Home › Resources › How to Track Gold Sent to Craftsmen
For jewellery businesses that do any manufacturing — whether in-house or through external craftsmen — the moment gold leaves the premises for a job is one of the highest-risk moments in the entire business cycle. From that point, the gold is outside your direct control. It is in someone else's hands, being worked into a form you cannot see. And in most jewellery businesses, the tracking of that gold from issue to return is either informal, paper-based or absent entirely. The losses that result are real, recurring and almost always preventable.
Retail transactions are at least visible — a customer stands at the counter, a sale is recorded, a receipt is issued. Manufacturing is different. Gold leaves the business as raw material and returns as finished goods. Between those two events, anything can happen — and in a business without proper tracking, anything often does.
The most common reason manufacturing is poorly tracked is not negligence — it is that the relationship with craftsmen is typically long-standing and trust-based. The owner has worked with the same karigar or workshop for years. There is a handshake understanding about what is expected. The idea of formally recording every gram feels like an insult to a trusted partner.
But trust and records are not opposites. A craftsman who is genuinely honest has nothing to fear from accurate records — and may actually welcome them as protection against being blamed for losses they did not cause. Records protect everyone. Their absence protects no one.
All gold manufacturing produces some wastage — filings, dust, melt loss. A typical allowance might be 1.5 to 2.5 per cent of the issued weight. This is normal and expected. What is not normal is when actual wastage consistently runs at 4 or 5 per cent — but nobody is measuring it job by job, so the pattern is never visible. Over a year, on significant gold volumes, the difference between 2 per cent and 4 per cent wastage represents a substantial amount of gold that has gone somewhere other than your finished pieces.
A job is issued with 100 grams of 22KT gold. The finished items weigh 94 grams. The declared wastage is 4 grams. That leaves 2 grams unaccounted for. In a single job, 2 grams might be within an acceptable variance. Across 200 jobs a year at the same craftsman, with the same 2-gram consistent shortfall, that is 400 grams — a loss that would only be visible if someone were comparing issued weight to received weight plus declared wastage on every job.
Gold sitting with a craftsman for weeks or months beyond the agreed deadline is gold that is not in your inventory, not in your safe, and not generating revenue. It also ties up working capital. Without a system that tracks outstanding jobs and sends reminders when deadlines pass, overdue jobs become invisible — and the gold associated with them effectively disappears from the business's awareness.
Every manufacturing job starts with a formal job card: craftsman name, gold issued (weight and purity), job description, expected delivery date, permitted wastage percentage. This is not a paper chit — it is a system record that creates an outstanding job in the manufacturing register from the moment the gold leaves the premises.
When finished items are received back, the system records the weight of every finished piece. The total received weight plus declared wastage is compared automatically against the issued weight. Any shortfall beyond the permitted allowance is flagged immediately — not discovered in an annual stocktake.
At any point, the owner or manager should be able to see exactly how much gold is currently with each craftsman — the total weight, broken down by job, with the date issued and the due date. Jobs that have exceeded their due date should be highlighted automatically. This turns "gold that is somewhere out there" into a clearly monitored asset position.
Over time, the system builds a record of each craftsman's actual wastage rate across all jobs. If one craftsman consistently declares 4 per cent wastage while another doing similar work declares 2 per cent, that difference is visible — and it prompts a conversation that protects both parties. Either the wastage is genuinely higher for a legitimate reason, or it is not — and the record makes it possible to find out.
Manufacturing tracking is not about distrusting craftsmen. It is about running a professional operation where every gram of gold is accounted for at every stage of its journey — from purchase, through manufacturing, to the finished piece on display. That level of visibility protects the business, protects the craftsmen, and ensures that the margins you expect from manufacturing are actually the margins you receive.
To see how manufacturing job tracking and wastage reconciliation works in a jewellery management system, request a free Jwellex manufacturer demo.
Complete manufacturing tracking from gold issue to finished goods — request a demo.
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