What a quotation is made of
Every free wall calculator on the internet stops at the specification. That is not an oversight — the manufacturer publishing it does not know your buying price, your margin, your warranty terms or your tax rate, and would not print them if it did.
So the commercial half gets rebuilt, badly, in a spreadsheet, once per distributor. This guide is that half written down: eight steps in a fixed order, and the three places the arithmetic quietly stops adding up.
Order matters. Discount applies after every line, tax applies after the discount, and the payment split divides the tax-inclusive total. Change the order and you change the number.
1. The screen line
The cabinets themselves, and the largest number on the page. There are two ways to write it and they are not interchangeable:
- Per cabinet. Quantity × cabinet price. This is the modern default: fine-pitch product is bought and sold by the cabinet, and the per-square-metre figure is derived afterwards for comparison.
- Per square metre. Area × price per m². Still correct for outdoor and rental stock, where the cabinet formats vary and the trade thinks in area.
If you price per square metre, the area has to carry real precision. A wall of 12.960 m² priced at €1 450/m² is €18 792. Round the area to 13 m² first and you have quoted €18 850 — €58 of margin given away by a display convention. Areas are worth six decimal places internally even though nobody wants to read them.
2. Your coefficient
The margin multiplier, expressed as a percentage where 100 leaves the price untouched. A coefficient of 148 turns an €830 cabinet into €1 228.40.
Three levels, most specific wins:
- On the product — because a processor and a cabinet do not carry the same margin.
- On the project — because a competitive tender and a repeat customer do not either.
- On the account — the default everything falls back to.
Resolve the precedence once, before any arithmetic starts. A quoting tool that asks you which coefficient applies has pushed its job onto you.
3. The control system
Typically one receiving card per cabinet, plus a processor sized by the total pixel load. The card count is the easy part — it is the cabinet count — and the processor is where quotes go wrong, because its capacity is measured in pixels, not in cabinets.
A 36-cabinet 4K wall is 8.3 megapixels. A 36-cabinet 2.5 mm wall of the same physical size is under 2 megapixels and needs a much smaller processor. Quoting the same controller for both is either money left on the table or a wall that will not light up.
Redundancy, if the job needs it, roughly doubles the card and cabling cost and is much easier to include now than to retrofit.
4. Spares and accessories
Spare modules and power supplies are conventionally quoted as a percentage of the screen line — typically one to two per cent — and are often given away as a goodwill line, shown at zero so the customer can see what they are getting.
Accessories are where offers diverge most: mounting structure, trim, cable sets, a service trolley, commissioning, content creation, training, shipping and insurance. None of it is optional in reality and most of it is missing from the first draft of every quotation ever written.
5. Warranty
Usually a surcharge as a percentage of the screen line, per tier. Two years might be included, three years a five or six per cent surcharge, five years more.
Take it as a percentage of the screen line rather than of the subtotal. The customer is insuring the cabinets, not the shipping, and a warranty priced off the subtotal quietly charges them to insure the commissioning.
6. Discount
Applied across the whole quote, after every line is totalled. Two things make a discount safe to give:
- Knowing the cost. An offer that shows you your own profit as you move the discount slider is worth more than any policy document.
- A ceiling. A maximum discount per user means a salesperson can close without asking permission and without giving away the job.
7. Tax
A percentage of the total after discount. One line, hard to get wrong — and the original easyLED got it wrong for five years by printing the tax-inclusive total on the row labelled “VAT”. Customers noticed. Label the tax row with the tax, and the total with the total.
8. The payment split
Almost every LED order is split — commonly forty per cent deposit and sixty per cent before shipping, sometimes with a retention until sign-off. The split is taken from the tax-inclusive total.
This is the step most likely to be visibly wrong on a printed offer, and it is a rounding problem rather than an arithmetic one. See below.
Where the arithmetic breaks
Three failures, all of them found in real quoting spreadsheets, all of them avoidable.
The split that does not add up
Take 40% and 60% of €56 762.53. Rounded independently you get €22 705.01 and €34 057.52, which sum to €56 762.53 — this time. On many totals they will sum to a cent more or a cent less, and a customer looking at an offer whose instalments do not add up to its total will question everything else on the page.
The fix is to allocate rather than to multiply: compute each instalment except the last, then make the last one absorb whatever remains. The split is then correct by construction.
Drift from unrounded intermediates
If the screen line is not rounded to the cent before the warranty percentage is taken from it, and the warranty is not rounded before the subtotal, tiny binary floating-point errors accumulate down the chain and surface as a total that is a cent off what the lines say. Round at every boundary, not at the end.
Claims the drawing cannot back up
A quotation that says “16:9” about a wall that is actually 28:15 is a claim the customer can check with a tape measure. Print the true ratio of the wall as built, and name the nearest standard ratio alongside it if it helps — but do not let the friendly label replace the fact.
What else belongs on the offer
The commercial chain is the part that has to be right. The rest is the part that gets the offer signed:
- A scale drawing of the wall beside a human figure. Nothing else answers “is that as big as I think?” as fast.
- The technical sheet — resolution, area, weight, power, heat, viewing distance — so the customer’s electrician and structural engineer can start work from your document.
- A quotation number in a scheme you control, so the revision conversation has something to refer to.
- Validity and lead time. LED pricing moves; an offer with no expiry is a liability.
- What is excluded. Civil works, power supply to the wall, network, content. Naming them is not defensive, it is the difference between a variation and an argument.
easyLED PRO does the whole chain from your own catalogue and prints both documents in your colours — and there is a real worked example on that page, priced by the same engine at build time rather than typed in by hand.