A costing sheet is the document that shows how an order's price is built, and it is the tool a merchandiser uses every time a price is quoted, questioned, or checked before an order is confirmed. Lesson T01-C07-L02 showed how a T-shirt's costing sheet lists five fixed cost components that sum exactly to the FOB price. This lesson shows you what to do when a whole product family has no fixed order at all yet: no full-fashioned or whole-garment sweater order exists in the master cast, so this lesson uses one clearly-labelled illustrative target price and one clearly-labelled illustrative yarn line to teach the same calculation method, never presenting either figure as a real order's cost. This lesson mainly teaches the money flow of an order: how a price is checked against a target, piece by piece, even when no real order exists to check yet.
You need: the idea of a cost component and a total price, taught earlier. You do not need a real sweater order's figures; none exist yet.
By the end of this lesson you can:
Not covered here: a real sweater order's own fixed figures (none exist yet; a sweater mill still needs adding to the master cast), and how margin and markup carry a price forward (T01-C07-L03).
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Costing sheet | The document that lists an order's cost components and adds them up to its total price. |
| Cost component | One part of an order's total price: yarn, knitting, linking, finishing, overhead, or profit. |
| Formula | An instruction in a spreadsheet cell that calculates a value from other cells, instead of a value typed in by hand. |
| Yarn | Fibre twisted into a continuous thread; a sweater's main raw material, priced and consumed by weight. |
| Linking (panel assembly) | Joining two fully fashioned knitted panels edge-to-edge, stitch for stitch, at the shoulder, side or sleeve seam. |
| Lump-sum bill of materials | A bill of materials that states only a total figure, with no separate component costs shown underneath it. |
Costing any order, knitwear included, starts from real fixed inputs and calculates everything else with formulas, never typed totals, the same rule lesson T01-C07-L02 taught on Order A's T-shirt and lesson T06-C01-L04 reused for Order B's jeans. No real sweater order is yet fixed in the master cast, so this lesson uses one clearly-labelled illustrative target price (USD 18.00 per piece) and one clearly-labelled illustrative yarn consumption and price (0.35 kg per piece at USD 9.00 per kg). Multiplying the yarn consumption and price gives the yarn line cost by formula; subtracting that from the illustrative target price gives the residual that must cover everything else, also by formula. This is a live calculation method, taught on a teaching figure, not a guess at a real order's costs.
| What can differ | The shapes you will meet | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|---|
| A full fixed breakdown (Order A's own T-shirt costing) | Fabric, trims, its sewing charge, overhead and profit are all individually fixed and sum exactly to the FOB price; every component is separately known. | When every component is fixed, you calculate shares of price directly, with no residual needed. |
| One fixed input plus one honest residual (Order B's own jeans costing) | Fabric cost and target FOB are genuinely fixed; everything else is one combined residual, since no further breakdown exists for Order B's jeans. | A partial breakdown must stay one honest residual, never split into guessed percentages borrowed from another order. |
| This lesson's knitwear costing (illustrative throughout) | Neither the yarn figures nor the target price are real cast facts; both are clearly labelled illustrative, used only to teach the calculation method, since no sweater order exists yet in the master cast. | Treating an illustrative teaching figure as if it were a real order's price would misrepresent a made-up number as a real cast fact. |
| A real future sweater order (once added, Human Action Required) | Would likely need its yarn consumption stated by weight (kg per piece), similar in method to this illustrative example, since knitwear yarn consumption is naturally weight-based rather than length-based like Order B's woven denim. | The method taught here transfers directly to a real sweater order once one is fixed in the master cast; only the figures would change. |
No real, fixed sweater order exists in the master cast for this course, unlike Order A's T-shirt or Order B's jeans. The Costing sheet instead uses one illustrative target price of USD 18.00 per piece and one illustrative yarn line of 0.35 kg per piece at USD 9.00 per kg, both explicitly flagged in the sheet's own notes column as teaching figures only, not real cast facts. The method mirrors Order B's own jeans honest-residual method from T06-C01-L04: enter the target price as its own reference figure, calculate the yarn line cost by formula, and calculate the residual by formula, rather than inventing a further breakdown that no real sweater order has yet fixed.
| Cost line | Illustrative figure (USD per piece) | How it is found |
|---|---|---|
| Illustrative target price | 18.00 | Entered directly; teaching figure only, no fixed cast order exists |
| Yarn (0.35 kg/piece x USD 9.00/kg) | 3.15 | Formula: quantity times unit price |
| Everything else (knitting, linking, finishing, boarding, overhead, profit) | 14.85 | Formula: illustrative target price minus yarn line cost |
| Total (illustrative price, formula-summed) | 18.00 | Formula: SUM of the two lines above |
The total row's formula-summed result equals the illustrative target price exactly, which is the sanity check that the sheet's method works, on a teaching figure exactly as it would on a real fixed order.
