What your tools actually cost (not what you paid for them)

„What do the tools cost us" nearly always gets the same answer: what we paid for them. The purchase price, added up from invoices, if they can still be found.

Except the purchase price is the smallest part of the cost, and the only part that can no longer change. What it actually costs is what comes after: the repairs, the time you did not have it, the ones bought twice, the ones that never came back.

It is not the reports that are missing, it is the data#

Any firm can produce a report. The problem is that in a system kept on paper and in spreadsheets, the data a report would be made from does not exist in usable form:

• Repairs are invoices in a folder, not amounts attached to an item.
• Downtime is not measured at all — nobody notes when it went in and came out.
• Movements are lines in a notebook, so they cannot be added up.
• Consumption is not tied to a job, so you cannot see what a project swallowed.

Which is why a reporting module makes no sense as a separate product. Reports are a by-product: if movements are recorded properly as they happen, the figures already exist and only need reading.

Four questions that become checkable#

The purchase requisition comes out as a document#

The most used report is not the one with charts, it is the one you forward. The purchase requisition is generated from whatever is below threshold, grouped by supplier, with one PDF each — so what you send is an order ready to read, not a table the supplier has to decipher.

One clarification so it is not a surprise: grouping by supplier works today for materials, which carry a supplier on their record. Consumables currently fall into a general group — the supplier field for them is still to come. Until then you get a correct requisition for consumables, just not routed by supplier.

What it does not promise#

We do not promise a percentage. We do not know by how much costs fall in any given firm, and any figure printed here would be invented — we do not yet have enough customers to measure, and when we do, the figure will be theirs, with their name on it.

What does change is something else, and it matters more at the start: the questions above acquire answers. „What has this grinder cost us over two years" is a question you cannot answer today at all — not badly, at all. After a few months of record-keeping, it is a search.

Reports become useful as history accumulates. In the first week they look almost empty, and that is correct: they measure movement, and the movement has only just started being recorded.