The cost types in Ply
Ply has three costs (or prices) you can track for each material. The two most important ones in your catalog are Cost to the Client and Cost to the Business, and there's also the Supplier Price.
Cost to the Business
This is what it costs your company to buy a material. In other words, it's your own cost as a business.
Cost to the Client
This is what you charge your clients for that material. It's your price with the markup built in.
How to set up these costs
There are two main ways to get your costs into Ply.
1. Sync from your FSM
If your Ply account is integrated with an FSM (like ServiceTitan, Jobber, or Housecall Pro) and you already have those costs configured there, Ply will pull them in for you. Both Cost to the Business and Cost to the Client can sync from your FSM.
2. Set them manually
If those costs are at $0 in your FSM, or they aren't configured at all, you can set them yourself. You have a few options:
Edit one by one: Open the material in the catalog and edit each Cost to the Client and Cost to the Business directly.
Bulk edit: Edit both costs across multiple materials at once.
Bulk update: From the catalog, click the three dots > Bulk upload/update > Update existing. Download your current catalog, edit the costs in Excel, and upload it back.
Editing costs globally
You can also update costs across your entire catalog at once using Global Price Editing.
This lets you apply a percentage increase to your costs. The key thing to know is that it's truly global: it applies to every material, not a selected group. For example, if you have 500 materials and set Cost to the Client to increase by 5% (say, because all your business costs went up), all 500 will update. This applies to both Cost to the Client and Cost to the Business.
How Cost to the Business differs from Supplier Price
These two can look similar, but they're not the same thing.
Cost to the Business is always your most recent purchase price. For example, say a material is set at $6.44. If you create a PO for that material at $7, then receive and reconcile it, the Cost to the Business updates to $7. It always reflects what you last paid.
Supplier Price lives under Prices & Suppliers inside each material, and it's where you register your suppliers' prices. It has nothing to do with Cost to the Business. The two may or may not match, depending on what your last purchase actually cost. These Prices & Suppliers entries are what connect to the Smart Suppliers and Preferred Suppliers feature (covered in a separate article).
FAQ
Is Cost to the Client calculated automatically based on Cost to the Business? No. Ply doesn't have markup calculators yet, so Cost to the Client is something you set manually. (This is on our roadmap.)
Can I edit costs globally? Yes. Use Global Price Editing to apply a percentage change across your whole catalog at once. Keep in mind it affects every material, not just a selected group.
Quick recap
The three costs you can track in Ply are:
Cost to the Client: what you charge your customers (your markup).
Cost to the Business: what it costs you to buy the material (always your last purchase price).
Supplier Price: the prices you register per supplier under Prices & Suppliers, used with Smart Suppliers and Preferred Suppliers.