Ahhhh, remember those spreadsheets I mentioned? My original goal was to really nail down the proper math to determine
a) if our current pricing was profitable and b) reverse engineer our “pulled out of the air” pricing into an algorithm that accounted for labor and materials, one that was repeatable and more importantly consistent across multiple employees managing jobs.
The first passes were pretty crude, with just straight markups and width/height entries, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The more I dug, the more I realized what needed to be accounted for to make sure our shop overhead was covered and profit remained. I trusted Claude.ai and ChatGPT quite a bit during these initial exercises. The result was a fully repeatable, actionable pricing calculator that proved our pricing methods based on business experience were not too terribly far off. Some items will go up, some will come down, but overall we were in a reasonable range.
The lightbulb moment came when I started sharing these calculators with coworkers.
That’s when I realized how cumbersome it would really be to access an Excel sheet every time we needed to quote something. Since I have been using WordPress for nearly two decades, and our business site is a WordPress installation, integrating a couple calculators as WordPress plugins seemed pretty straightforward. The hard part—the algorithms—were already solid, tested, and repeatable.
I am not an expert coder, but I can read it, edit it, and know enough to be a danger to myself and others.
So I turned to a familiar ally to walk me through getting a working beta. The initial attempts with Claude were cumbersome with only a free account. The waits between usage restrictions were becoming torture. Slowly, we prodded through the steps and executed a working plugin.zip into WordPress on a test page.
The first tests were outstanding and I continued to build on it with thoughts like: hey this can output a line item to copy into an estimate… hey this would be great with a list of materials… hey let’s add lamination and mounting logic… hey we die-cut this, what should that upcharge be?
Those questions—and the fact that the answers could immediately turn into working features—were the moment I realized ActiveCollab was becoming a restriction, not a tool.
And that’s when the uncomfortable thought crept in: if I could build the calculators, why couldn’t I build the rest of the system too?
In hindsight, that was probably the moment I should have closed the laptop…