Jewellery workshop management software

What it is

A workshop module tracks jobs by weight. Metal is issued to a karigar against a job, recorded in gross and fine weight; the job moves through states from issued to received to completed; and what comes back is weighed and compared against what was expected before any labour is settled. Shops that write it jewelry workshop software mean this same set of jobs, and we use the trade’s spelling throughout.

The problem in a jewellery shop

Metal at the workshop is still your stock, but it is the hardest stock to account for. Issue 120 g to a karigar for six bangles and you will not get 120 g back: some is lost to filing, polishing and solder, and the trade handles that with an agreed wastage allowance. The trouble is that the allowance is usually agreed verbally and remembered differently by each side.

So three questions become awkward at once. How much metal is out with karigars right now, across all open jobs? Did this particular job come back within its allowance, or a gram over? And when the karigar’s labour is settled at the end of the month, is that settlement taking account of a shortfall, or paying for it twice? None of this is answerable from a piece-count stock list.

How DataJewellers handles it

Karigar jobs are part of the stock ledger, not a separate register. Metal issued leaves saleable stock and sits against the job, which is where it stays visible until pieces come back.

• Karigars as records. Each karigar has a record with their open jobs, running balance and payment history, so a settlement conversation happens against a document rather than a memory.
• Issue by weight and fine weight. An issue records the gross weight and the purity, and therefore the fine weight, which is the only figure that survives a karigar melting and re-forming the metal.
• Expected against actual. The job carries what you expect back. When pieces are received you see the difference and the implied wastage before labour is settled, rather than a week later.
• Job states. Issued, received, completed — so “what is still out” is a filter rather than a count of notebook pages.
• Repairs kept separate. A customer’s repair is not yours to sell, so it is held outside saleable stock. This is a module a business enables when it takes repairs in; karigar jobs are on by default.
• Replacements. For businesses that use them, a replacement is tracked against the piece it replaces, so the history of both is readable afterwards.
• Workshop reports. Metal still out, by karigar and in total, and exportable with the rest of your reports to CSV, Excel or PDF.

When a job is received the finished pieces enter stock as items in their own right, with their own codes and tags, weighed as they actually came back rather than as they were ordered. That is the moment the ledger stops counting the metal as issued and starts counting it as saleable.

A worked example

Say 120.000 g of 22K is issued to a karigar for six bangles, with a wastage allowance of 2% agreed and recorded on the job. At 22K the fineness is 0.91667, so the issue is 110.000 g fine.

Who it is for

Shops that have their pieces made rather than only bought finished: a retailer with two or three regular karigars, a family business with its own bench upstairs, a shop that takes in repairs and alterations over the counter. If you buy everything ready-made and never hand metal to anyone, you want purchase management instead, and can leave this module switched off.

The shops that get most from it are the ones where metal moves out more than once a week. At that frequency the notebook stops being a record and becomes a backlog, and the question that gets dropped is the one that costs money: how much fine gold is sitting on someone else’s bench this evening.