A batch is one production run: what you paid the workshop up front and on delivery, plus the freight, hardware and customs tagged to that run. When the batch is received, its total is split across the pieces the run produced in proportion to the estimates those lines already carried — not evenly per piece — and that per-piece figure is written onto the products the run made and, if you tick it, onto open order lines still carrying the old estimate. Every line is shown before anything is written, and orders already delivered are never repriced.
Create the batch and its lines
What the run is making and how many of each. Each line is seeded with the cost that product normally carries, which is the estimate the split will later be weighted by.
Record what the workshop was paid
The pre-payment when the run starts and the post-payment on delivery. Both appear in your expenses automatically, marked as the batch's own payments so that totalling the run cannot count them twice.
Tag the extras to the batch
Freight, hardware, customs — anything that was part of getting the run made. Tagged expenses are part of what the batch cost; untagged ones are not.
Receive the batch and write the actual cost
One action, with every line it is about to change listed first: the product, the estimate it carries now, and the figure the run says it should carry. Nothing is written until you confirm.
The part you cannot discover by clicking, and the reason most of these questions get asked twice.
The production cost on each product
The per-piece figure the run produced replaces the estimate on the products it made, so the next order for that piece is priced off what the last one cost.
Open order lines still on the estimate
Only the lines still carrying the untouched estimate move. A cost someone typed in by hand was a decision, and a batch write-back does not silently overwrite it with an average.
The margin on those orders
An order whose cost has just been corrected shows the margin it actually earned, in place of the one the quote implied.
Nothing on a delivered order
Delivered orders keep the margin they were booked at. Rewriting closed history changes a number nobody is going to look at again for the right reasons.
Named here, so you find out now rather than in week two.
No materials inventory
A batch holds what the run cost, not what went into it. No counting to the gram, no reorder points, no lot numbers.
No order is joined to a batch
Cost lives on the order line, which is why a run can supply several orders and an order can be made from several runs without either having to be chosen.
A run with no estimates splits flat
The weighting needs something to weight by. Where every line carries zero there is nothing to use, and the total divides evenly — a fallback rather than a decision.
Why not just divide the total by the number of pieces?
Because a run of one table and six stools did not put an equal amount of materials, time and workshop attention into each. A flat split says the table and a stool cost the same to make; weighting by the estimates already on the lines keeps a table worth four stools before and after, and moves only the level.
I make in-house. Do I have to use batches at all?
No. Batches are optional. If you produce it yourself, put the cost straight on the product and the margin works the same way; the batch exists for the case where one invoice arrives for a pile of pieces.
Does the workshop payment get counted twice?
No. The two payments are mirrored into Expenses so they show up in your outgoings, and those two rows carry a mark that excludes them from the batch's own total. That mark is a column rather than a note, so editing the note cannot change what a run cost.
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