Manufacturer setup — start to finish

If your shop produces pieces in-house (cast, set, polish, etc.) rather than just buying finished goods from vendors, walk through this once. ~15 minutes. The manufacturing tools — Production, the House Designs chip on the Style Catalog, the costing recipe on each design, and the bulk-recompute cost action — are available to every shop; there’s no feature to switch on first.

How ownership works

Every style is either a house design (yours — you make it) or a vendor style (a vendor’s — you buy it finished). You choose which when you create it, from the + New Style menu, and it can’t be changed afterwards: it decides how the piece is costed, so it’s an identity, not a preference. The badge beside the style number tells you which one you’re looking at, and it’s what splits the Style Catalog into House Designs vs Vendor Styles. There’s no company-contact or org setting to configure first.

Step 1 — Set your metal prices

Go to Settings → Organization → Metals Pricing.

First set the Metal Weight Unit — grams or pennyweight (dwt). This is the unit everything metal in JewelTrak is entered and stored in: item weights, scrap lots, and your designs’ variant weights. Whichever you pick, the labels and the live metal prices follow it, so you never convert anything by hand.

Set it once, before you enter data. Changing it later doesn’t convert your existing weights — it re-reads them, so a 10 g item would start reading as 10 dwt.

Then fill in Current Gold Cost, Current Silver Cost, and your Casting Labor Rate. The labels tell you the unit ($/g or $/dwt), and it’s the same unit you weigh in.

Under Live Metal Pricing, you can point at a spot-price feed instead, and your metal lines will follow the market automatically (rates refresh about twice a day). Leave the provider on Manual to keep the fixed costs you typed above.

Step 2 — Build your first design

1. Go to Style Catalog and click the House Designs chip. (You’ll see it’s empty.)
2. Click + New Style and choose House design from the menu.
3. Fill in the design: Style Number, Description, group/category, setting type.
4. Build the Costing recipe — one set of lines for the design:
   • Stones — per-stone melee, entered once.
   • Labor — minutes × rate, or a setting band.
   • Overhead — a % if you carry one.
   • Each line says what it applies to. Most of a piece is the same whichever metal it’s cast in, so those lines apply to all variants and you enter them once. Target a line at one variant only when it genuinely differs — platinum is harder to work, so it can carry its own bench premium.
5. Add your variants (14K yellow, 18K white, platinum) — and weigh each one the first time you make it, on its row. That weight is its metal cost, at today’s rate for its purity, so the 18K genuinely costs more than the 14K. Until a variant is weighed, its metal costs nothing.
6. Save.

The design is now in your House Designs catalog. Each variant’s cost is read-only — it’s its own metal plus the recipe lines that apply to it. To change it, change the weight or the recipe.

You don’t set a markup here. When you make an item from a variant, your price multipliers set its retail and price levels from its cost — the same rule that prices everything else in JewelTrak.

Step 3 — Recompute when bullion moves

When gold or silver prices shift significantly:

1. Update Metals Pricing in Organization settings (or let the live feed do it).
2. Go to Style Catalog → House Designs.
3. Click ↻ Recompute Costs at the top right.

This re-prices every house design at today’s metal and updates each of its variants. Lines you set to a typed rate stay where you put them. Vendor styles aren’t touched. Existing StockIDs in inventory aren’t touched either — their cost basis is locked in from when they were produced.

Step 4 — Run your first Production cycle

1. Go to Production.
2. Click + New Production Job.
3. Check Make from a saved design and pick your design. The description and expected BOM cost auto-fill.
4. Set the Quantity (1 for one-off, N for a batch).
5. Save.
6. On the detail page, add Stages as work happens (Casting / Setting / Polish, etc.) — assign each to an in-house jeweler or outside vendor with cost + due date.
7. Allocate Stones from your stone inventory. They decrement at allocate time and re-credit if you remove them.
8. When the work is done, click Complete & Create Inventory. This spawns N StockIDs in your inventory with the accumulated cost (stages + stones) as the cost basis.

How the cost basis works

Every spawned StockID carries PurchasePrice = (total stage costs + total stone costs) / Quantity. That’s a point-in-time snapshot. Once the StockID exists, its cost is locked — future gold market movements don’t retroactively re-cost a piece you already made.

Where to outsource

If you send the work to an outside caster instead of producing in-house:

• Don’t create a Production job. Instead go to Purchasing → Purchase Orders and use the Factory filter.
• Create a Factory Order (the + New Factory Order button), vendor = the caster, lines = the styles/quantities you want made.
• Send the order. When the goods arrive, receive them through the standard receipt flow. Each received unit spawns a StockID — carrying the style # — with the order’s unit cost as the basis.

Related

• Production — module overview, list of jobs, stages and stones tracking.
• Style Catalog — how the chips split your house designs from vendor styles, and how a house design is costed.
• Workshop Monitor — kiosk view that includes Production jobs alongside Repairs and Custom Jobs.