Your most valuable ledger is written on a scrap of paper
Walk behind the counter of almost any jewellery shop in India and you will find the single most important record of the business scribbled in a diary, a loose register, or worse, held in the owner's head. It is the karigar ledger — the running account of how much gold has gone out to which goldsmith, what it was meant to become, and what has come back. This is not a minor book. On any given day it can represent more raw value than the stock in your showcase, because it is physical gold that has left your premises on trust. And most jewellers document it with less rigour than they use for a mobile recharge.
That was tolerable when the karigar was your cousin and the amounts were small. It becomes a real exposure the moment you scale, take on more artisans, or face a GST officer who wants to know why gold left your books without an invoice. The good news is that doing it properly is not harder — it is just a discipline that most software has never bothered to support.
What actually happens when gold leaves for the karigar
The transaction is deceptively simple and quietly complex. You weigh out gold of a known purity, hand it to a karigar with an order — a set of bangles, a chain of a certain design — and agree on making charges and an allowable wastage. Days or weeks later a finished piece comes back. You weigh it again. Somewhere between the gold that went out and the jewellery that returned sits wastage, the karigar's labour, and the trust that the numbers add up. If you are not recording both ends by weight, you are not running a job-work process. You are hoping.
- The issue: date, karigar name, gross weight issued, purity or fineness, and the specific item ordered.
- The terms: agreed making charge and the wastage percentage you will allow on that design.
- The expected return: what weight of finished jewellery should come back, and by when.
- The receipt: actual finished weight received, actual wastage, and any gold returned unused.
- The reconciliation: does gold-out equal gold-in plus wastage plus scrap — for every single job.
The GST layer most jewellers under-document
Here is where the notebook becomes a liability. Sending gold to a karigar is, in GST language, sending goods for job-work — and there are rules for it that are entirely manageable once you know them. Gold moving to the job-worker travels on a delivery challan, not a tax invoice, and no GST is charged on the gold itself at the point of issue. The karigar, as the job-worker, charges GST on the job-work — that is, the making charge — at 5%, and as the principal you can generally claim that as input tax credit. Crucially, inputs sent for job-work are expected to return within one year; if they do not, the law can treat the issue as a deemed supply, which is a tax event you never intended to trigger.
On top of that, a principal is required to report the movement of goods to and from job-workers in Form GST ITC-04 — half-yearly if your aggregate turnover is above ₹5 crore, annually if it is at or below that, with the usual October and April due dates. None of this is exotic. But none of it can be produced from a diary at year-end, and reconstructing a year of karigar movements the night before a filing is exactly how errors and mismatches happen. Confirm the specifics with your CA, because thresholds and periodicities do get revised.
- Raise a delivery challan for every gold issue to a karigar — not a bill, a challan.
- Collect a job-work invoice from the karigar with 5% GST on making charges, and claim the input credit.
- Track the one-year return clock on every issue, so nothing silently becomes a deemed supply.
- Keep the movement data ITC-04-ready, so the filing is an export, not an archaeology project.
- Reconcile weight on every job, so wastage is a number you agreed to — not one you discover later.
Gold that leaves on a delivery challan and returns as a reconciled, HUID-tagged piece is a business. Gold that leaves on a diary page is a leap of faith.
Where notebooks and generic billing tools stop
To be fair to the software you already own: Tally will record the accounting entries cleanly, Marg has strong jewellery billing and inventory, and myBillBook is a friendly, cheap counter tool. But ask any of them to run a live karigar ledger — gold issued by weight, expected returns, wastage reconciliation, the one-year clock, and ITC-04-ready movement records — and you quickly find yourself back in the diary. They were built to bill a customer and value your stock, not to manage the physical gold circulating among your artisans. That gap is where weight goes missing and where a tax filing gets uncomfortable.
How BizRevolt runs the karigar ledger
BizRevolt's Jewellery and Bullion workspace treats job-work as a first-class process. You issue gold to a karigar by weight and purity, and the system raises the delivery challan, records the terms, and starts tracking the expected return. When the piece comes back it is weighed in, wastage is reconciled against what you agreed, and the finished item flows into your tagged, per-piece HUID stock. The one-year return clock is watched for you, overdue issues are flagged, and the movement data sits ready for ITC-04 instead of scattered across registers. Owners with multiple karigars or branches see the whole outstanding position — how much gold is out, with whom, and for how long — on a single screen. Plans are ₹1,499 a month for a single counter, ₹3,999 for a growing showroom, and ₹7,999 for a multi-branch chain.
Keep Tally for your books if it works for you. What we replace is the riskiest, least-documented part of your day — the gold on trust with the goldsmith — with a ledger that reconciles by weight and produces the paperwork the law expects.
If you cannot say right now, to the gram, how much of your gold is sitting with karigars and how long it has been out, that is the number worth fixing first — before it becomes an audit question. We build BizRevolt in the open with working jewellers, so tell us how your karigar book runs today and where it hurts. Call or WhatsApp +91 91 0657 4865 and we will give you an honest read on whether we can help.
Image credits: Rivaa jain, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Adrienne of Oxford, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.