Production costing software for Indian factories with real WIP accounting and cost variance built into the ledger. Know the exact material, labour, and overhead cost of every production order, see where a job lost money, and price on data instead of instinct.
Not a costing spreadsheet bolted on the side. Every production posting is a real journal entry, so the cost of a job is the number in your ledger.
Starting a production order moves cost from Raw Materials to a Work-in-Progress account. Completing it moves WIP to Finished Goods. These are real double-entry journal entries, not just stock movements, so your balance sheet shows exactly how much capital is tied up mid-production.
Every order carries its own material + labour + overhead cost. The finished-goods cost reconciles exactly to the finished-goods ledger postings for that order — an enforced, tested invariant. The cost you read on the order is the cost that hit your books.
Read-only variance analysis splits a job that lost money into its causes: price variance for input cost moves, quantity variance for yield and over-issue, and period absorption variance for under-absorbed labour and overhead. You see why margin slipped, not just that it did.
Record scrap at the raw-material, WIP, or finished-goods stage. ReadyBooks posts a scrap expense and removes the stock in the same step, so the loss shows up as a real cost line. Mark scrap as reworkable to recover it instead of writing it off.
Close a production order in stages and the cost is tracked as a running weighted average across the partial completions of the same order. You get one consistent per-unit finished cost across batches, not a different number for the first run and the last.
Cancelling an order reverses the WIP postings so nothing is stranded. Closing an order at a partial quantity writes off the unabsorbed WIP instead of inflating your work-in-progress balance forever. The books stay clean with no orphaned cost.
COGS stops being a guess. There is one cost number for a job, and it lives in your ledger.
The inventory report, the profit and loss, and the job costing report all reconcile because the per-order finished cost is the journal entry that built your Finished Goods balance. No more three reports showing three costs for the same SKU.
Compare the true finished cost of a SKU against what you actually sold it for and see the margin on that specific item — not just a blended factory-wide number that hides which products carry the profit and which drain it.
When a job comes in over cost, the variance breakdown attributes it to input price, yield, or under-absorbed overhead. You fix the actual cause instead of squeezing the wrong lever next quarter.
Because WIP is a real account that fills on order start and empties on completion, cancellation, or close, your work-in-progress balance is always defensible. No stale value stranded from an order that was abandoned months ago.
Manufacturing margins in India are thin — single digits on most SKUs once raw material, conversion, and overhead are honestly counted. At that margin, a costing error of a few percent is the difference between a profitable line and one that quietly bleeds. The trouble is that in most factories the cost of goods sold is a guess: the inventory module values stock one way, the accountant books a period-end estimate another way, and the quoting spreadsheet uses standard rates nobody has touched in two years.
ReadyBooks closes that gap by making the production postings the ledger. Starting an order, completing it, scrapping material, and closing it short all post real journal entries through your chart of accounts. The cost of a job is not estimated alongside the books — it is the books. That single design choice is what lets you trust the SKU margin, defend the WIP balance in an audit, and quote a new job from what a similar one actually consumed.
The pay-off is pricing on data instead of instinct. When you can see the real material, labour, and overhead a job took, plus the variances that pushed past jobs over budget, you set a price that protects margin. Over a year, gut-feel quoting on thin margins quietly costs lakhs; a true cost per job is the change that turns that around.
Work-in-Progress is the value of material on the floor that is neither raw stock nor finished goods — and it needs a real home in the ledger.
Work-in-Progress is the value of material that has been issued to a production order but not yet converted into finished goods. Before WIP accounting, that value has nowhere honest to sit: it has left raw material inventory because it is on the shop floor, but it is not finished stock yet either. ReadyBooks gives it a real home with a dedicated WIP ledger account. When you start a production order, the system debits Work-in-Progress and credits Raw Materials for the value of the material issued — a genuine double-entry journal, not a one-sided stock note.
When the order is completed, the flow reverses out of WIP and into Finished Goods. Direct labour and manufacturing overhead are absorbed onto the order at this point, so the finished-goods cost that lands in your books is material plus labour plus overhead for that specific order. The WIP account empties for that order as Finished Goods fills. At any moment, the balance in your WIP account is the honest sum of all the part-finished value on your floor — which is exactly the number a banker or an auditor wants to see when they ask how much capital is locked in production.
This matters most when something interrupts the normal flow. If you cancel an order that has already pulled material into WIP, ReadyBooks posts the correct reversal so the WIP account does not carry a phantom balance. If you close an order at a partial quantity — you made less than planned and decided to stop — the unabsorbed WIP is written off rather than left to inflate the balance indefinitely. The WIP account therefore only ever holds value for orders that are genuinely still in progress.
