The electroplating treatment price list: convenient, until you notice how much it costs

Anyone searching for an electroplating treatment price list usually wants one thing: a table with gold plating, nickel plating, rhodium plating and a figure next to each. The problem is that in this trade, that table cannot honestly exist. Or rather: it can exist, but it starts aging the very next day. And the shop that keeps using it pays the difference without ever seeing it on an invoice.

This is not a theoretical point. It's the very mechanics of the price list that don't hold up in electroplating, for two very concrete reasons.

First: the metal moves, the price list doesn't

A major part of the cost of a precious metal treatment is the metal deposited. And metal has a price that changes every day: today's gold, rhodium or palladium is not the metal of the day you printed the price list. If the market price rises and your price stays put, the difference comes out of your margin, silently, batch after batch. If it falls, you're out of the market without knowing it and the jobs go to whoever updated before you did.

The uncomfortable part is the asymmetry: when the metal goes up, the customer doesn't call to tell you you're losing money, they pocket the discount and keep quiet. You notice at year's end, when the numbers add up to less than the work done would suggest. We've written about this in connection with the gold price and your margin: the price that ages is the most common way of giving metal away.

Second: the price list can't see the part

The price list thinks in categories: "gold plating, small parts", "medium rhodium plating", "nickel plating by the kilo". But the real cost of a treatment depends on the part: how much surface area it has, what thickness the customer asks for, how many layers are needed, how many parts are in the batch. Two jobs that sit on the same line of the price list can have real costs that are miles apart.

The result is cross-subsidy: on the "light" jobs you're expensive and you lose them, on the "heavy" jobs you're cheap and you win them. Too bad that winning the underpriced jobs is not good news: it means your price list selects exactly the customers you earn the least on, or nothing at all.

"I update it every now and then" doesn't work

The classic defense is the periodic update. In practice, updating the price list is a job nobody wants to do: you have to decide when, by how much, on which items, and then break the news to customers, who never celebrate. So it gets put off. And every month of delay is a month in which quotes go out at the old price.

Then there's the worst case: the quote sent with the freshly updated price list that sits open for weeks before it's signed. In the meantime the metal has moved again. The price list was right on the day you sent it and wrong on the day of acceptance, which is the only day that counts.

The alternative: the living price

The solution is not updating the price list more often. It's changing the logic: the price of a treatment should be built on the part and tied to the day's market price, not fished out of a table. For precious metals the right convention has always existed, metal charged separately at an index-linked price: the metal portion follows the market until the customer signs, then it locks. Transparent for them, protective for you.

Doing it by hand, for every quote, is the reason nobody does it: you'd have to recalculate every single time. It's exactly the work a quoting tool does on its own. Quot, for example, prices every part at the current market price and, if you choose the index-linked clause, adjusts the quote until it's signed and then freezes it: the price list no longer ages, because there's no longer a frozen price list, there's a living price. If you want to see how it works on your own treatments, the 7-day trial is free and takes just a few minutes.