Materials, recipes and what things cost

The question behind everything else a maker does: am I making money on this? Answering it needs three things the catalog alone cannot say — what you buy in, what it costs per unit of the thing you actually use, and what goes into one of what you sell.

Materials

A material is something you buy and consume rather than sell: wax, wick, jar, fragrance, label; timber, screws, glue, finish. Add them under Materials in the sidebar.

Materials are catalog items with a type of Material, which means they get everything items already have — stock tracking, purchase history, average cost — with two differences:

• they never appear in a quote, order or invoice picker; and
• they do appear in purchase pickers and in recipes.

Each one has a unit, and stock tracking on by default: a material you do not count is a material you cannot cost as it moves.

The Materials list shows what you have on hand, what it costs you, and what that comes to per base unit — the figure that makes two suppliers comparable when one sells by the kilo and the other by the pound.

Units

You rarely buy in the unit you use. Wax comes in 5 kg boxes and goes into a candle by the gram; wick comes on a 100 m reel and is cut by the centimetre.

Company Settings → Units holds the units your workspace counts in. The standard set is there already — g, kg, oz, lb, ml, l, fl oz, mm, in, ft, yd, m, min, hr and each — and you can add your own: a bar, a skein, a sheet.

Every unit says what it measures (weight, volume, length, count or time) and how many base units one of it is. A skein that holds 100 g is 100 g; say so, and a recipe using grams can consume it.

Conversion only ever happens within one kind of measure. Grams convert to kilos; grams do not convert to millilitres, because that would need to know the density of the thing, and guessing would quietly mis-cost every recipe that did it. Pick the same kind of unit on both sides and OrderDen does the rest.

Workspace variables

Some numbers belong to the workshop rather than to any one product: what an hour of your time is worth, what overhead you carry, what packaging costs a unit. Those live in Company Settings → Variables, and you start with three:

Add as many as you like. You can use them by name in any cost calculator, and changing one here re-costs everything that uses it — which is the point: put your hourly rate up and every product tells you what that did to its margin.

An item variable of the same name wins for that item, so a product with an unusual overhead can carry its own without disturbing anything else.

Recipes

On any product's page, the Recipe tab is its bill of materials. Add a row per material with the quantity, the unit you think in, and any waste — the offcuts, the spillage, the tail of the wick that never reaches the product. Then say how many units one batch makes, how many minutes of hands-on time it takes, and (if this one is different from your usual) its overhead percentage.

The cost works itself out as you type:

materials + labour + overhead
─────────────────────────────  =  cost per unit
         batch yield

• Materials — each line's quantity, plus its waste, at what that material actually costs you, converted through the units. A material you have bought is costed at its weighted average; one you have only priced by hand is costed at the figure you typed.
• Labour — minutes ÷ 60 × your hourly rate.
• Overhead — a percentage of materials plus labour.

A batch of 12 candles using 1.2 kg of wax at $12/kg, 12 wicks at $0.08 and 12 jars at $1.10, with 45 minutes of work at $25/hr and 15% overhead, comes to $4.53 a candle. At $22 that is a 79% gross margin — and if the wax price goes up next month, you will see it.

Materials with no cost

A material nothing has costed yet is listed under the breakdown rather than guessed at. Its lines count as zero, so the total is an understatement, not a wrong number — and the page says which material is missing, so you know exactly what to fix.

Where the unit cost comes from

Every item says where its cost comes from — the Cost follows picker on the item form:

• What I type — a figure you own. Nothing overwrites it, and the average from purchases is shown beside it so you can see when the two have drifted.
• The recipe — the cost is whatever the recipe works out to, and it moves whenever a material's price does. The change is written to the item's history: "Unit cost updated from recipe: $3.12 → $3.40 (wax price changed)".
• What I pay — the cost stays equal to the weighted average of what you have actually been charged.

Use recipe cost as unit cost on the Recipe tab is the one-click way into the second of those.

When costs move

Receiving a purchase moves a material's average cost. Everything that uses it is re-costed straight away: the recipes that name it, and any product whose cost follows its recipe. Change your hourly rate or your overhead percentage and the same happens across the whole workspace.

None of this changes documents you have already issued. Every quote, order and invoice line keeps the cost that was true when it was written, so last quarter's margin report stays what it was.

Cost calculators can use all of it

The cost calculators on an item can refer to your workspace variables and to what the recipe worked out, alongside the item's own variables:

So "what if I added packaging and a 20% contingency?" is (recipe_unit_cost + packaging_per_unit) * 1.2 — a calculator beside the recipe, comparable at a glance.

Bringing a materials tab in

A workshop that has been running on a spreadsheet nearly always has a materials tab already — a code, a name, what it is counted in, what the last box cost — and until that is in OrderDen no recipe can cost anything. The import wizard takes it as a CSV under Materials.

Two columns behave differently from the rest, both on purpose:

• Unit is required and is never invented. A material's unit is what every recipe line converts through, so "kg" typed as "kgs" would quietly create a second unit that converts to nothing. A code you don't have is a rejected row, and the message lists the codes you do have. Add your own under Settings → Units first.
• Category is created when it is missing, because filing is a naming decision with no arithmetic behind it and refusing the row would mean typing forty categories in first.

Fill in On hand and each row also books an opening balance at the cost you gave — the same movement the opening-stock form writes, so a re-import books the difference rather than doubling the shelf. Vendor names who you buy it from and becomes the material's preferred vendor — matched to a vendor you already have by name, ignoring case, or created if you don't — and Vendor code is their code for it, printed on the purchase line. Leave both blank and a re-import for costs changes nothing about who you buy from.

Everything here is on the API: materials, units, variables, recipes and the cost breakdown — see the API reference.