Paint Supplies Bill Against Every Paint Hour

Paint supplies bill at $55 for every paint hour written, and body supplies at $5 for every body hour. The figure is calculated from the hours on the estimate, which means it moves only when the labour moves. That is a deliberate choice over the other common method, which is to add a flat percentage of the job total for materials. A percentage of the total is a percentage of the parts too, and parts do not consume paint. On a job where a $2,000 component goes on with two hours of refinish around it, the percentage method bills materials against the part and produces a number with no relationship to what left the mixing room.

Hours are the closest available proxy for consumption, because materials are consumed by the time spent applying them. A panel taking six hours to refinish takes roughly three times the primer, sealer, activator, reducer, clear and abrasive of a panel taking two. It is not perfect. A large flat surface consumes more per hour than a tight radius, and a three stage pearl consumes more than a solid white. What it is, is auditable. An owner can count the paint hours on the sheet and check the supplies line themselves, which is not possible with a percentage applied before they ever saw the sheet.

The supplies line is not paint. Paint, when it is a specific tinted mix for a specific vehicle, is usually written as a part. What the supplies line covers is everything the paint needs in order to become a finish, and everything the booth needs in order to produce one. Primer and sealer, activators and reducers matched to the temperature on the day, clear coat, tack cloths, strainers, mixing cups, stir sticks, gun cleaner, filters, masking paper, plastic and tape in three widths, abrasives from the coarse cut through to the polish stage, and the booth filters that have a service life measured in hours of spraying.

The abrasive count surprises people. A single refinish operation on a coach passes through five or six grit stages, and each stage is a consumable that ends in a bin. So do the gloves, the suits and the respirator cartridges, which are consumed per person per session rather than per job. On a coach the masking alone becomes a genuinely large number, because there is a great deal of surface that is not being painted and every square foot of it has to be covered. A forty foot shell masked to spray one side carries more paper than a car has surface area in total.

Body supplies bill at $5 for every body hour, and the gap between that and the paint figure is not a rounding decision. Body work consumes less per hour, and much of what it does consume is either a part in its own right or a tool that lasts for years. The $5 covers filler and hardener, adhesives, seam sealer, weld wire and gas, cut off wheels, sanding discs on the body side, the fasteners and clips too small to itemise honestly, cleaner and degreaser, and the rags and shop towels that a body job goes through continuously from start to finish.

Where the two figures meet is fiberglass and laminate work, which is why coach repair blurs the line. Resin, mat, cloth, release film and vacuum bagging material behave like body supplies on the estimate and like paint supplies in cost. A large laminate repair genuinely runs above the $5 figure in raw consumption and is carried by hours elsewhere on the job. Saying that plainly is more useful than pretending the formula is exact. It is a fair average across the work this shop actually does, not a measurement of any one repair.

Hazmat and disposal is $45 flat, and it appears when chemicals, refrigerant or LP are part of the job. It is not a general surcharge and it does not attach to every order. A shop that sprays generates waste that cannot legally go into a dumpster: solvent, gun wash, filters loaded with overspray, contaminated rags, and on the systems side recovered refrigerant and purged LP. Disposal runs through licensed handlers who charge by pickup and by weight, and the permits that allow the shop to hold that waste at all are conditions of operating rather than optional extras.

The reason it is flat rather than hourly is that the cost is per event and not per hour. A job that opens a refrigerant circuit generates a recovery whether the technician is on it for one hour or six. Charging by time would overbill the long jobs and underbill the short ones, so flat is the more accurate shape. Where it becomes a fair question is on a job touching none of that, in which case it should not be on the sheet at all. If it is there and the job is dry, ask what generated it.

Material gets consumed before anything reaches the vehicle, and that is the part of the supplies figure owners never picture. A colour match on a coach is not a code lookup. Coach paint fades unevenly across a shell that has spent years pointed the same direction in a storage yard, and the roof side of a panel rarely matches the shadow side of the same panel. Matching means spraying test cards, letting them flash, checking them against the vehicle under shop light and again in daylight, adjusting the mix, and doing the whole thing over.

Three or four cards is normal on a solid colour. A metallic or a three stage pearl takes considerably more, because the match depends on how the flake lies down and that shifts with gun setting, air pressure and distance as much as with the mix itself. All of that is primer, base, clear, reducer and card stock consumed on material that never touches the coach. It is also why the paint supplies figure ties to paint hours rather than to painted square footage. The matching hours are real hours and they consume real material.

An estimate with no materials line is not an estimate with no materials. The money is somewhere. Usually it sits inside a labour rate set high enough to absorb it, occasionally inside the parts prices, and sometimes in a single lump called shop supplies with no method attached to it. All three are legal and none of them are automatically dishonest. What they share is that the owner cannot check them. A lump has no arithmetic to verify, and a loaded rate cannot be separated back into the parts it was built from.

The practical effect shows up when the job changes. A supplies figure tied to hours moves correctly when a supplement adds four paint hours. A lump does not move, or it moves by an amount nobody can derive, and that is where a supplement conversation turns bad. Insurance work sharpens this further, because carriers audit materials methods and a formula tied to hours is the one they already understand. It is not that the hours method is cheaper. It is that it survives being looked at closely by somebody with an incentive to disagree with it.

Getting two sheets onto the same footing takes about ten minutes and needs no expertise. Two totals built by different methods are not comparable, and the lower one is not reliably the cheaper job.

• Separate each estimate into labour hours, parts, materials and tax before comparing anything
• Multiply out the materials formula yourself where one is published, so you know what you are comparing against
• Ask the flat rate shop what their supplies figure becomes if the job grows by five paint hours
• Check that tax has been applied to parts and materials only, because labour is not taxed in this state
• Compare the operation lists side by side before you compare the bottom lines

One honest caveat sits at the end of all of this. On a small single panel job, a shop folding materials into a slightly higher rate often does come out lower, because a formula tied to hours has no minimum and no discount while the flat method tends to round in the owner's favour on short work. If the job is two hours of refinish on one door, take the flat number and do not spend the afternoon auditing it.

The method starts to matter on jobs where the hours are large, where the substrate is uncertain, and where a supplement is likely. On a coach that is most of them. A sidewall opened for delamination, a cap refinished after a strike or a full repaint are all jobs where the hours written on day one are not the hours performed on day twenty, and the difference has to be priced by something an owner can follow. A published formula does that. A number somebody chose does not.