Before anything can be sold, it has to be made. Raw material becomes a finished item, and behind every unit sits a real cost: the material, the people and machines that worked on it, and whatever was lost along the way. Manufacturing in TamilAccounting follows that whole journey, from the bill of materials to finished goods in stock, and posts every rupee of it to the same ledger you already run the business on.
Who it's built for
The same module fits very different shop floors, because it gives you three ways to make things and lets you choose one per order:
- Food, bakery, spices and snacks: recipes with a process-loss allowance, and batch and expiry on the output
- Pharma, Ayurveda, cosmetics and nutraceuticals: batch- and expiry-tracked production, with rejected quantity recorded on every run
- Chemicals, paints and detergents: batches made to a formula, with wastage built into the plan
- Electrical, electronics, engineering and furniture: builds in stages across work centres, with job cards for labour and machine time
- Garments and textiles: cutting, stitching and finishing as stages of one production chain
- Printing and packaging: stage-wise jobs raised against a customer's order
- Retail and FMCG: gift hampers, combo packs and festival boxes, and splitting them back when a combo doesn't sell
- Computers, mobiles and refurbishing: building from parts, and stripping returned units for spares
- Make-to-order workshops: every build tied to a confirmed customer order
Production at a glance
The Manufacturing overview opens on the numbers a production manager checks first: open work orders, orders in progress, what's overdue, what closed, units finished this month, a breakdown by status, and the most recent work orders with the date each one is required by.
The board: what to do next
The overview tells you how the month is going. The board tells you what to do next. Every open order sits in the column it has actually reached — draft, awaiting approval, ready to release, material out with a job worker, in progress, partly received, closed — and each card carries the one action that moves it on. Release it. Send the material. Produce. Receive. Close. Filter to a work centre or a crew and you are looking at a shift's work on one screen, with nothing to remember and nothing to chase by phone.
It starts with the bill of materials
Every item you manufacture has a bill of materials: the components that go into one unit, how much of each, the unit it's measured in, the location it's drawn from and the work centre that uses it. Each line also carries a wastage % (the powder left in the mixer, the fabric that falls off the cutting table), so the plan asks for what production really consumes, not the ideal.
Add a standard labour and overhead cost and the bill of materials rolls up into one calculated total. A single click on Recalculate Standard Cost from BOM puts that number on the item, so stock is valued at what it actually costs to make. A similar item doesn't need its bill of materials typed again: copy it across and change what's different. The Costed BOM list then shows every manufactured item beside its rolled-up cost.
A worked example: a 1 kg spice masala pack
| Component | Per pack | Wastage | Effective qty | Rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coriander powder | 0.500 kg | 2% | 0.510 kg | ₹160 / kg | ₹81.60 |
| Chilli powder | 0.300 kg | 2% | 0.306 kg | ₹240 / kg | ₹73.44 |
| Turmeric powder | 0.200 kg | 2% | 0.204 kg | ₹180 / kg | ₹36.72 |
| Pouch | 1 pc | 0% | 1 pc | ₹6.00 | ₹6.00 |
| Material | ₹197.76 | ||||
| Standard labour | ₹8.00 | ||||
| Standard overhead | ₹4.00 | ||||
| Standard cost per pack | ₹209.76 | ||||
Three ways to make it: work order types
Every production job is a work order, and the first thing a work order asks for is its type. The type decides how much of the process you want to record.
Assemble: one step, done on save
Choose the item and quantity, save, and it's finished. The order is released and produced in the same moment: the components (wastage included) leave stock and the finished item comes in. Labour and overhead go on the same form, filled in from the item's standard cost. Assemble works with ready parts that aren't batch-tracked. When a component carries batch numbers, the system asks you to use Advanced Manufacture instead.
Use it for: gift hampers, combo packs and kits, festival boxes, and any same-day assembly from parts already on the shelf.
Unassemble: the same step in reverse
Unassemble takes finished units out of stock and puts their components back at bill-of-materials quantities.
Use it for: splitting a combo pack that isn't moving, stripping returned or faulty units to recover their parts, and undoing an assembly that was built wrong.
If your company doesn't allow negative stock, both are checked before they save: Assemble won't go through while a component is short, and Unassemble won't break down units that aren't in stock.
Advanced Manufacture: production that takes time
When making something takes days, happens in batches or produces rejects, Advanced Manufacture records each stage as it really happens:
- Create the order, or save it as a draft, with the date it's required by.
- Release it. The material requirement is built from the bill of materials, wastage included.
