What your product really costs - calculating unit cost outside Excel
The real cost of a product is not just the price of material. It is made up of material, the working time of people and machines, set-ups, scrap and a share of fixed costs falling on that piece. In Excel you work it out once, by hand, for one product - but with changing prices and dozens of items the spreadsheet stops keeping up. A system calculates the same cost automatically, on the fly, for every order.
4 July 2026 · Bartek Liszkowski
“We sell, but I don't know whether we make money on it” - I hear this from manufacturers very often. I know that discomfort well: a product price taken from a hunch or from an old calculation that has stopped being true. Below I break unit cost into its parts and show how I work it out without a manual spreadsheet.
What unit cost is made of
The cost of a piece is made of several layers: material including offcuts, people's working time, the time and rate of the machine or workstation, set-ups when the range changes, the cost of scrap and a fixed-cost mark-up. Leave out even one of these layers and you make less on the product than the calculation shows.
Why Excel fails at costing
A spreadsheet is static. Material prices change monthly, and in Excel someone has to update them by hand in every calculation separately. With complex products - welded, multi-stage, assembled from sub-units - the number of links grows until the spreadsheet becomes impossible to maintain.
On top of that, Excel calculates on assumptions made in advance. It assumes a piece takes ten minutes, though in reality it takes fifteen.
Where real data comes from
The true cost comes from recording on the floor: how long an operation actually took, how much material was really used, how many pieces went to scrap. When that data flows from the floor automatically, cost stops being guesswork and becomes a reflection of what happened.
How I calculate it in the system
Every product has its routing in the system: a list of operations, materials and workstation rates. Current raw-material prices and real times from recording are wired in. Unit cost recalculates itself - at every change of price or time the result is instantly up to date, for the single piece and for the whole order.
What it changes in pricing and margin
When you know the real cost, you see plainly which products make money and which you subsidise. You price on data rather than on a hunch, and you talk about price with the customer more confidently. The most common discovery after go-live: a few “flagship” products bring in less than everyone thought.
If you sell but aren't sure which products you actually make money on - get in touch. I'll gladly show how I'd tie pricing to real data in your company.
Common questions about unit cost
Can the cost of complex products, e.g. welded ones, be calculated?
How does the system know how much was really used?
Do I need a big MES to calculate this?
How quickly will I see a first result?
Book 30 minutes or write a message.
The first call is a calm conversation to get to know each other. I check whether I can genuinely help. No slides, no sales pressure. If I see it is a poor fit, I say so directly.
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Briefly describe what you need - I reply within one business day. Often sooner.
Phone +48 601 789 966 - feel free to call, I answer the phone myself.