Glossary
Jewellery & precious-metal glossary
The vocabulary AurumOS is built around — defined plainly for owners, CFOs and operations teams.
Fine weightGross weightPurity (fineness)Working capitalTrapped capitalWork-in-progress (WIP)KarigarWastageScrap & recoveryBullionMetal-Days
- Fine weight
- The pure precious-metal content of an item — its gross weight multiplied by its purity (fineness).
- Fine weight is the amount of pure metal you actually own inside a piece. A 10 g item at 22 karat (916 fineness) contains about 9.16 g of fine gold. Because precious metals are priced per gram of pure metal, fine weight — not gross weight — is what determines the real value on your shelf.
- Gross weight
- The total weight of an item including alloys and other metals — not just the precious metal.
- Gross weight is what a scale reads: the full alloy weight of a piece. It tells you how much you physically hold, but nothing about how much value you own, because it includes non-precious alloy content. Most legacy inventory systems track only gross weight.
- Purity (fineness)
- The proportion of pure precious metal in an alloy, expressed in karat or parts-per-thousand (e.g. 22K / 916).
- Purity (or fineness) is how much of an item is the precious metal versus alloy. Gold is commonly 24K (999), 22K (916) or 18K (750). Multiplying gross weight by fineness gives fine weight — the basis for accurate valuation.
- Working capital
- The money tied up in day-to-day operations — for jewellers, largely the value of metal in stock and WIP.
- Working capital is the cash a business has locked in inventory, work-in-progress and receivables to keep operating. In jewellery manufacturing it is dominated by the value of precious metal sitting in vaults, on benches and in finished stock.
- Trapped capital
- Working capital locked unproductively in excess, idle, or slow-moving precious-metal inventory.
- Trapped (or blocked) capital is money you can't use because it's frozen in stock that isn't moving — overstocked designs, ageing work-in-progress, or buffers larger than demand requires. Identifying and safely releasing it frees cash to reinvest, without raising stockout risk.
- Work-in-progress (WIP)
- Partly-finished items moving through production stages — casting, polishing, setting, QC and dispatch.
- WIP is inventory between raw metal and finished goods. Because it carries real fine-metal value at every stage, untracked WIP is a common place for working capital — and wastage — to hide.
- Karigar
- An artisan or craftsperson who manufactures jewellery, often issued metal against expected output.
- A karigar is a skilled jewellery worker. In Indian manufacturing, metal is frequently issued to karigars and returned as finished pieces plus scrap. Tracking the fine weight issued versus returned is essential for accountability and for catching leakage disguised as wastage.
- Wastage
- Precious metal lost during manufacturing — some legitimate, some a cover for leakage.
- Wastage is the small amount of metal lost in cutting, filing, polishing and casting. A normal bench loss has an expected range; persistently abnormal wastage can signal process problems or theft masked as loss, which is why benchmarking wastage by karigar and stage matters.
- Scrap & recovery
- Metal reclaimed from production residue (filings, polishing dust, defective pieces) and refined back to fine metal.
- Scrap is the recoverable precious metal generated during manufacturing. Recovery is the process of refining it back to usable fine metal. Accurate scrap and recovery tracking closes the loop on the metal balance and prevents value from quietly leaking out.
- Bullion
- Investment-grade precious metal in bulk form (bars, coins, grain) used as raw material.
- Bullion is the raw precious metal — bars, grain or coins — that feeds manufacturing. Its value moves with live market prices, so valuing bullion holdings by fine weight at current rates is part of a true inventory valuation.
- Metal-Days
- A measure of how long fine-metal value has been sitting idle in inventory — fine weight × days held.
- Metal-Days quantifies idle precious-metal value over time. By weighting fine weight by how long it has sat unsold or unworked, it surfaces where capital is ageing — the inventory most worth releasing or reworking first.