Express costing

What it is

Express costing is a three-question assistant that writes starting values into your cost settings: hourly rates with their employer social cost, monthly business overheads, and the indirect-cost percentage and target margin for your new recipes.

It is not a new calculation engine: it writes into the same Costs screens you could already fill in by hand. Its only purpose is to stop your first cost sheet from coming out full of zeros.

• Path: https://app.areacacao.com/costs/express
• How to get there: sidebar → FORMULATION → Costs → first tile, Express costing. It also appears as a shortcut from Profitability and from the onboarding assistant.
• Screen title: Express costing — "Tell us where your workshop is and how many of you there are. Your first cost sheet, in a minute."
• Credits: none. It is deterministic; no AI involved.

The three questions

Each answer advances to the next step on its own. A dot indicator and the label Step N of 4 show where you are (the three questions plus the summary). Back returns to the previous step, and the I'd rather set it up by hand link takes you to Rate settings without writing anything.

The three blocks in the summary

The fourth screen is the summary: "This is what we're going to write" — "Untick anything you don't want applied. Nothing is saved until you press Apply."

It splits into three blocks, each with its own independent checkbox:

Rates and employer social cost

Lists the labor roles the chosen size activates, with the resulting hourly rate and the social-cost uplift (+N% employer social cost). The roles activated by size are:

(The names shown are the ones in your own role catalog; the table lists the roles AreaCacao seeds by default, whose names are stored in Spanish. The General role is never touched.)

Every other role in your catalog is left alone — neither archived nor modified. If one of the expected roles isn't in your catalog, the block says so ("N roles are not in your catalogue and will be skipped.") and carries on with the rest.

This block may also change the default currency of your cost settings, when the chosen country's currency differs from your current one. If that happens, the summary states it: "The currency will change from X to Y."

Monthly business overheads

Proposes three fixed monthly cost lines, split out of a typical total for your country and size:

• Workshop rent
• Energy and utilities
• Insurance and admin

The Monthly total appears below them. All three are created as fixed costs with monthly recurrence in Fixed business costs.

Indirect costs and target margin

Two starting values for recipes:

• Indirect costs over direct cost, as a percentage.
• The target margin for the channel you picked.

The block carries its own note: "Applied to recipes that don't have saved costs yet. Recipes you already costed are left untouched." That is literal: when you open a recipe's Costs tab, these values are only seeded if that recipe has no saved costs at all.

The rule that protects what you already had

No block overwrites your own settings without an explicit confirmation. When the assistant detects that a block would write over something you'd already adjusted, it shows an amber notice — "You already have your own settings in this block" — with the specific reason, plus a checkbox you have to tick: "I understand and want to overwrite it".

The reasons the assistant detects are:

A block with a notice and no confirmation is not written, even if its main checkbox is ticked. An account that has never touched its cost settings triggers no rates or margin notice at all, because there is nothing to protect.

The final button states how many blocks it will actually write: Apply N blocks. If nothing is writable, it is disabled and says: "No block is selected."

When it finishes

The closing screen reads "Done. Your cost engine has numbers now" — "Open any recipe with ingredient prices and you'll see the full cost sheet. Everything seeded is editable."

It offers two exits: Review my rates (to Rate settings) and See the profitability traffic light (to Profitability).

If a block failed to be written, the screen says so instead of faking success: "Couldn't apply: [blocks]. Try again or set it up by hand." The blocks are written independently, so a failure in one doesn't bring the other two down.

What it does NOT do

• It does not cost any recipe. It only writes starting values; the cost sheet is still computed by the cost engine from your ingredients and their prices.
• It does not record ingredient prices. Those remain yours: see Ingredient prices.
• It does not touch equipment or its depreciation.
• It does not modify recipes that already have saved costs.
• It does not create new labor roles: it only adjusts the ones already in your catalog.
• It does not delete or archive existing roles or costs: for business overheads it adds new lines rather than replacing what you had.
• It is not reversible with a button. If you apply and regret it, you have to correct things by hand in the Costs screens.
• It uses no AI and no credits. The AI Cost Assistant is a different tool, and that one does cost credits.

Next steps