calculating incorrectly.
If you've changed formulas, validation, sheet structure or protected areas, compare the behavior with an untouched copy of the original customer workbook.
Maintain an untouched master copy of the original workbook and periodically back up your working file.
Loaded labor cost includes more than base wage. Depending on the assumptions you enter, it can include employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation, benefits, paid time off, holidays, and other employer-paid costs. The workbook then spreads those costs across productive hours to calculate the effective cost of one productive field hour.
Employees are generally paid for more hours than they can actually bill or apply to customer work. Vacation, holidays, training, meetings, travel, shop time, and other nonbillable time can reduce productive hours. When annual employment cost is divided across fewer productive hours, the true cost per productive hour increases.
Loaded labor cost represents what the productive labor hour costs the business. The billable labor rate applies your selected labor gross-margin target to that cost. It is a labor-pricing benchmark and does not by itself represent a complete customer selling price.
Job Pricing troubleshooting
Confirm your loaded labor rate, labor hours, other direct job costs, contingency percentage, and target direct gross margin. Changes to any of these inputs will affect the Required Sell Price.
The workbook compares your Proposed Sell Price with the Required Sell Price calculated from your direct job cost and target gross margin. If the proposed price is lower than the required price, the resulting gross margin will fall below your selected target.
Review the Model Checks first. Missing labor capacity, invalid margin inputs, incomplete setup information, or other flagged assumptions can affect calculated results.
Confirm that the estimator has a usable cost basis, labor capacity has been entered and margin inputs are valid. Review Model Checks before changing formulas.
Confirm both annual overhead and annual productive labor capacity. A fixed overhead structure spread across fewer productive hours produces a higher overhead requirement per productive hour.
Your modeled overhead and contribution-margin target are requiring a higher selling price than the direct gross-margin target alone.
The customer workbook begins without completed jobs. Add jobs to the Job Database and mark applicable records as Completed so completed-job information can populate the reporting.
Contact MarginForge Support
If the documentation and troubleshooting steps above don't resolve the issue, email us with enough information to reproduce or understand the problem.
support@marginforgetools.com
When contacting support, include:
Support period and product changes
The complimentary support period ends 30 calendar days after the original purchase date. Assistance provided after that period, if any, does not create a new support period or extend the original one.
Modifying formulas, protected structures, validation, formatting or other workbook functionality can affect how the product operates and may limit the support MarginForge can provide for the modified file.
View the full Support Policy →