Gee Ledger

Costing & Calculator

Every other part of Gee Ledger records what already happened. These two are for deciding what to do next: what a product costs to make, what it has to sell for, and whether the batch you actually made came in where you thought it would.

They live under Planning in the sidebar.

ScreenUse it for
CalculatorWorking a price out before anything exists — often the first thing you do
CostingRecording what a run actually cost, and comparing it to the estimate

Calculator

Open Calculator and add a card for each thing you are costing. Nothing here touches your books; it is a workbook you can throw away.

Costing One Product

For each card:

  1. Name what you are costing (e.g. Chilli sauce, 250 ml jar)
  2. Add each ingredient:
    • Bought — the pack you buy, with its unit (e.g. 5 kg)
    • Paid — what that pack costs
    • Used — how much of it goes into this run
  3. Add other costs — labour, packaging, gas, delivery — each with its own unit where that helps
  4. Enter Made — how many come out of the run, and in what unit
  5. Enter a price each

The card then shows the cost per unit, an expected income and the profit. Leave the price blank and it suggests one.

Using Part of a Pack

Ingredients are usually bought in a pack size that has nothing to do with how much a run uses — a 5 kg sack for 800 g of work. Tick I only used part of the pack to enter both, and only the portion used is costed.

Untick it and the line collapses to the whole pack, which is right when you use the lot.

Units

Quantities convert within a dimension: grams to kilograms, millilitres to litres, minutes to hours. You can buy in kilograms and use in grams without doing the arithmetic. Converting across dimensions is refused rather than guessed — a kilogram is not a litre.

Scenarios

A calculator session is a scenario you can save, name and come back to. Alongside the name there is what it assumes — the half that makes the numbers mean anything months later: which prices were held, which season, when it launches.

Above the cards, what this scenario comes to totals every product in it:

WhatMadeCost eachSell atCostIncomeProfit

So a scenario covering four products answers “what does this whole plan come to” without adding it up yourself.

Turning an Estimate into a Batch

When a card describes a run you actually made, save it as a batch into Costing. The ingredients, other costs and yield come with it, and it becomes the estimate that the real figures are later compared against.

Costing

The Costing workspace is about products you actually make and sell.

What You Sell, What You Buy

Set a standard cost for a product — what you expect one unit to cost. That is the figure everything else measures against.

Batches

A batch records one production run: what went in, what it cost, and how many came out. Save one from the Calculator, or enter it directly.

Estimated Against Actual

Once a batch has both an estimate and real figures, Costing shows the difference — per ingredient and per unit produced. This is the question the workspace exists to answer: did it cost what we thought?

Sales and Budget

The workspace also shows what those products actually sold in a chosen month, and lets you set a budget to measure against.

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