- Produce in one run or several. Each run draws its components from stock automatically and puts the good output into stock straight away, with batch, expiry and any rejected quantity recorded. Rejected units still used their material, so that cost stays with the good ones.
- Issue extra material the plan didn't allow for, or return what wasn't used.
- Add costs: labour and overhead as they happen, each against its own account.
- Close. Whatever cost the order still holds moves onto the finished item.
Use it for: real production with a timeline, anything batch- or expiry-tracked, partial daily output, and multi-stage jobs.
Made to order: straight from a sales order
A work order doesn't have to start on a blank form. Open a confirmed sales order that contains manufactured items and raise a work order from it, either for the order or from the icon on any manufactured line that still has quantity to deliver. The customer comes across automatically, so production and the order it serves stay linked. Leave the customer empty and the same work order simply makes to stock.
Every work order also records the branch, the person in charge, the team, the work centre and the location the output goes to. Those are exactly the fields the manufacturing reports filter on.
Multi-stage production
A garment is cut before it's stitched; a board is printed before it's assembled. For work like that, a work order raises sub work orders for each stage, each tagged with a process type. The system refuses a chain that loops back on itself or repeats the same process, and an order can't be closed while its stages or job cards are still open.
Planning the stages
When the thing you are making is built from sub-assemblies you also make, you should not be raising those orders by hand and hoping the dates line up. Plan the stages instead: give the job a start date and the date the stages are needed by, and every in-house sub-assembly becomes a work order of its own, in the right sequence, with the parent waiting on them. The parent refuses to close while a stage is still open, so a half-built job cannot be signed off by mistake, and the tree view shows the whole chain at once.
Job cards: the shop floor, hour by hour
Under a work order, job cards schedule the actual operations: which work centre, which team or employee, and the time window, with a target quantity and estimated hours. As the work happens, the quantity done and actual hours are recorded against them, so the gap between plan and reality shows up for every operation, not just for the finished order.
Trace what consumed what
The same raw material often feeds several finished items, sometimes several levels deep. Pick any component and TamilAccounting lists every parent item that consumes it, the quantity each one needs, the work centre and location involved, and how many bills of materials deep it sits. When a material runs short or its price jumps, you know exactly what's affected.
Following the example into the books
Say the masala is made on an Advanced Manufacture order for 500 packs, produced in two runs of 300 and 200. Labour actually came to ₹4,500 and overhead to ₹2,000.
| Step | Debit | Credit | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Run 1: 300 packs draw their components | Work in progress | Raw material inventory | ₹59,328.00 |
| Run 1: good output into stock | Finished goods inventory | Work in progress | ₹59,328.00 |
| Run 2: 200 packs draw their components | Work in progress | Raw material inventory | ₹39,552.00 |
| Run 2: good output into stock | Finished goods inventory | Work in progress | ₹39,552.00 |
| Labour charged to the order | Work in progress | Labour account | ₹4,500.00 |
| Overhead charged to the order | Work in progress | Overhead account | ₹2,000.00 |
| Close: the remaining cost settles onto the item | Finished goods inventory | Work in progress | ₹6,500.00 |
Work in progress ends at zero. The 500 packs sit in stock at ₹1,05,380, which is ₹210.76 a pack: one rupee over the ₹209.76 standard, because labour ran ₹500 over plan. Showing you that rupee is exactly what the Work Order Costing report is for.
What the job really cost
A standard cost set months ago is a guess. What a run actually drew is a fact, and that is what goes into stock: each production run backflushes its components at their real value, so the finished goods carry what they really cost rather than what they were supposed to.
Everything else lands in work in progress as it happens — extra issues, labour at the rate set for that employee, team or work centre, overhead, expenses, and for subcontracted work the job worker's charges as they accrue. When you close the order, the screen tells you what it is about to settle before you commit: what was ordered, what was produced, what is still sitting in work in progress and where it is going. Close it and the balance moves onto the finished goods, so work in progress ends at zero. If no stock is left to carry it, the balance goes to cost of sales, where it belongs.
Two safety nets sit behind that. Settle WIP finds orders that were closed before their cost was final — a late supplier bill, an overhead posted the week after — and settles them properly. Reopen puts an order back and reverses the close settlement when something was genuinely missed.
Rejects, downtime, and how well you are actually making it
Good output is only half the story. Each production run records what was rejected and why, against reasons you defined once, so scrap stops being a number nobody can explain. A machine that is not running is the most expensive thing on the floor, so stoppages are logged against the work centre with their reason and marked planned or unplanned — maintenance you chose is not a failure, and the report should not treat it as one.
