Their material, your hours, one figure at month end.
Machining, coating, plating, treatment and finishing all share an awkward problem: the goods in your workshop are not yours, you are selling hours rather than parts, and the customer's count and your count have to agree at the end of the month. Gydon handles all three without pretending you bought the material.
Booked in without being bought
A free issue note records what a customer has sent you: what it is, how much of it, and which batch it came from. It puts no value through your purchase ledger, because you have not bought anything, and it lands in a location the sales side cannot promise stock from.
Which means the question that gets asked on the phone, how many of ours have you still got, has an answer on a screen instead of a walk round the shop.
- Quantities in, quantities returned, and what is still with you
- Batches carried through, where the customer needs traceability back to a certificate
- A separate stock location, so free issue can never be sold or promised by mistake
- No value posted anywhere, because whose books it sits in is an accounting judgement
Forty-eight frames in, none of them bought.
You are selling operations, so cost operations
When the material is not yours, the entire quote is labour, setup and machine time. That is the part Gydon is built around: stages with their own minutes, their own setup and their own rate per work centre, and actual hours clocked against them at the bench.
Over a few months that tells you which customer's work is genuinely worth having. A rate agreed two years ago against a part that has quietly got harder is the most expensive thing in a subcontract shop.
- Setup charged once per job, so a small batch is not priced as though it were a big one
- Minimum charges handled as a line rather than a mental adjustment
- Planned against actual per operation, per customer, over any period
- Rework visible as time booked, rather than absorbed and forgotten
The hours, which on subcontract work is the whole invoice.
Agreeing the figure without a phone call
Where a customer runs Gydon too, their order, your acknowledgement, the return and your invoice all pass between the two systems, and neither side retypes anything. A statement lists the documents rather than a single total, so if the two of you differ it is obvious which document is missing at which end.
Where they do not run Gydon, nothing changes: your paperwork prints from your own templates, and Xero picks up the invoices as it always did.
Two documents agreed, one they do not hold.
What subcontractors usually switch on
- Manufacturing and Product Costing
- Operations, work centres and work orders. On subcontract work this is the priced part, not an overhead.
- Trading Partners
- Free issue in and out, orders straight from a customer's Gydon, and statements that reconcile document by document.
- Shopfloor App
- Clocking on to an operation at the machine, which is where a subcontract invoice comes from.
- Inventory
- Consumables and tooling you do buy, kept apart from the free issue you do not.
- Xero
- Invoices and credit notes across to the accounts package without rekeying.
- Worth knowing
- Gydon records and costs the work. It does not decide whose balance sheet free-issued goods belong on; your accountant does, and Gydon will not quietly make that call for you.
Bring a customer's part and your rate card
We will book their material in as free issue, route the operations, cost it at your rates, and show you the statement that would go back at month end.