The cost rates settings

Settings → Catalogues → Cost rates is the catalogue of your cost rates. Each row is one rate you charge — an hourly labour rate, a price per kilowatt-hour, a cost per machine minute — defined once and referenced from as many bills 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 → and assembly BOMsAssembly BOMThe BOM 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 → (definitions for subassemblies) as you like.

On this page

• What you need to edit this page
• What the table shows
• Creating a cost rate
• Editing a rate (and what re-prices)
• Deleting a cost rate

What you need to edit this page

Creating, editing and attaching cost rates needs the Enhanced plan. Below it the page still opens and the catalogue is still readable — every rate, every usage count — but the whole card is inert, with a badge naming the tier, one Upgrade action and no way to fire a control by accident. The page says it in its own words:

Creating, editing and attaching cost rates requires the Enhanced plan. Existing cost rates stay visible and keep pricing your BOMs.

That last sentence is the important one. Cost rates you attached while you had the plan keep pricing every bill that references them; nothing is hidden and no cost silently drops out. What you lose is the ability to change them.

Note

If Assemblified can’t read your plan at all — rather than reading it as “not Enhanced” — the card shows Retry instead of the upgrade panel. A plan it couldn’t check is not a plan that ended.

What the table shows

Column	What it is
Name	Your label for the cost — Dipping labour, Electricity, Kiln time.
Kind	Labour or Overhead. See labour vs. overhead.
Unit	What one unit of the rate buys — hour, kWh, minute, pcs. Picked from your Units catalogue.
Rate	Cost per one unit, in your store’s currency, shown as rate / unit.
Used by	How many BOMs and how many assembly BOMs currently reference this cost rate, on two lines.

The table sorts: click a column header to bring the most expensive rate, or the most-referenced cost rate, to the top.

The Unit is a label, not a conversion. Nothing in the app converts hours to minutes for you — pick a unit, then always express quantities in that unit. If the rate is $40 / hour, one minute of it is a quantity of 0.0166667.

Creating a cost rate

1. Open Settings, then Cost rates under the Catalogues group in the settings sidebar.

2. Click New cost rate in the card’s heading row.

3. Fill in four fields:

   • Name — required.
   • Kind — Labour for human time, Overhead for everything else. Defaults to Overhead.
   • Unit — chosen from a dropdown, not typed. See the note below.
   • Rate — cost per one unit. Decimals are fine and are kept exactly. A negative rate is refused under the field, before the dialog will submit.

4. Save. The cost rate is now available in the Add a cost rate… dialog on every bill of materials and assembly BOM.

Creating a cost rate changes no cost anywhere. It costs nothing until you attach it to something with a quantity.

Units come from the Units catalogue

Unit is a dropdown fed by Settings → Catalogues → Units, ordered time first, then energy, then counts and the rest. You can no longer coin a brand-new unit by typing it here — add it in Units and it appears in this list. One exception keeps old cost rates safe: a cost rate’s own unit is always offered back to you, even if that unit has since been deactivated or was hand-typed before this changed, so editing a cost rate can never silently re-unit it.

Tip

If you have several labour rates (junior vs. senior, day vs. overtime), create one cost rate per rate rather than one “Labour” cost rate you keep editing. The rate is what a work order freezes — separate cost rates keep separate histories.

Editing a rate

Editing a cost rate’s rate re-prices every bill of materials and assembly BOM that references it, immediately. There is nothing to recalculate or re-save — open any affected bill and the new number is already there.

Existing work ordersWork 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 → do not move. They kept the rate they saw when they were created. See Additional costs on work orders.

Deleting a cost rate

Deleting a cost rate that’s still attached to a bill is blocked, and you find out before you’re asked to confirm anything: the delete button refuses on the spot and the page raises a red banner at the top saying the cost rate is still attached and that deleting is blocked until you detach it. Detach it from every bill that holds it, then delete.

The Used by column is how you find them — it counts the bills of materials and the assembly BOMs holding the cost rate.

When nothing holds it, you get the usual confirmation:

Delete cost rate? This cannot be undone. Existing work orders keep their frozen rates.

Work orders never block a delete. Each work order stored the cost rate’s name and rate alongside its quantity when it was created, so historical work orders keep their costs intact after the cost rate is gone from the catalogue.

See also

• Attaching to a bill
• Pushing cost to Shopify