What did that job actually pay you?
£120 for a garland sounds fine. Then there is the hour of driving, the inflating the night before, the balloons and helium you bought and the storage unit they came out of. This works out what is really left, per hour of your life.
Free, no signup, and nothing is sent anywhere. The sum happens on your phone.
Before VAT, if you are registered.
Balloons, helium, weights, frames. Not fuel, that is counted below.
Before you left the house.
Optional. Leave it blank and we will just tell you what the job paid.
What it costs you to be open
Insurance, storage, software, your accountant, the phone. None of it belongs to one job and all of it comes out of the jobs.
Not stock or fuel. Those are counted above.
Roughly is fine.
That job actually paid you
£15.03 an hour
3.3 hours of your life, once the driving and the prep are counted.
- Materials
- £35.00
- Mileage at 55pHMRC's rate. Covers fuel and wear.
- £9.90
- This job's share of your running costs£400.00 a month, spread over 16 jobs.
- £25.00
- Your time, at the rate you asked for
- £50.00
- Left over after all of that
- £0.10
Craftrun does this for every job, without you typing it in
It already knows the price, the date and the miles, and it works your running costs out from the expenses you have logged. You add the prep once and it tells you which of your regular jobs are quietly not worth doing.
Join the early listWhy this comes out lower than you expect
Most people work out a job's worth as price minus materials. That is the number an invoice shows and it is the number an accountant needs, but it quietly treats your own time as free.
The driving counts twice. Once as fuel and wear, at HMRC's 55p a mile, and once as time you could not spend on anything else. An hour in the van is an hour.
The prep is the invisible half. Packing the car, inflating, cutting, loading. It happens at home the night before, so it rarely gets counted, and on a small job it is often longer than the job.
Turnover is not profit, and neither is price minus materials. The storage unit, the public liability, the software and the accountant are paid for out of the jobs, so every job has to carry a share of them. Spread over a normal month it is rarely less than a tenner a job, and on a quiet month it is a lot more.
Fuel is not counted separately. The 55p a mile already covers running the vehicle, not just the diesel in it. Adding fuel on top would charge the same tank twice.
The rate went up in April 2026. It moved from 45p to 55p on 6 April 2026, the first change since 2011, so a job you costed last year was costed on a lower figure than the same drive would use today. Above 10,000 business miles in a tax year it drops to 25p, which this calculator does not apply.
None of this means a low number is a bad job. A short local one at a good rate can beat a big one two hours away. That is the point: you cannot tell by looking at the price.
Made by Craftrun
Requests, quotes, deposits and stock for UK balloon artists. It does this sum on every job automatically, works your running costs out from the expenses you log, and takes 0% of what you earn.