If you need to spec wire by the foot, but you choose a spool or box from the catalog, then you may find that your profit calc seems off. This is what happens when a product cost is based on a full spool, and you set the line item quantity to match the run distance. You may set the quantity to 100 (for 100'), and the sell price to your per-foot sell price, but the cost from the catalog is still per spool, not per foot. So your profit is out of whack.

You can use fractional quantities (less than 1) on a line item in Portal to get correct cost and sell price of a spool or box of wire for a single run. For instance, if I add a 500' spool of 16/2 speaker wire to a proposal, and the run is 100' for that line item speaker location, my quantity would be 0.2.

Portal allows you to use up to two decimals for fractional quantities on proposals. That means if you have 1,000' spool, you can spec as small as 10' increments. If you have a 500' spool, you can spec in 5' minimum increments. Below is a table showing the fractional quantity for some examples:

To calculate your own, just take your wire run (100', for instance) divided by the spool size (500'). That results in 0.2, which is our first example. For a 100' wire run using a 500' spool catalog item, you would use a quantity of 0.2 on the proposal.