Together those two logs, plus the cycle times you set per item, produce overall equipment effectiveness: how much of the time the machine was available, how fast it ran when it was, and how much of what it made was good. It is the one number that tells a factory owner whether buying another machine would help, or whether the one they own is idle a third of the day.
Sending work out: job work
Not everything is made in your own shed. Mark a supplier as a job worker and they get their own stock location, so material you send them is still yours and still on your balance sheet — just somewhere else. A work order can be set to subcontract execution with a rate per good unit, material goes out on a challan, comes back as a production receipt with the job worker's charges attached, and those charges are billed off against what actually returned. Job work has a video of its own; it is enough here to know that the same work order carries it.
Manufacturing reports
Twenty-four reports sit under Manufacturing in the Reports module. Most print to PDF or export to Excel, and every summary report filters by the work order's work centre and team, so each supervisor can see their own floor.
Planning: before production starts
- Bill of Material Listing: the bill of materials for one item or for all of them, optionally narrowed to one component category, now level by level with the cost rolled up.
- Where-Used: the same question from the component's side — every item this material ends up in, and at what level.
- Material Shortage: the materials open work orders still need by a date, set against stock on hand and open purchase orders, showing the shortfall and what's left to buy or make. You can include unreleased orders, show only shortages, or list the work orders behind each line.
- Open and Overdue Work Orders: every order not yet closed as of a date, with its status, due date, days overdue and progress. Group it by status, overdue age, work centre, team, customer or item, and include drafts and orders awaiting approval if you want them.
- Make-to-Order Tracking: each work order tied back to the sale that asked for it, so you can tell a customer where their order actually is.
Shop floor: while it runs
- Work Order Listing: work orders in a period by item, location, work centre and team, with a switch to show only outstanding orders.
- Work Orders: each work order printed on your own template, ready to hand to the floor.
- Work Order Issues: every material issue in a period, by location, work centre and team.
- Job Cards: shop-floor job cards as a PDF, one card per page, for one card, all cards on a work order, or everything scheduled in a period.
- Job Card Summary: job cards grouped by work centre, team, employee, work order, item or status, with target against completed quantity, estimated against actual hours, and a count by status.
- Stage Progress: for multi-level jobs, how far each stage has got and what the parent is waiting on.
- Work Centre Load: capacity against the hours planned and the hours actually worked, so you can see which station is the bottleneck.
Output and cost: after it's made
- Production Register: finished goods produced, run by run, grouped by date, month, item, category, work centre, location or team. Summary Only gives one line per item.
- Material Consumption: raw material drawn into production (the automatic draws and any extra issues, net of returns) in quantity and value, by component, category, finished item, work order, date, work centre or team. Material consumed at zero cost is flagged.
- Material Usage: Plan vs Actual: what the bill of materials planned for the quantity produced, wastage included, against what was actually drawn, with the variance in quantity, percent and value. Show closed orders only, variances only, or a summary by component.
- Work Order Costing: what each order cost in material, labour, overhead and expenses, the cost per unit against the BOM standard, and whether a closed order's cost reached stock. Show Cost Sheet itemises every order.
- WIP Valuation: the money sitting in open orders at a date, reconciled against the work in progress account, which is the figure your auditor will ask for.
- Production Performance: output against plan, by item, work centre, team or period.
- Rejection and Yield: what was rejected, for which reason, and the yield that leaves you with.
- Labour Cost and Efficiency: hours and money against what the cycle times said it should take.
- Downtime and OEE: availability, performance and quality, and the OEE they multiply out to.
- Batch Traceability: forwards from a batch to every customer who received it, backwards from a complaint to the material that went into it.
Job work: what went out and what came back
- Job Work Challan: the delivery challan for material sent to a job worker.
- Job Work Register: sent, consumed, returned and still pending, with ageing.
- Material with Job Workers: the material ledger for each job worker, reconciled to the account that holds it.
What Manufacturing gives you
- Bills of materials with wastage %, a work centre on every line, and a one-click standard cost update
- Three work order types: Assemble and Unassemble in one step, Advanced Manufacture stage by stage
- Work orders raised straight from a sales order, linked to the customer
- Production in runs with batch, expiry and rejected quantity, and output in stock as each run finishes
- Labour and overhead posted to the order, with every rupee settled onto the item at close
- Sub work orders for multi-stage processes, protected against loops and repeated stages
- Job cards for time and quantity tracking at operation level
- A where-used trace for any component
- Twelve manufacturing reports, filterable by work centre and team
From a bill of materials to finished goods on the shelf, costed and posted without a spreadsheet in sight: that is Manufacturing in TamilAccounting.
