Configuring Your Cost Settings

Cost settings are the defaults CrafterBy applies whenever you create a product. Getting them right before you add products saves correcting values later.

Settings → Cost Settings. The page is five cards.

System Settings

Field	What it does
Currency	The currency every price and cost is displayed in.
Measurement	Metric (cm, m, kg, L) or Imperial (in, ft, lb, oz).
Decimal places	Applies to prices and quantities across the whole app.
Dimension decimal places	A separate control for areas and volumes (m², m³) on materials, which need finer precision than money.

Currency lives here, not on the organization form — that form only asks for a Name and a Slug. And changing currency converts nothing: there is no exchange-rate logic in CrafterBy, so a material entered as 10 stays 10 with a different symbol.

Default Rates

Field	What it does	Typical
Labor Rate	Cost of one hour of your time, per hour. Used on every product where you log time.	20–50 / hr
Electricity Rate	What you pay per kWh. Turns a machine's power draw into an hourly cost.	0.10–0.25 / kWh

Set the labour rate to what you want to earn, not what you currently earn. Example: a leather-goods maker logs 45 minutes to cut and stitch a card wallet. At an 18.00 hourly rate that step costs 13.50.

Include in Calculations

Two toggles decide whether Packaging (boxes, materials) and Shipping (shipping expenses) are included in cost calculations by default.

Cost Factors

Field	What it does
Overhead %	The default share added to cover rent, utilities and marketing.
Waste Factor	A percentage added to material quantities for offcuts, failed batches and spoilage.

Waste worked example: set 10%, and a product using 100 g of wax is costed as if it used 110 g. Pick a number that matches your process — a jeweller may run 5% because silver offcuts are reclaimed, while a fragrance blender may need 15% because product is lost in equipment and testing.

Both are defaults. You can override the waste factor on an individual material and on an individual product.

Interface Settings

Keep Menus Expanded controls whether sidebar groups stay open as you navigate.

Current Settings Summary