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Prototyping

Before something is a product it is an idea, and finding out whether it works costs real wax. Prototyping is where those ideas live: their recipes, the samples you actually poured, and what each attempt cost.

Find it under Prototyping, above Product cards.

The prototypes list, with the samples made from one of them

A prototype card​

A prototype card is a recipe like any other — materials, ready items, other prototypes, labour by the minute — with the commercial half left out. There are no packaging materials and no channel prices, because nothing here is for sale yet.

Prototypes can be multi-level: a prototype can contain another prototype, and it can contain a real ready item that you already make. They stay out of every product list, the production dialog, the channel syncs and the low-stock warnings until you promote one.

Making a sample​

Make a sample asks how many you are pouring, on what date, and from which warehouse. Before you confirm, it shows exactly what will be spent, materials and items, with a warning if something is short.

Making a sample: what the trial will consume, listed before it is spent

Making a sample is not production:

  • Production reserves materials and writes them off when the goods sell. A sample is never sold, so a trial takes its materials outright, at the same FIFO cost a production run would pay.
  • The trial records what it cost, so "we spent €41 finding out that fig doesn't work" is a number you can see rather than a feeling.
  • The movement log shows it as a prototype movement, distinct from production.

Each trial is listed under the prototype with its date, quantity, cost and status.

Reworking a sample​

What survives being taken apart can go back. Rework lists every material the sample took and asks, for each one, how much came back usable: all of the jar, most of the wax, none of the wick. "Apply to all" fills every row at once when they agree. Each share returns to stock at the cost it left with, and the trial then shows one recovery figure - the value that came back as a share of what was spent, so 80% of the wax and none of the wick reads as what it is rather than as "80%". Hover the figure to see what went back, material by material.

Ready items that went into the sample do not come back: they were taken apart to make it.

A trial can be reworked once. Anything not recovered stays spent.

Turning a prototype into a product​

When the idea works, Make it a product promotes the card: give it its final name and SKU, say whether it is a product or a ready item, and it becomes an ordinary product card with its composition intact. From that moment it behaves like every other card — packaging, channel prices, production, margins.

If the idea does not work, reject it. The card stays with everything you learned on it, marked rejected and out of the way, rather than being deleted.

Where the money shows up​

Materials spent on samples leave stock but are never sold, so they cannot appear in COGS. They get their own line in the Profit report — Prototyping — so the report cannot quietly gain profit by forgetting what experiments cost.