Rate cards, priced items and uplifts
Hold your priced work items per client, and name the rate bumps you actually charge.
A rate card holds the priced work items you charge a client for — "Measures against jobs price up from them." It has nothing to do with your Maliru subscription: this is the price list for your own work.
Rate cards live under Commercial › Rate cards and need Manage commercial.
Rate cards
The register lists each card with its Client, Contract, number of Priced items, Currency and Status, with a Status filter, and View: for saved views — see Saved views.
New rate card asks for:
- Name — the only thing required.
- Client — optional. House rates is the choice for a card that belongs to no client, such as your standard day-work rates.
- Contract — optional, offered once you have contracts.
The card's currency comes from the contract you name, otherwise from your workspace currency.
The … menu on a row offers Rename, Archive (or Restore) and Delete. An archived card keeps its prices and its history, and drops out of the way. A card cannot be deleted while any measure uses it — Maliru says how many do.
Priced items
Open a card to see its items: Code, Description, Unit and Rate. The header shows the client and currency, with three tools: Uplifts, Fix columns and Import.
To add one by hand, fill in the row at the foot — Code, Description, Unit and Rate — and choose Add item. Units offered include each, hour, day, week, item, visit, m, m2 and m3, plus any unit the card already uses. Codes are unique on a card.
Click any item to open Edit rate item and correct its code, description, unit or rate. The same dialog holds the Labour share — "The part of the price that is labour, for deductions withheld on labour." It starts at 100%. It only matters if a client withholds a deduction on labour; see Deductions your client withholds.
Delete removes an item from the card: "Invoices already raised keep the price they were raised at." An item that measures are already priced on cannot be deleted — correct its details instead.
When someone records a measure, they choose items with a picker that searches by code, description or card.
Importing a card
Most cards arrive as a spreadsheet. On the card, choose Import:
- Upload file (Choose .xlsx or .csv) or Paste rows from a spreadsheet, including the header row.
- Check the Column mapping: each source column goes to Code, Description, Unit, Rate, Labour % or Skip.
- Read the Preview. Each row says whether it is ready; View skipped shows only the rows that will be left out and why.
- Choose Import. "Existing codes are updated; new codes are added."
An import takes up to 2,000 rows. Re-importing a corrected sheet reconciles by code rather than adding duplicates. A sheet that lists the same code twice is refused as a whole, naming both rows. A sheet with no labour column leaves each item's labour share as it was.
If the sheet has no short code column, Maliru warns "These codes are descriptions": the description is used as the code and Description is left empty. Codes print on quotes and invoices, so map a short column to Code if there is one — or import as it is and number them afterwards with Fix columns.
Fixing columns after an import
Fix columns moves what an import put in the wrong column: "Every line on this card is rewritten; prices are left alone." For each of Code takes, Description takes and Unit takes, choose where the value should come from. Code takes can also generate Numbers — 001, 002, 003…, with an optional Number prefix such as TR-. The dialog shows the first lines before and after, then Fix N items.
Uplifts
Uplifts are the named rate bumps you charge on top of the base rate. On a card, choose Uplifts ("Adjust the unit rate when recording measured work.") and add as many as you need:
- Percent — for example Out of hours at 30%. It multiplies the rate.
- Fixed — for example Rural at 15. It adds to the rate.
Give it a Name (e.g. Night work), a Type and a Value, then Add. The dialog works an example through for you — £100.00 + 30% = £130.00 per unit.
When you record a measure, each line takes one uplift, or None. The uplift you see is the uplift you bill: the same effective rate prices the measure, the invoice and the valuation, so there is never a gap between what was shown and what was charged.
Tip: name uplifts the way your commercial team already talks — "OOH", "Standby", "Confined space". People pick them by name.
Letting an uplift offer itself
The catch with picking by name is remembering to pick at all. Somebody recording a measure a week later has no way of knowing that one span ran into the night, so the uplift is missed and never billed.
Set your Working hours once — the button sits above the rate cards. Choose your working days, the hours you work From and To, and whether to Treat your public holidays as outside working hours. Nothing changes anywhere until you save, and Turn off removes the window again.
Then tick Offer this uplift when a job was worked outside working hours on the uplift that covers that work (the Suggest column). When a job turns out to have been worked outside your hours, recording a measure against it says so under the line and offers that uplift by name:
Worked 3h 30m outside working hours (19:40–23:10). Apply Night rate?
It looks at the visits on the days the measure covers, so a night visit last month does not flag today's daytime measure. A measure dated a day with no visit is checked against all of the job's work. Where the hours match one of your shift times, the note names it: Night shift, 28 Sep 18:00–04:00, scheduled outside working hours.
Apply Night rate fills in the same Uplift box you would have used yourself; the cross dismisses the offer for that line. It never applies anything on its own, and it never changes what an uplift is worth.
Maliru reads the hours your team actually clocked on that job. Where nobody clocked on, it falls back to the published shift and says Scheduled rather than Worked, because a plan is not a fact. Where there is neither, it says nothing rather than guessing.
On the Measures board, Uplift › May need an uplift gathers the measures worked outside your hours that carry no uplift on any line — worth a look before they are invoiced. When you measure several jobs in one go, the grid marks the jobs that qualify and offers to uplift just those.
Tip: if short overruns are noisy, set Ignore under to the number of minutes you are happy to let go. It starts at nought, because a missed uplift costs money and a suggestion you do not want costs a glance.