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| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Read Me | How the sheet works, which cells to change, and which to leave alone. |
| Takeoff | One row per area or bed. Enter length, width, a sod flag and a depth in inches. It returns square feet, cubic yards to order and sod pallets. |
| Estimate | Materials, labour, overhead, profit and tax, with a price per square foot of treated area at the bottom. |
Each row on the Takeoff tab is one area or bed. Enter length and width. If it gets sod, put a 1 in the Sod? column. If it gets bulk material — mulch, topsoil, crushed stone — enter the depth in inches.
The sheet does the rest. Area in square feet. Raw cubic yards: area × depth ÷ 12 ÷ 27. Then cubic yards to order, with a 10% over-order built in. You can change that percentage, but order a little over. A short load on a 40-minute drive costs you more than the extra yard did.
Suppliers sell stone by the ton and mulch by the yard, so the sheet gives you both. Crushed stone runs about 1.4 tons per cubic yard; sand and topsoil run lighter.
Material take-offs are the easy part. The jobs that lose money lose it on access and disposal, so the Estimate tab has lines for both.
And before any of it: call before you dig. Locating buried utilities is a legal requirement in most jurisdictions, and the locate is free. In the US, dial 811.
The Estimate tab adds 10% overhead to your costs, then 10% profit on top of that, then tax. Both percentages are editable, and you should know what they actually give you: 10% then 10% is a 1.21 multiplier, which works out to a 17.4% gross margin — not 20%. If you want a true 20%, raise the numbers.
The sheet also reports price per square foot of treated area. Track it across a few jobs and you will start quoting small work over the phone with some confidence — and spotting the bids where you have forgotten something, because the number comes out too low.
Multiply the area in square feet by the depth in inches, divide by 12, then divide by 27. A 500 sq ft bed at 3 inches deep is 500 × 3 ÷ 12 ÷ 27, about 4.6 cubic yards — order 5. The Takeoff tab runs this formula for every row and adds a 10% over-order so you are not making a second trip for one yard.
It varies by grower — most pallets cover somewhere around 400 to 500 sq ft. The template defaults to 450 sq ft per pallet and rounds up, since you cannot buy part of a pallet. A 1,000 sq ft front lawn comes to 3 pallets, which is $555 at $185 a pallet. The coverage figure is an editable cell, so set it to whatever your supplier actually ships.
Crushed stone runs about 1.4 tons per cubic yard. Sand and topsoil are lighter, roughly 1.2 to 1.35. The sheet shows both yards and tons because suppliers quote stone by the ton but mulch by the yard, and you need the right unit for each phone call.
Because the percentages stack as markup, not margin. Cost × 1.10 × 1.10 is a 1.21 multiplier, and 0.21 of 1.21 is a 17.4% gross margin. That is how most estimating sheets work, this one included. If your business needs a true 20% margin, raise the profit percentage until the bottom line gets there.
Yes. It is a plain .xlsx file with 102 working formulas — a real calculating spreadsheet, not a PDF of a blank form. No macros, so it opens cleanly in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice. Download it, put your own prices in, and it is yours.