This article explains how the materials table in Cost Submission is related to Sourcing Metal Locks, how it relates to the Sourcing Precious Metal grid, and how it reacts to changes in the Bill of Materials.
When you first open your Cost Submission, if your Bill of Materials contains precious metals that are not indexable on your Precious Metal Sourcing grid, then your Materials table will not pre-populate and will appear like this:
💡 What does Index to grid mean?
Learn more about Sourcing grid indexing & pre-population here
If a material can be indexed against your Enterprise customer's Precious Metal grid then it will pre-populate with values:
You can enter values or over-ride pre-populated values via the edit pencil:
You have two options in terms of entering your metal loss:
- % value (commonly used in US, Turkey and Asia)
- Invoiced metal title (commonly used in Italy)
Whichever method you choose to use, Loupe will automatically calculate the other for you. Use this as a sanity check to ensure you have understood how Loupe calculates loss %.
💡 Loss % Calculus in Loupe
Loupe uses industry best practice forward loss calculus. For example:
- a 5% loss rate on 9k gold (375 parts per thousand purity)
- equates to an invoiced metal title of [375 / (1 - 5%)] = 394.73
- This means the factory lost 5% of their starting metal weight during the production run
Some companies, common in far east Asia use a reverse loss calculus method, but this is misleading as it does not represent the actual % of fine metal lost during production. Rather it represents the % of the post-production precious metal weight that was lost in production. In which case rather than 5% the number would be 5.26% - a mathematical difference that will affect / distort your costing if you don't use forward loss.
⚠️ Warning
Any values entered in your Bill of Materials that do not index against an Enterprise retailer's Sourcing grids will be highlighted to their Sourcing team and may result in rejection or delay of approval of your Cost Submission.
💡 Impact of Chain & Findings on Materials Table
If your Bill of Materials contains a Chain and/or Finding that is an identical Material to the rest of the piece, then you will notice that the net weight values in the top section of your Materials table is adjusted in order to subtract the declared Finding and/or chain net weight from the total piece net weight. Gross weight (scale weight) remains unaffected.
If you are entering data for a non-precious material (eg Stainless Steel, Titanium etc) then the modal is more simple and you just enter the cost of the raw material used:
