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How order costing works

An order is customer work — cost your materials, equipment time, labor, and overhead, and Sunday Maker shows what you charged and what you made.

What is an order?

An order in Sunday Maker is customer work you're pricing and tracking — line items, totals, status, and optional production costs. It might be 50 sublimation tumblers for a corporate client, a dozen laser-engraved cutting boards, or a wholesale candle shipment.

Orders answer two questions: what are you charging, and what's your profit after materials, labor, and fees?

How to create an order

Go to Orders in the sidebar and click Create order. You can add line items two ways:

  • From a saved product — pull in a product you've already costed with materials, processes, and suggested pricing.
  • Custom items — add one-off line items with your own description and price.

What goes into an order

Each line item can include production cost details:

  • Material — your blank, sheet good, or base material and its cost per unit
  • Processes / steps — each production step with equipment time and consumables
  • Packaging — boxes, bags, tags, and anything else that goes with the finished piece
  • Setup cost — any one-time cost spread across the batch
  • Maker labor — your hourly rate × the time you spend on the run
  • Shipping — optional shipping materials or charges

How the math works

Sunday Maker calculates cost per unit by adding up all contributors and dividing by quantity:

Total production cost ÷ quantity = cost per unit

From cost per unit, you set your sell price or target margin. The order shows:

  • Line totals — per item and for the full order
  • Order total — what you're charging the customer
  • Profit — revenue minus production cost and fees
  • Net after fees — after channel fees (Etsy, Shopify, wholesale, etc.)

Snapshots and saved numbers

When you save an order, Sunday Maker snapshots costs at that moment — material prices, equipment rates, and consumable costs as they are right now. If your material costs change later, saved orders still reflect what things cost when you fulfilled them.

Orders vs products

Products are templates — the standard recipe and pricing for something you make regularly. Orders are instances — a specific customer order at a specific quantity with specific line items. You'll typically have one product record and many orders that reference it.

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