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 BOMBill 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 BOM 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
• 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 BOM — including factors on any nested sub-assemblySub-AssemblyA reusable assembly block that composes into bigger BOMs. Define it once, include it in any BOM. At execution time, Assemblified expands the sub-assembly into its own components recursively. Read more → .

You change…	Does the work order move?
A factor’s rate, in the catalogue	No. Never.
Attaching a new factor to the BOM	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 from the live BOM so its material list stops following BOM updates. After you decouple, edits to the BOM no longer flow into this work order — useful when you've already started a build and need a frozen recipe. 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.

Where the two buckets land

The Kind you gave each factor decides where it goes:

• Labour-kind factors become the work order’s labour cost.
• Overhead-kind factors are folded into the work order’s cost totals.

Neither has a visible row of its own. Both flow into the Planned, Adjusted, and Actual columns of the work-order cost summary.

Additional costs have no separate “actual” figure — there’s no ledger of what the electricity really cost on the day, only what you planned. So the overhead figure is the same in all three columns, which means it cancels cleanly out of the vs. Planned deltas: 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 BOMs carry Labour-kind factors, Assemblified computes the labour cost for you and includes it in the cost totals. Meanwhile the Planned labour field (in Edit Work Order Details) stays empty — and that emptiness is what says “the app owns this number”. It keeps rescaling as you change the quantity.

The moment you type your own number into Planned labour:

• it’s yours, and it stops rescaling with quantity;
• the figure the app had been serving is kept as the baseline — the labour behind the Planned column, which Adjusted is then measured against.

Two things worth knowing:

• Clear the field to hand the number back to the app; it resumes computing and rescaling.
• Typing 0 means zero, not “unset”. If you want the app to take over again, clear the field rather than zeroing it.

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 BOM’s labour factors. Read the cost summary, not the input, to see what the work order’s labour actually is.

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.
Adding an item on the canvas	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 Material Quantities, with Also reset unit cost overrides ticked	Re-captured at today’s rates — materials and additional costs alike.
Reset Material Quantities, without that box	Quantities only. Rates untouched.

That last row 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 BOM or sub-assembly — but work orders never block a delete. Each work order stored the factor’s name 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 BOM or sub-assembly — where the quantities come from.
• Pushing additional costs to Shopify — the two checkboxes.
• Material planning & costs — the rest of the work-order cost model.