> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.vehiso.com/blog/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Stop Pricing Parts in Your Head - URL: https://www.vehiso.com/blog/parts-pricing-markup-matrix/ - Published: 2026-10-07T08:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T08:00:01.000Z - Author: Blessing Dube - Tags: Workshop management, Parts management, Garage profitability, pricing, Dealer Management System Two identical cars, two weeks apart, same set of front pads. The first was written up by the advisor who has been there nine years and prices by feel, roughly doubling what the factor charges and rounding to something that sounds sensible. £89. The second was written up by the lad who started in June, who did not know what to charge, so he found the last job with those pads on it, saw £89, and used it. Except the pads have gone up since then, so the same £89 is now a thinner margin on a higher cost, and nobody noticed. Neither of them did anything wrong. There was no rule, so they each invented one. ## Pricing by memory is a system, just a bad one Every workshop has a pricing method. In most of them it is undocumented, lives in one or two people's heads, and produces different answers depending on who is at the desk and how busy they are. It has three predictable failure modes. **It lags price rises.** Memory prices from the last invoice, and the last invoice is history. When costs move, sell prices do not move with them, and the margin narrows silently. This is the single most common reason a parts margin drifts down over a year without anybody making a decision. **It is inconsistent across the desk.** The nine-year veteran and the June starter price differently. So do you and your service manager. Customers who come back notice more than you would expect. **It has no answer for the odd cases.** A £4 clip and a £900 turbo cannot take the same markup, and everyone knows it, but the point where the rule changes is different in every head in the building. None of this is a discipline problem either. Nobody can hold a consistent pricing policy across a hundred parts a week while also answering the phone. ## Cheap parts and expensive parts are different businesses The instinct to price a clip differently from a turbo is correct, and it is worth saying why rather than treating it as a quirk. The cost of handling a part barely changes with its value. Somebody rings the factor, somebody books it in, somebody finds it, somebody puts it on a job, somebody deals with it if it is wrong. That is roughly the same work for a £4 clip as a £900 turbo. So a flat percentage gets it wrong at both ends. At the bottom, a percentage on £4 does not cover the handling, and a workshop that marks up small parts at 30% is losing money on every one of them. At the top, the same percentage on a £900 unit produces a number the customer will price-check against the internet and walk away from. Which is why the sensible structure is not one markup but a set of them, banded by what the part cost: | Cost of part | Markup | Example | | ------------ | ------ | ---------------------------- | | Up to £10 | 100% | £4.10 clip sells at £8.20 | | £10 to £50 | 75% | £41.20 pads sell at £72.10 | | £50 to £250 | 55% | £118 sensor sells at £182.90 | | Over £250 | 35% | £900 turbo sells at £1,215 | Those numbers are an illustration, not a recommendation. The bands your workshop needs depend on your market and your mix. The point is that the bands exist, are written down once, and then apply themselves. In Vehiso this is a markup matrix, and you can preview it before it goes live, which matters: the moment you see what your rules do to the fifty parts you actually sell, you find out whether the policy you thought you had is the policy you want. ## Not every customer is the same customer The second half of pricing consistency is that a workshop sells the same part to different people on different terms, and the difference should be a rule rather than a negotiation each time. **Retail.** The walk-in customer. Your standard markup applies. **Trade.** The local bodyshop, the dealer down the road, the fleet you look after. A different, thinner markup, applied consistently rather than depending on how well the caller is known. **Internal.** Parts going onto your own stock vehicles during prep. This one is important and routinely fudged. If prep parts are charged at retail, your workshop looks brilliant and your vehicle margin looks dreadful; if they are charged at nothing, the reverse. Charging them at a defined internal level is the only version where both numbers mean something, which is the argument in [reconditioning is not free just because you did it yourself](https://www.vehiso.com/blog/in-house-prep-costs-vehicle-margin/). **Warranty.** Work billed to a warranty provider, where the rate is frequently not yours to choose. Four price levels, set once. The advisor picks the customer type and the price follows. Nobody has to remember what the bodyshop gets. ## The advisor can still override it This is the part that decides whether any of it survives contact with a real workshop. A pricing system that cannot be overridden gets worked around within a fortnight, because there is always a job where the rule is wrong. A goodwill gesture on a comeback. A part you got a deal on. A customer who has been coming for fifteen years. So the matrix produces the price and the advisor can change it. The difference is that they are now changing a number rather than inventing one, and the override is visible in the margin on the job. A workshop where every price is a decision has no policy. A workshop with a policy and occasional overrides has both a standard and the flexibility to depart from it, which is what you actually wanted. ## What to check after a month Two questions, and they are the reason to bother. **Has the gap between cost and sell stayed where you put it?** With banded markup applied to the current cost, it should hold automatically through a price rise. That alone is worth the setup, because it is the leak that never announces itself. **Are the overrides clustered?** A handful across a hundred jobs is a workshop using judgement. Forty of them, all on the same category, means your band is wrong for that category and the desk has been quietly correcting you for a month. Move the band. You cannot ask either question without the cost being on the line in the first place, which is the foundation everything here sits on: [you do not need a stores man to know what parts make you](https://www.vehiso.com/blog/workshop-parts-margin-without-stock/). ## Where to go next - [Your labour figure is honest. Your parts figure is a guess.](https://www.vehiso.com/blog/parts-gross-profit-vs-labour/) - [What a part costs is not what you paid for it](https://www.vehiso.com/blog/weighted-average-cost-parts/) - [Reconditioning is not free just because you did it yourself](https://www.vehiso.com/blog/in-house-prep-costs-vehicle-margin/) - [Car dealer invoicing](https://www.vehiso.com/blog/car-dealer-invoicing/) Parts pricing is part of [Vehiso Workshop](https://www.vehiso.com/features/workshop-parts-management) at no extra cost, and is not available on the Free plan.