Jewellery ERP Software: What It Must Handle Before You Buy or Build

Most retail software assumes a product has one price and stock is a count of pieces. Neither is true in a jewellery showroom. A bangle is worth what it weighs at today's gold rate, every piece is slightly different from the next, and part of your stock is sitting with a karigar as raw metal. That is why jewellers who try a general billing tool or a generic ERP usually end up back on spreadsheets for the parts that matter most.

This guide lists what a jewellery ERP has to handle, with the questions to ask a vendor for each one. It ends with a plain way to decide between buying a ready-made product and having one built. We write custom business software for a living, so the last section is the advice we would give a jeweller on a first call.

1. Stock that balances by weight and by piece

Every piece needs its own record: a tag number, gross weight, net weight, stone weight, purity and the metal it is made of. The system has to answer two questions at any moment. How many pieces are in this tray? And how many grams of 22K gold are in this store? If the two do not agree with a physical check, something is missing.

• A unique tag per piece, printed as a barcode or written to an RFID tag, so a tray can be scanned and matched in minutes.
• Purity stored as a number the system can calculate with: 999 for 24K, 916 for 22K, 750 for 18K, 585 for 14K.
• Loose stock (bullion, findings, loose stones) kept by weight or carat without a tag.
• Stock out on approval with a customer or another store, still counted as yours until it is sold or returned.

2. Prices that follow the metal rate

This is the part a general ERP cannot do. You do not store a selling price for a gold chain. You store how the price is built, and the system works it out from today's rate. A typical calculation looks like this. The figures are an example, not a current rate.

1. Metal value: 10 g net weight at ₹9,000 per gram for 22K = ₹90,000.
2. Wastage: 8% of net weight, 0.8 g at the same rate = ₹7,200.
3. Making charges: ₹600 per gram = ₹6,000.
4. Stones and other fixed components = ₹4,000.
5. Subtotal = ₹1,07,200. GST at 3% = ₹3,216. Price to the customer = ₹1,10,416.

Now change the rate to ₹9,150 and every piece in the store has a new price. The software has to do that in one step, for every store, the moment someone enters the morning rate. It also has to cope with the ways jewellers differ:

• Making charges per gram, as a percentage of metal value, or as a fixed amount per piece.
• Wastage as a percentage that changes by design type, because a plain band and a filigree necklace do not lose the same amount of metal.
• A different margin or making charge for a collection, a store or a sales channel.
• Discounts that apply only to making charges and never to the metal value.
• A record of what rate and rule produced each price, so you can explain a bill six months later.

3. Job work and karigar accounts

Metal leaves your shop as raw gold and comes back as finished pieces. In between, it belongs to you and sits with someone else. A jewellery ERP keeps a running account for each karigar in grams, not only in rupees: metal issued, pieces received, the wastage you agreed, and the balance still owed to you. Without this, a few grams go missing every month and nobody can say where.

4. Old gold, schemes, orders and repairs

• Old gold exchange: test the purity, value it at the day's buying rate, and set it against the new bill.
• Savings schemes: monthly instalments, maturity dates and what the customer can redeem.
• Custom orders: the advance taken, whether the rate was fixed on the booking date, and the delivery date.
• Repairs: the weight of the piece when it came in and when it went out.

5. Hallmarking, GST and the bill

Hallmarked gold jewellery in India carries a six-character HUID along with the BIS mark and the purity grade. The HUID belongs on the item record and on the invoice. The bill itself should show net weight, purity, rate, making charges, wastage and stones as separate lines, with GST calculated on the right value. Tax rates and hallmarking rules change, so they must be settings you can edit, not numbers fixed in the code. Check the current rules with your accountant before you configure them.

6. Online and in-store from the same stock

If you also sell on Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento, the website has the same two problems as the showroom. A piece sold at the counter must disappear from the site, and web prices must move with the rate. An ERP with an API can push new prices to the store when the rate changes and pull online orders back into stock. One without an API leaves someone editing prices by hand every morning, which is where wrong prices go live. We cover the storefront side in our e-commerce development work.

Buy a product or build your own?

A ready-made jewellery ERP is the right choice when:

• You have one to three counters and standard billing.
• Your making charge and wastage rules fit the options the product offers.
• You do not sell online, or the product already connects to your store platform.

Building makes sense when:

• Your pricing rules differ by store, collection or channel and the product cannot express them.
• You need price changes approved before they go live, with a history of who changed what.
• The ERP has to talk to an online store, an accounting package or a POS you already use.
• You are paying for a large product and using a fifth of it, while still keeping the important numbers in Excel.

There is a middle path that often costs less than either. Keep your existing billing and accounts, and build only the piece that is missing, usually the pricing engine or the karigar ledger, as a small application that connects to the rest. We build these on Laravel, with a web dashboard your staff can use from any store.

Before you talk to any vendor

1. Write down how you price three real pieces: a plain one, a studded one and a custom order.
2. List every place metal sits that is not your own counter: karigars, other stores, approvals, repairs.
3. Note what you do in Excel today. Those sheets are the features your current software is missing.
4. Decide who is allowed to change a rate, a making charge and a discount.

Take that list to every demo. A vendor who can run your three pieces through their system in front of you is worth a second meeting. If you would like us to look at it, tell us about your business and we will reply within one business day with what we would build, what we would leave alone, and a fixed price for the first version. We also build our own pricing software for jewellers: the Jewellery ERP case study explains how it works out every price from the day's rate and sends it to Shopify.