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’ metal 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, and its metal.
4. Save, then build the Costing recipe — one set of lines for the design:
   • Metal — which metal, and what it weighs. Weigh it the first time you make the piece. That weight at today’s rate for its purity IS its metal cost, so the 18K version genuinely costs more than the 14K one. Until a design has a metal line, its metal costs nothing.
   • Stones — category, then carat weight × cost per carat. Entered once.
   • Parts — a bought component priced each: a chain, a clasp, findings.
   • Labor — minutes × rate, or a setting band; casting as a rate per unit of metal.
   • Other Costs — a flat amount for anything else: certification, plating, an outside service.

The design is now in your House Designs catalog. Its cost is read-only — the sum of its recipe lines. To change it, change the weight or the recipe.

Making it in a second metal is a second design. Copy it (Copy design), give the copy its own number — R300 becoming R300Y and R300W, if that’s your convention — and reweigh it: the same piece in 18K is about 16% heavier than in 14K. The copy carries the recipe across, and a design group keeps the family together and searchable.

You don’t set a markup here. When you make an item, 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. 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 click + New Purchase Order.
• Set the vendor to the caster, and add a line per design and quantity you want made.
• Send the order. When the goods arrive, Receive Shipment records what turned up and pins the cost; Add to inventory then spawns a StockID per piece, carrying the design’s style # with that pinned 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.