The true cost of a job is not a factory-wide average — it is the material, labour, and overhead that one production order actually consumed.
The true cost of a job is material plus direct labour plus manufacturing overhead for that one production order. Material is the actual value of the raw material issued to the order, taken from your stock at its weighted-average cost. Direct labour is the labour absorbed onto the order when you complete it. Manufacturing overhead is the overhead absorbed onto the same order. ReadyBooks adds these three components on the order itself, so the cost is specific to that job rather than a factory-wide average smeared across everything you made that month.
What makes the number trustworthy is the reconciliation. The finished-goods cost shown on a production order ties exactly to the finished-goods ledger postings created for that order. This exact-tie is an enforced, tested invariant inside ReadyBooks — the system is built and tested so that the cost panel on the order can never silently disagree with what hit the Finished Goods account. You are not reconciling two systems and hoping they line up; there is one cost, and it is the ledger.
When you complete an order in stages, ReadyBooks tracks the cost as a running weighted average across the partial completions of that same order. Each partial completion contributes its own material, labour, and overhead into the average, so the per-unit finished cost stays consistent from the first batch you close to the last. That consistency is what lets you compare the cost of one job against another, or against the price you quoted, without worrying that the comparison is distorted by which batch you happened to look at.
Knowing a job lost money is not actionable on its own; knowing whether the cause was input price, yield, or absorption is.
Knowing a job lost money is not actionable on its own; knowing why is. ReadyBooks variance analysis is read-only reporting that decomposes the gap between what a job should have cost and what it did cost into three named causes. Price variance is calculated as the actual unit cost minus the planned unit cost, multiplied by the quantity consumed. It isolates the effect of input prices moving — when steel or yarn or active ingredient costs more than your plan assumed, price variance is where it shows up, separate from anything to do with how the job ran.
Quantity or usage variance is the actual consumption minus the expected consumption for the quantity you actually produced, multiplied by the planned unit cost. This isolates yield and discipline on the floor: over-issue, wastage, off-spec output, and rework all surface here. A job can have a perfectly normal price variance and still bleed because the line consumed more material than the recipe called for — usage variance catches exactly that, valued at planned rates so it is not contaminated by price movement.
Period absorption variance is the over- or under-absorbed labour and manufacturing overhead for the period. Because you absorb labour and overhead onto orders at standard rates, the rates will rarely match actual spend to the rupee. If your standard rate under-absorbed — actual overhead ran higher than what was loaded onto jobs — that under-absorption is a real cost the period has to bear, and absorption variance makes it visible instead of letting it hide in a swelling overhead account. Across the three variances, the answer to "why did this job lose money" is always one of: input price moved, yield slipped, or overhead under-absorbed.
Scrap is one of the most under-counted costs in a factory — until you make it an explicit, in-the-moment expense tied to where it happened.
Scrap is one of the most under-counted costs in a factory because it usually disappears as inventory shrinkage discovered at the annual count, long after the job that caused it has been forgotten. ReadyBooks makes scrap an explicit, in-the-moment cost. You can record scrap at the raw-material stage, in WIP, or on finished goods, and the system posts a scrap expense and removes the scrapped quantity from stock in the same action. The loss lands as a real expense line tied to when and where it happened, so it shows up in the period it was incurred rather than as a mystery adjustment months later.
Not all scrap is dead loss. Material that can be reprocessed should not be written off as if it were destroyed. ReadyBooks lets you mark scrap as reworkable so the recoverable value is preserved rather than expensed away. This keeps your scrap expense honest — it reflects genuine loss, not value that is going to come back into a future order — and it keeps your inventory accurate for the material that is actually still usable.
Treated this way, scrap stops being an invisible drain and becomes a measurable cost. When scrap is a visible expense line attributed to a stage of production, the per-order cost carries it, so a job with a scrap problem shows a higher true cost and a worse margin — exactly the signal you need to investigate the line before the next run repeats the loss.
Thin-margin factories where a guessed COGS is the difference between profit and loss.
Each production order carries a true material-plus-labour-plus-overhead cost that ties exactly to the Finished Goods ledger. The inventory report, the P&L, and the job costing report finally reconcile, and the owner quotes new orders from what a similar job actually consumed.
Variance analysis separates the damage: price variance shows the yarn-cost moves, usage variance shows the dye-house over-consumption, and absorption variance flags under-absorbed overhead. The team fixes the actual leak instead of guessing.
Partial completions are costed on a running weighted average so per-unit cost stays consistent across releases. Rejected material is recorded as scrap at the right stage with a posted expense, and reworkable material is preserved instead of written off.