A common mistake is presenting an illustrative teaching figure as if it were a real, fixed order price once it has been used in a worked example a few times. Every illustrative number in this lesson must keep its "illustrative" or "teaching figure only" label in the notes column every time it appears, exactly as the workbook's Costing sheet does. Dropping the label after the first mention would misrepresent a made-up teaching number as a real cast fact, the same mistake this whole course is built to avoid.
No real sweater order exists yet to teach this lesson from, so it uses one made-up target price and one made-up yarn cost, both clearly marked as teaching numbers, not real facts. Multiplying how much yarn goes into one piece by the price of that yarn gives the yarn cost, by formula, not by a typed number. Taking that yarn cost away from the made-up target price gives what is left over for everything else, all combined into one number, since nothing else is real enough to split up further. Adding the yarn cost and the leftover back together should give exactly the made-up target price again, which proves the method works. The one rule that matters most is that these numbers must never be reused later as if they were a real buyer's real order.
A trainee merchandiser, having worked through this lesson's illustrative sweater costing example, later quotes a real buyer inquiry using the same USD 18.00 per piece target price and 0.35 kg per piece yarn consumption from the lesson, assuming they are safe, standard industry numbers.
Here is what the trainee is about to send:
Is this a safe assumption? Decide before opening the answer.
No. Two facts decide this together.
First, those figures were never real market numbers. They were explicitly illustrative teaching figures, chosen only to demonstrate the calculation method (target price minus yarn line cost equals the residual), not real yarn consumption for any specific sweater style, not a real yarn price, and not a real buyer's target.
Second, a real quote needs the actual yarn type, weight, gauge and buyer target for that specific order. A real sweater's yarn consumption depends on its gauge, its yarn count and its size, none of which this lesson's illustrative 0.35 kg per piece was chosen to represent. Reusing the lesson's illustrative numbers as if they were real could produce a badly wrong, and potentially loss-making, quote.
Neither fact alone is enough. Knowing the figures were illustrative does not, by itself, show the harm; knowing a real quote needs real inputs without knowing the lesson's numbers were never real would not explain why this specific shortcut is unsafe. The trainee should treat this lesson's numbers only as a demonstration of method, and calculate a fresh yarn cost and residual from the real buyer inquiry's own real inputs.
Framed qualitatively, mistaking an illustrative teaching figure for a real market number and using it in an actual buyer quote risks a mispriced order that could lose money or lose the buyer's trust once the real costs come in. This is a real but not separately quantified risk this lesson's explicit "illustrative" labelling exists to prevent: every figure in this lesson stays flagged, in every mention, precisely so nobody downstream mistakes a teaching number for a real cast fact.
The Costing sheet has six columns: cost line, quantity, unit cost, the illustrative target price, the calculated line value, and notes. The target price of USD 18.00 sits on its own row, notes marked "illustrative, no fixed cast order exists." The yarn row's quantity (0.35) and unit cost (9.00) are entered; its line value is a live formula multiplying the two, giving USD 3.15. The residual row's value is a live formula subtracting the yarn line from the target price, giving USD 14.85, kept as one combined line. The total row is a live formula (SUM), and it must equal USD 18.00 exactly.
[Download the Knitwear order file](../../templates/T06-C02-knitwear-order-file.xlsx)
1. Why does this lesson's Costing sheet label every figure 'illustrative' or 'teaching figure only'?
2. How is the illustrative residual calculated, and what does it need to cover?
3. Why would it be unsafe to reuse this lesson's illustrative numbers in a real buyer quote?
| EN | AR | FR | TR | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Costing sheet | كشف التكلفة | Fiche de coûts | Maliyet tablosu | The document that lists an order's cost components and adds them to the price the factory quotes. |
| Cost component | عنصر التكلفة | Élément de coût | Maliyet bileşeni | One part of an order's total price: yarn, knitting, linking, finishing, overhead, or profit. |
| Formula | صيغة حسابية | Formule | Formül | An instruction in a spreadsheet cell that calculates a value from other cells, instead of a value typed in by hand. |
| Yarn | خيط (غزل) | Fil | İplik | Fibre twisted into a continuous thread. Fabric is made from yarn. |
| Linking (panel assembly) | ربط القطع (لينكينغ الأجزاء) | Remaillage des pièces (linking) | Parça birleştirme (linking) | Joining two fully fashioned knitted panels edge-to-edge, stitch for stitch, at the shoulder, side or sleeve seam, giving a flatter, less bulky join than a sewn seam on woven or cut single-jersey fabric. |
| Lump-sum bill of materials | قائمة مواد بمبلغ إجمالي واحد | Nomenclature forfaitaire | Toplam tutarlı malzeme listesi | A bill of materials that states only a total figure, with no separate component costs shown underneath it. |
You can now calculate an illustrative sweater's yarn cost and its illustrative residual by formula. The next lesson brings this Costing sheet together with the Knitwear Order Shape sheet and the Quality Fault Log into one complete knitwear order file, the workbook's own final assembly lesson. Back to the course map