Additional costs on work orders

A work orderWork OrderA planned production run: pick materials, build the items, do QC, and complete — all tracked together. Use work orders when you're building stock ahead of demand or running a multi-day project. Read more → treats additional costs differently from a bill of materialsBill of MaterialsA bill of materials tells Assemblified how to build one unit of a finished good. When a customer orders the finished-good variant, Assemblified deducts the right component quantities from inventory automatically. Read more → , on purpose. A bill answers “what does this cost to make today?”. A work order is the record of a job you priced when you created it, and it must not silently re-price itself.

On this page

• The rate is frozen; the quantity is not
• Reading the cost band
• Where the two buckets land
• The labour hand-over
• When rates are re-captured
• Deleted factors don’t erase history

The rate is frozen; the quantity is not

When a work order is created, every item captures the rate of each cost factor reachable from its bill — including factors on any nested assembly billAssembly billThe recipe for an intermediate component you build and then use inside other bills — a lid, a wick assembly, a pre-wired harness. It keeps its own pre-assembled stock and can be a work order item in its own right. Read more → .

You change…	Does the work order move?
A factor’s rate, in the catalogue	No. Never.
Attaching a new factor to the bill	No.
The work order’s planned quantity	Yes — both buckets rescale. 20 candles cost twice the electricity of 10.

Note

Rescaling follows the quantity the work order’s materials are sized for. So if you decoupleDecoupleDetaching one work-order item's material list from that item's planned quantity, so the list stops resizing when the quantity changes. You decouple by answering "Keep current materials" at the re-spread prompt; a decoupled item wears a badge until you reset it. Read more → a quantity edit from the material plan, the additional costs stay put alongside the materials — a work order never mixes a 10-unit material plan with a 20-unit overhead line.

Reading the cost band

The work-order summary card has a Cost band of six cells. Each one expands to a card explaining the number behind it.

Cell	What it shows
Material cost	Raw materials plus sub-assemblies, in the current plan.
Labour cost	The work order’s labour figure. See the labour hand-over.
Additional cost	The overhead-kind cost factors from the bills.
Planned	The original cost target, locked when the work order was created. See planned costPlanned costA work order's original cost target, frozen from its bills when the work order was created. Your edits — quantities, unit-cost overrides, substitutions, splits — do not move it; they land on Adjusted cost instead. Actual cost is what the build runs consumed. Read more → .
Adjusted	The current target after your edits to quantities, unit costs, substitutions and splits. See adjusted costAdjusted costA work order's current cost target after your edits — quantities, unit costs, substitutions and hand-entered labour. It updates live as you edit, and the summary prints the difference from the frozen figure as "Δ vs planned". What the build runs consumed is Actual cost. Read more → .
Actual	What was actually consumed, priced at the unit cost stamped at consumption time. Empty until the first build run completes. See actual costActual CostWhat the work order really cost, derived from materials that have been consumed by completed build runs. Stamped into the audit ledger at the moment of consumption, so it doesn't drift if prices change later. Read more → .

The three stage cells — Planned, Adjusted and Actual — each break down into the same four rows: Material, Sub-assembly, Labour and Additional. Adjusted and Actual also carry a Δ vs planned line.

Planned is the original, Adjusted is the current one

These two labels are easy to read backwards. Planned is the frozen target from the bill at creation time; Adjusted is what the plan costs now, after your edits. A Δ is always measured against Planned.

Where the two buckets land

The Kind you gave each factor decides which cell it feeds:

• Labour-kind factors become the work order’s Labour cost.
• Overhead-kind factors become the work order’s Additional cost.

Both are named cells of their own, and both appear as a row inside each of the three stage breakdowns.

Expand Additional cost and the card states the rule itself: overhead cost factors have no actuals ledger, so every stage shows the same figure. That is deliberate — Planned, Adjusted and Actual carry an identical additional-costs number, which means it cancels exactly out of the Δ vs planned lines. A work order with a cost factor never accuses you of having changed a plan you didn’t touch.

The labour hand-over

If a work order’s bills carry Labour-kind factors, Assemblified computes the labour cost for you, rescales it with the quantity, and includes it in the totals. You don’t have to enter anything.

The moment you enter your own figure, it’s yours: it stops rescaling with quantity, and the figure the app had been serving is frozen as the labour behind the Planned column — which is what Adjusted is then measured against. (On a work order whose bills carry no labour factors there was nothing being served, so your first figure becomes the anchor itself.) That anchor is captured once, on the first entry, and later edits never move it.

Expand the Labour cost cell and the card names its parts: a From bills figure, an Operator override figure beside it when the two differ, and the Actual. It also carries the sentence that explains the whole arrangement:

Prefilled from the bills’ labour cost factors; an operator may override it.

Editing labour

Labour has its own dialog now — not the Edit details form. Expand the Labour cost cell and click Edit labour cost. The dialog has two fields, Planned and Actual, and tells you how it reads them:

Leave a field empty to say nothing about it. Zero means this work order costs no labour.

Two things worth knowing:

• The dialog’s Planned field is the work order’s current labour figure — the one shown in the Labour cost cell and in the Adjusted column. It is not the Planned column; that one keeps the anchor described above.
• Clear the field to hand the number back to the app; it resumes computing and rescaling from the bills’ labour factors. Typing 0 means zero, not “unset”.

Caution

An empty Planned labour field does not mean the work order has no labour cost. It means the app is computing it from the bills’ labour factors. Read the cost band, not the input.

When rates are re-captured

Rates re-capture only where material costs also re-price — one rule, no surprises:

Action	Rates
Creating a work order	Captured at today’s rates.
Add item on the Items card	Captured at today’s rates, like that item’s materials.
Duplicating a work order	Copied as-is. A duplicate costs what the original costs.
Reset quantities, with Also put unit costs back to the master values ticked	Re-captured at today’s rates — materials and additional costs alike.
Reset quantities, without that box	Quantities only. Rates untouched.
Refresh from bills on the materials card	Reconciles the material list. Nothing is re-priced.

Reset quantities lives in the materials card’s ⋯ menu and opens a dialog titled Reset materials. Ticking Also put unit costs back to the master values is the single deliberate way to re-price an existing work order from today’s catalogue.

Deleted factors don’t erase history

Deleting a cost factor is blocked while it’s attached to a bill — but work orders never block a delete. Each work order stored the factor’s name, kind, unit and rate alongside its quantity, so once the factor is gone from the catalogue, your historical work orders still cost exactly what they cost.

See also

• Attaching to a bill — where the quantities come from.
• Pushing additional costs to Shopify — the two checkboxes.
• Material planning & costs — the rest of the work-order cost model.