The Unit That Looked Profitable Until It Wasn't
The flip looked clean on the day of purchase. You had the acquisition cost, the agent's commission, maybe one obvious repair. You ran the number in your head, decided the margin was there, and bought it. Then the repair opened up a second problem, which required a third supplier, and by the time you posted it for sale the total you had committed bore no resemblance to the number you calculated in a parking lot three weeks ago.
Secondhand goods flipping — appliances, electronics, furniture, motorcycles — runs on margin, and margin lives or dies in the repair phase. The acquisition cost is fixed. The selling price is constrained by the market. The only variable you can actually know and control is what you spent getting the unit from bought condition to displayed condition. Most flippers track this imprecisely if at all.
Seven Slots Because Seven Is the Real Number
The repair matrix in this template runs seven deep. Not because seven is a round number, but because seven is roughly where real-world refurbishment stops being predictable. Repair Details 1 through 7, each paired with a named supplier and a cost, represent the actual complexity of taking a used unit through a full restoration cycle.
An air conditioning unit bought from a distressed seller might need refrigerant recharge from one supplier, coil cleaning from a second, a replacement capacitor from a third, and a new thermostat wire harness from a fourth. That is four repair lines before you have addressed cosmetic issues. If the indoor unit housing is cracked, that is a fifth. Replacement remote from a parts dealer is a sixth. Freight from the technician's location back to your display point is a seventh if you track it here rather than in acquisition costs.
The individual supplier fields matter beyond simple cost accountability. When you run the same unit type repeatedly, you learn that Supplier 2 does coil cleaning faster but more expensively than Supplier 5. You learn that for compressor work specifically, Supplier 4 is cheaper but always goes over his quoted cost. That knowledge is in the record, not in memory, which means it is still there when you are buying the same model six months later and need to estimate repair costs before committing to an acquisition price.
The Total Unit Investment calculation — #{unit cost}+#{agents commission}+#{cost 1}+#{cost 2}+#{cost 3}+#{cost 4}+#{cost 5}+#{cost 6}+#{cost 7} — is not impressive as a formula. It is impressive as a forcing function. Because it runs automatically as you enter each line item, you see your running total change with every supplier payment. The number that was comfortable at Cost 3 becomes tight at Cost 5 and actively dangerous at Cost 7. Having the running total visible during repair rather than after forces the decision: stop spending, or re-price.
From the Day You Display It to the Day the Number Is Final
Date Displayed and Date Released, separated by however many days the unit sat on the floor or in the listing, create a velocity metric even if you never explicitly calculate one. A unit that moved in four days sold itself. A unit that sat for sixty days absorbed storage cost and opportunity cost that the Unit Income field does not capture — which is a known limitation of this structure, worth noting if your holding costs are material.
The sold price less Total Unit Investment less Tatay Fredo's commission — the formula embedded in Unit Income — is personal and operational at the same time. It names a real person in the commission split, which tells you this database was built to run a real operation involving a specific partner arrangement, not as an abstract exercise. Tatay Fredo's cut comes off the top of net, not gross, which is the correct structure for a commission tied to a sales role rather than a procurement role.
The Released boolean closes the record without deleting it. The unit's full cost history stays queryable even after it sells, which is the only way to build the repair cost benchmarks that make future acquisitions smarter.