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 cost rates 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 rate reachable from its bill — including cost rates on any nested assembly BOMAssembly 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 → .

You change…	Does the work order move?
A cost rate’s rate, in the catalogue	No. Never.
Attaching a new cost rate 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	Materials plus subassemblies, in the current plan.
Labour cost	The work order’s labour figure. See the labour hand-over.
Additional cost	The overhead-kind cost rates from the bills.
Original planned cost	The original cost target, locked when the work order was created. See original planned costOriginal planned 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 Current planned cost instead. Actual cost is what the build runs consumed. Read more → .
Current planned cost	The current target after your edits to quantities, unit costs, substitutions and splits. See current planned costCurrent planned 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 original planned cost". What the build runs consumed is Actual cost. Read more → .
Actual cost	What was actually consumed, priced at the unit cost stamped at consumption time. Empty until the first build run completes. See actual costActual costThe cost of materials consumed by completed build runs, plus actual labour and planned overhead. Material unit costs are stamped into the audit ledger at consumption, so later price changes do not rewrite them. Overhead has no separate actual-cost ledger and retains its planned value. Read more → .

The three stage cells — Original planned cost, Current planned cost and Actual cost — each break down into the same four rows: Material, Subassembly, Labour and Additional. Current planned cost and Actual cost also carry a Δ vs original planned cost line.

Original planned cost is the original, Current planned cost is the current one

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

Where the two buckets land

The Kind you gave each cost rate decides which cell it feeds:

• Labour-kind cost rates become the work order’s Labour cost.
• Overhead-kind cost rates 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 rates have no actuals ledger, so every stage shows the same figure. That is deliberate — Original planned cost, Current planned cost and Actual cost carry an identical additional-costs number, which means it cancels exactly out of the Δ vs original planned cost lines. A work order with a cost rate 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 cost rates, 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 Original planned cost column — which is what Current planned cost is then measured against. (On a work order whose bills carry no labour cost rates 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 cost. It also carries the sentence that explains the whole arrangement:

Prefilled from the bills’ labour cost rates; 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, Current planned cost and Actual cost, 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 Current planned cost field is the work order’s current labour figure — the one shown in the Labour cost cell and in the Current planned cost column. It is not the Original planned cost 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 cost rates. Typing 0 means zero, not “unset”.

Caution

An empty current planned labour cost field does not mean the work order has no labour cost. It means the app is computing it from the bills’ labour cost rates. 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 cost rates don’t erase history

Deleting a cost rate is blocked while it’s attached to a bill — but work orders never block a delete. Each work order stored the cost rate’s name, kind, unit and rate alongside its quantity, so once the cost rate 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.