The Ring Quote That Feels Fair and Still Loses Money

Over the next six weeks, you make the ring. You also revise the design, answer questions, recover what metal you can and spend longer on the finish than you expected. By the time the customer collects it, the job has used more time and material than the quote allowed for.

There may still be a profit. There may not. The difficulty is that the finished ring gives you no way to tell.

To find out, you need to account for the whole commission, including the work that never reached the bench.

It is a small change. You may be happy to include it. But including it in the service is not the same as including it in the price.

If your labour allowance covers only making the ring, the time spent getting the design approved has to come out of somewhere else. Usually, that means the margin.

The finished ring will weigh less than the metal issued to the job. Some of the difference will be in sprues or clean scrap you can use again. Some will be in filings and polishing dust, with value you may recover later through refining. Some will be lost.

You should not charge the job as though all that metal has disappeared. Equally, you cannot assume that everything outside the finished ring comes back at full value. What matters is the metal used, less the value you retain or realistically recover, with refining charges taken into account.

At the bench, you are on more familiar ground. You allowed time for shaping, soldering and setting the stone. But the allowance was an estimate, and the ring still has to meet your standard before it can leave.

Perhaps the setting goes smoothly, but a mark remains after polishing. You return to the surface, remove it and finish again. There is no separate invoice for that extra work, and no obvious moment when it becomes a cost. You simply keep working until the ring is right.

That is normal workshop practice. The problem comes when the quote allows for everything to go right first time, while the workshop has to deal with what actually happens.

Then there is the work of getting the finished piece to the customer: any hallmarking, the box, delivery or a collection appointment. A fitting may lead to an adjustment. These belong to the commission just as much as setting the stone, even though they happen after the ring first looks finished.

By handover, the job has drawn on design time, customer communication, materials, bench work and the running costs of the workshop. The question is whether the price covered all of them, not just the ones you remembered when you quoted.

Apply that hourly rate to the time recorded, then add materials and other direct costs. Avoid counting an expense twice if it is already covered by the rate.

Now compare the total with the price charged, excluding any tax you collect on behalf of the authorities. What remains is the job’s profit. Your own pay should already be included in its cost, rather than depending on whatever is left.

This is where the record becomes useful. Instead of a vague sense that the ring took too long, you can see what happened. The making allowance may have been accurate, while design used twice the expected time. Or the hours may have been right, but the metal recovery was too optimistic.

Each finding gives you something specific to change in the next quote.

As you record more commissions, you can replace guesses with allowances based on your own workshop. You can also make the scope clearer: which design revisions are included, what happens if the brief changes after approval and what aftercare the price covers.

Estimate, one of Canova’s tools, uses a photo of a piece to produce an estimated cost and production time, broken down into metal, stones and fabrication, with margin added. It is currently in private beta, available by invitation; you can book a demo at canova.io.

The estimate gives you a starting point. Your workshop records tell you how well it holds up.

The next time a customer asks for a ring, you will still need to judge the work involved. But you will have something better than a figure that feels fair: evidence that the price covers the job.