Setup fees: the margin leak most shops do not catch
A setup fee is the small line item that decides whether an order is profitable. Distributors who treat the supplier's setup fee as a customer-facing line item leave money on the table every order. Distributors who mark it up consistently make an extra few hundred dollars a month without selling anything new.
The math nobody runs
A typical screen-print setup fee from a decoration supplier is $40 per color per location, with a markup industry default of about 50%. Pass-through pricing means you charge the customer $40. Markup pricing means you charge $60. On a four-color front-and-back order that is $160 of pure margin you collect just by being consistent.
A shop doing 30 decorated orders a month at one extra setup-fee location each is leaving $600 a month on the floor by passing through. That is $7,200 a year on a workflow that is purely structural.
How the price-code system handles this
In DECADE.promo every adopted product has a setup-fee price code (a separate code from the product price code). The supplier net setup fee gets stored once. The customer-facing setup fee is computed from the code at quote time and stays in sync if the supplier raises their setup fee.
Your default policy lives in PPD settings. The override is one click per customer if you have a relationship that demands pass-through.
When pass-through is actually the right call
A small number of long-tenured customers have negotiated pass-through setup fees, often as a trade for committed annual volume. Those customers are valuable enough that you keep the deal. Setting that on the customer record means every order to that customer respects the carve-out automatically.
What we built differently in DECADE.promo
Unlimited AI on the GOAT plan
AI mockups, Product Capture (browser-extension AI scraping of supplier sites), AI vectorization, and AI image upscale - all unlimited on one flat-price tier. No credit metering, no per-feature add-ons.
AI Product Capture extension
Browse any supplier website - SAGE, Hit Promo, Koozie Group, anywhere - click the browser extension, and our AI reads the page. SKUs, pricing tiers, setup fees, colors, lead times, and images are extracted in seconds and import directly to your products catalog.
Tightly integrated with SAGE
Bring your own SAGE Connect subscription. Search, adopt products, and pull pricing tiers without leaving Decade.promo. Sales decks, quotes, and POs reuse the SAGE data automatically.
Transparent pricing
Free tier for solo distributors, flat per-PPD pricing for teams, and no per-seat tax. Customers always free. Suppliers always free.
See it in your workflow
Free tier, no credit card, no contract. Start with one project and decide from there.
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