What a restring actually costs you
Most stringers can tell you what they charge. Far fewer can tell you what the job cost — not because they don't care, but because the number is genuinely awkward to get, and the obvious way to work it out is wrong.
Start with the reel, not the set
String is bought by the reel and used by the racket, so every true cost begins with one division: what the reel cost you, divided by how many sets you actually get out of it. Racketworks treats a reel as 16 sets by default, a half-reel as 8, and a set as 1 — and lets you override it, because reels differ and so does how much you waste.
That single division is where the first quiet error lives. A shop that guesses “about ten sets” from a reel it actually gets sixteen from overstates every restring by 60%, forever, and never sees it.
Then halve it, if it's a hybrid
A hybrid is one string in the mains and a different one in the crosses. A racket takes about one set of string in total — so a hybrid draws roughly half a set of each, and the leftover halves do the next one.
Charge a full set of both — which is what a spreadsheet does unless you tell it not to — and the job's cost roughly doubles. Not once: on every hybrid you do.
0055, and the historical jobs were corrected with it. We mention it because the arithmetic is easy to get wrong even when you have thought about it — and because a shop deserves to know which of its numbers moved, and when.How much this matters depends on how much hybrid work you do, and that varies more than people expect. In one working shop's 1,034 restrings, 77% were hybrids — so the half-set rule was not an edge case there, it was the common case. Your shop will differ; the point is that it is worth knowing which one you are.
Work it out for your own bench
Nothing below is sent anywhere. Put in what your reel cost and what you charge, and the numbers are yours.
1 if it comes as a single set
Count a whole set of both strings — the way most spreadsheets do — and this job reads $16.88 instead of $8.44. On a hybrid that is roughly double, on every hybrid you do.
Why “free” and “unknown” are not the same number
Here is the part most software gets wrong, and it is not arithmetic — it is honesty. When a job has no cost recorded, the easy thing is to treat it as zero. The margin then looks excellent, the report is confident, and it is fiction.
Those two states are genuinely different. A restring on the customer's own string costs you nothing, and that is a real, knowable $0. A restring where nobody recorded the reel is unknown, and no honest system can turn that into a profit figure.
So Racketworks refuses to. It tells you how many strings still need a cost, and when a figure is built on partial data it publishes the number and the direction it is wrong in — a margin marked at most when a cost is missing, at least when a price is, or simply partial when both are, because those two gaps push the answer opposite ways. It comes with its denominator: “2 of 4 restrings priced, 3 of 4 costed.” And when nothing has been measured at all, the figure is withheld rather than shown as $0.00 — which under any label is a claim the system cannot make.
Cost is captured when the racket is logged
The last piece is timing. Racketworks draws string from your actual lots — preferring a reel whose cost you know, then oldest first — and records what that racket cost when you log the job, from the reels you had open at that moment.
That is why a restring from March still reports March's reel price after you have paid more for the next one. Change the string or the racket on that job later and it is re-costed against the reels you have open then — the figure follows the work, so an edit is a correction rather than a second, contradictory record.
It also means the answer starts accumulating the day you begin recording costs, and not before. There is no honest way to reconstruct what a job cost two years ago from a reel you no longer have, and nothing here pretends otherwise.
The short version
- Reel cost ÷ sets per reel — decide the divisor deliberately.
- Hybrid? Half a set of each, not a full set of both.
- Customer's string is a known $0; a missing record is not.
- Capture the cost when the racket is strung, or you will be guessing later.
Racketworks does all four for you, from the shared string catalog every shop starts with — 779 real strings across 18 brands — so the first restring you log already knows what it drew. Open the demo shop and price a racket, or start free — Solo is free forever and takes no card.