What a build actually costs, down to the last hinge.
A quote that guesses the materials is a quote that loses money. FoundrySuite tracks every component's cost, costs the batch from what went into it, and keeps the books while you build — on the machine in the workshop, not on somebody else's.
The four jobs, in order
A custom build is a small supply chain. FoundrySuite keeps the whole thing in one system rather than four.
1. Quote
Price from the item catalogue, not from memory. Each component carries its own cost, so the quote's margin is a number before the customer says yes.
2. Build
A bill of materials turns components into goods. The batch build moves stock: out of raw materials, into finished goods, at the cost of what went in.
3. Invoice
Generate it from the job, and read the PDFs that come back — supplier invoices, delivery notes, certificates — with the fields on them already extracted.
4. Costed
Cost of goods is computed from the components, not estimated afterwards. What a build earned is a number the ledger agrees with.
The books a build leaves behind
The paperwork a maker is most often reconstructing from a spreadsheet, in one window, already balanced.
When a supplier raises a price, the margin watchdog flags the open quotes that would now lose money — before the next build, not after.
Stock you can trust
Inventory is a ledger with extra rules. Every purchase in and every sale out is a movement with a cost attached, so the stock figure and the balance sheet figure are the same number — because they are the same records.
Items carry a cost history, so “what did this cost last time” is a query, not a memory. Raw materials, work in progress and finished goods are real accounts in the chart, and the batch build moves value between them.
And the paperwork has to be right
- Bills of materials are recipes. Six panels, twelve hinges, two tins of finish — the build costs what went into it.
- Movements are transactions. Stock changes are recorded events, not notes on a whiteboard.
- The books balance. Every posted entry balances to the cent or it is refused — which matters when your accountant runs a query.
- Margins are watched. A supplier price rise flags the quotes it would sink.
- Nothing depends on the signal. Items, builds, invoices and the ledger are all local operations.
Need to get sign-off from the owner, partner, or board? Share this 30-second summary:
- The Workflow Win: Quotes, bills of materials, batch builds and invoices in one instant desktop workspace — no re-keying between the workshop sheet and the general ledger.
- The Financial Pitch: $110/mo for 24 months, $200/mo for 12 months, or a $2,200 one-time license (partner discounts available at checkout) replaces $3,600+/yr in separate CRM, invoicing, and bookkeeping subscriptions — with $0 renewal fees, forever.
- The Risk & Compliance Win: 100% local data storage with an immutable double-entry audit trail, zero cloud sub-processors, and one-click standard exports for our external CPA.
- Zero-Risk Evaluation: A full 30-day offline trial with no credit card required. Resume your current tools in parallel — nothing to migrate, nothing to uninstall.
The AI, for a maker
The useful parts are unglamorous: reading a supplier invoice you photographed in bad light, extracting a price list, summarizing a job's history before you quote the next one, and drafting the follow-up email you will actually send.
It drafts and summarizes. It cannot issue an invoice, post to the ledger, or change what a customer owes. Those are computed by rules and confirmed by you — which is the correct arrangement for a business where a mistake is expensive and obvious.
Things worth knowing first
- It runs on a workshop PC. No graphics card, no subscription, no metering — you are not paying per quote.
- If you work mostly on a phone, this is not phone software. It is a desktop program you can open on a laptop, tablet or second machine in the office.
- Online research needs a connection. Everything else does not.