Practical guides for the people who price warehouse contracts, written from the methodology inside CostAware. Sixteen articles across five areas: how a price is built, what goes on a rate card, what happens once the contract is live, how tenders become quotes, and why any of it is worth changing.
How a warehouse contract price is actually built — from volumes and headcount through to a defensible per-unit rate.
A step-by-step guide to pricing third-party logistics contracts. Covers volume analysis, FTE calculation, ABC cost allocation, rate card design, and margin strategy.
Understand how activity-based costing works in warehouse operations. Allocate wages, equipment, and overheads into transparent rate card pricing pools.
Learn how to calculate full-time equivalent staffing for warehouse operations using volume-driven methodology. Step-by-step guide for 3PL operators.
How 3PL warehouse rate cards are built from cost allocation pools. The pricing chain from FTE to customer invoice, covering all seven rate types.
Fully ABC, Fixed + Activity Rates, or Cost Plus. The same total cost recovered three ways, with a worked comparison of exactly who carries volume risk when the forecast misses.
The rate types an Australian warehouse contract needs, what a pallet position really costs, and how to calibrate productivity from your own actuals rather than an industry average.
A practical guide to building an Australian 3PL rate card. Covers the seven rate types, ABC cost pool connections, and how to structure transparent per-unit pricing.
How to calculate your true warehouse cost per pallet position. Breaks down rent, labour, equipment, and overhead into a single per-pallet metric for 3PL operators.
Industry productivity benchmarks are a starting position, not an answer. How to measure what a warehouse actually achieves and apply corrected rates to future quotes only.
What happens after the price is signed — margin drift, multi-site rollups, mobilisation cost, and repricing a renewal from real volumes instead of a stale forecast.
Margin leaks a percent at a time. How to measure drift against the signed plan at actual volumes, filter for persistence and materiality, and act months before renewal.
Reprice a warehouse contract renewal on real captured volumes, not a three-year-old forecast. Why the trailing 12 months beat a whole-of-term average.
The methodology for pricing multi-site 3PL warehouse contracts. Covers site-level cost modelling, consolidated budgets, rent escalation, and rate cards.
Mobilisation, ramp-up and the amortised vs upfront decision. The five start-up cost categories, calculated recruitment, and why ramp-up belongs in the operating budget.
Turning a tender document into a costed quote, packaging it as a proposal a customer will accept, and running the whole thing as a team without version chaos.
Turning a tender document into a costed draft. Confidence bands, source citations, the average-versus-peak trap — and why the most important thing an extraction AI can say is “not found”.
The three documents every tender needs, why the customer pack must never break out margin, and how template-driven generation stops a proposal going stale.
Costing is only half the job. How to run the pricing workflow — handoffs, approvals, proposals and sign-off — from draft to signed contract without version chaos or mystery edits.
The commercial argument for changing how you cost contracts.