Cost breakdown spreadsheet

[NightShade]

So a while back I put together a spreadsheet to help figure the breakdown of costs to reload vs. buyingoutright. It uses Microsoft excel but you should be able to open with open office and have it work as well. The sheet is locked but if you need an unlocked copy please let me know and I can see about arranging it. You should be able to change any values that are required to make the calculations work.

This spreadsheet has the ability to help anyone who reloads figure their approximate costs fairly closely and will also allow you to figure the price of reloading versus buying factory rounds. You can put in the costs of the brass, bullets, primers, 3 miscellaneous items and powder. The powder is input by putting the cost of the bulk item, how many pounds purchased and then putting in the grains used per round. Being a spreadsheet it figures on perfection and this will probably make your actual costs a little higher than what is shows but that will be due to not getting every speck of powder out of the can or ruining some brass, loosing a bullet, damaging a primer, etc.

The spreadsheet should be pretty close and allow you to figure what your savings will be for reloading and if you know the purchase price of your reloading equipment it can give you a pretty good idea how many rounds it will take to offset the cost of the reloading equipment. If anyone has suggestions for changes let me know and I will see what I can do.

Download the file here.

Hope that this helps out a little bit for those people who do reload or those interested in starting. And if a moderator or admin wants to drop the link in the sticky feel free.

 

[7stw]

I have been using the hand load app for about a year ands half. Works excellent. It's a free apple app.

 

[fatcpa]

I may be overlooking the obvious, but it looks like the spreadsheet is set up to handle "all or nothing" for the cost of brass. For the uninitiated, this give unrealistically high cost for the rounds for which the total cost of the brass is used and unrealitically low values for subsequent rounds. When figuring cost of reloading, shouldn't you assume some useful life of the brass that you are reloading and spread the cost over that life? Several things effect the life of brass. Heavy loads vs light loads effect brass life. I also consider whether I will physically lose some brass or not. I recover all the brass shot from revolvers during each range session. My range has grassy areas and over the life of the brass I will lose about 20% when shot from a semi automatic (old eyes, bad back). So, when calculating brass cost per round, I figure a 10 reload life for rounds such as my 45 colt (cowboy loads) and maybe 8 reloads for the semi auto rounds. It's easy enough to use the spreadsheet as designed and just divide the total original cost of brass by the assumed life. Don't mean to be critical of your spreadsheet. It does a good job of making the calculations. Just my two cents.

 

[NightShade]

As far as the brass you have to determine yourself whether or not it is good. A primer, bullet and powder are one and done so a spreadsheet can figure it perfectly. If I automatically figure you bought 1000 brass and reused it 5 times for 5000 rounds it would show cheaper but at the same point I would then have to add a section for lost percentage, damaged percentage and end of life percentage. Your rates are going to be different from mine and everyone else will have different rates as well. I just figure that if you are going to reload and reuse your brass you can put in your guesstimate and go from there. If you want to figure the cost of new brass you can add it in. It's also feasible to put the price in for 250 cases and then put in 1000 as the quantity for brass.

I mainly put this together as a simple way to get started and compare the information to buying factory loads or the factory reloads. This was my first rendition and I do need the input to make adjustments to how things are setup but I don't want to make it so big and complicated it's not used at all, either.

I think that by the time you get into reloading you will also be picking up some info from people about the useable life. If someone is assuming that it ill last forever they may be figuring on reusing the bullets as well, lol.

 

[swampratt]

My wife uses spread sheets.
I still use pencil and paper and sometimes a calculator.
I really liked the calculator when i did a page worth of problems converting CC to CI and figuring compression on an engine.
This was all done with paper and pencil and no calculators...Took a good long time.
Spread sheets are pretty quick.
But they do not account for the times you reach across the loading bench and tump the filled cases on the floor

 

[NightShade]

I agree 100% on that, I put it together for an idea of what could be achieved. Not what will be. That is part of the reason why I'm not too worried about the brass section but when I put it together I did so because I wanted to compare what it would be vs buying factory loads.

Just like the powder being an 8 pound container and filling over 9000 rounds. I know it will go a long way but I doubt it will go that far, I think this was based on .40 S&W. The weight breaks down at 7000 grains to 1 pound and with weights that small its way too easy to waste.

 

[NikatKimber]

Very similar to the way I set up my sheet. But I added the field for "approximate reuses" for brass. You can change that based on your estimate of how many times you reuse a particular caliber, but it gives a better average if you reuse.