A jewellery bill carries five numbers, and they bind in an order. What the piece weighs. How pure the metal is. What that metal is worth this morning. What the work cost. What the law adds at the end. Each one is the input to the next, so a number settled wrongly early is carried into every line after it.
Five numbers, settled in five different places. Your scale settles the weight. A test, a hallmark or an agreement settles the purity. Your city’s bullion trade settles the rate. You and whoever made the piece settle the labour between you. The law settles the tax. One of the five is a negotiation; the other four are measured, quoted or ruled, and most arguments across a counter are being had over the wrong one.
That chain is what this section covers: where each number comes from, the words the trade uses for it, and the paper it travels on. It runs in two directions as well. Metal comes into a shop as old gold and goes out as a sold piece, and the same word does different work depending on which way the metal is moving.
One habit holds all of it together. The trade counts fine metal in grams. Your customer counts rupees. Everything below is one conversion between those two, done in a fixed order, and the order is the part nobody writes down.
Read the second column of this table down before anything else. It is the shape of the whole subject in one view.
| The number | Who settles it | What moves it | What is yours to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weight, gross and net | A scale, and whatever comes off the piece before it goes on the scale | Nothing, once the piece is finished | Have both weights taken in front of you and written on the paper |
| Purity | A test, a hallmark, or a tunch two people agreed | Nothing in the metal; the reading still moves with where you tested | Ask which of the three settled the figure you are being given |
| The rate | Your city’s bullion trade, that morning | The market, the rupee, and the hour | Know whose rate you bill on, and say it the same way every time |
| Labour: making, wastage, VA, mazdoori | You and the other side, by agreement | Negotiation, and the shape the quote is written in | Name what the percentage sits on before you argue the percentage |
| Tax | The law | Notification and amendment | Read the section, keep the paper, let your CA sign the return |
Two of the five are measurements of a physical thing and cannot be talked out of. One arrives from outside your shop already decided. One is a negotiation. One is a rule with a section number behind it. Knowing which is which tells you, before anybody raises a voice, whether the argument in front of you is one that can be won at all.
Where does today’s number come from before anyone types it in?
It arrives already decided, four steps away from you: a dollar quote, two conversions, the cost of landing metal in India, and then the figure your city’s bullion trade settles that morning. Each of those links, and the step your own board adds after them, belongs to who actually decides today’s gold rate.
What matters at this level is where the rate sits in the sum, which is last. A rate prices fine metal, so it cannot be applied until you know how much fine metal there is. Weight first, purity second, rupees third. A shop that opens with the rate and argues purity afterwards has run the sum backwards, and a customer can hear it happening.
The rate is also the only figure in this section that carries a date. A piece’s weight and purity are facts about that piece and hold until somebody alters it. A conversion constant such as the tola at 11.6638 g is a definition, and it holds whatever the market does. A percentage holds until somebody renegotiates it. The rate holds only as long as your own shop chooses to hold it, and a single day is the outside of that.
So the card on your wall and the slate by the counter are two different pieces of paper. Constants get printed once and stay up. The rate gets written fresh, with the hour beside it, and a figure with no hour on it is worth arguing with.
The old units are where the two kinds of figure meet on one line. Your register may be kept in tola or in pavan of 8 g while the rate you were handed is per 10 grams, so the conversion has to happen before anything is multiplied. Convert first and write the grams beside the entry in the same hand, and the unit stops being something anybody has to carry in their head.
One thing this site refuses to do for you. No page here prints a live rate and no tool on the bench fetches or guesses one, so the 24K figure every gold calculator works from is a figure you type in. Your browser keeps it for the next visit, and it is never a number the site went and found. On a busy morning that is a nuisance, and it is a decision taken with open eyes: a rate this site fetched would carry the hour this site fetched it, and the hour is exactly what an argument at a counter turns on.
How is purity settled, and by which test?
Three ways, and which one applies depends on which direction the metal is moving. Metal coming in over the counter is measured. Metal going out as a sale is certified. Metal going to a bench and back is agreed.
All three produce a purity figure. All three can disagree with each other while every person in the room is honest.
| Which way the metal is moving | What settles the purity | What that figure is | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old gold coming in across the counter | A test you run: a streak, a meter, or an assay when the money is large | A measurement of the spot or the sample that was read | It says nothing about how much metal is in the piece |
| A piece leaving your counter as a sale | The hallmark, applied at an assaying and hallmarking centre | A certificate about that one article | It certifies purity, and nothing about weight, work or price |
| Metal issued to a bench and coming back | A tunch both books count in, agreed on the day the metal goes out | An agreement, worth exactly what was written down | It settles nothing with anyone outside the two of you |
A meter reads the surface it was pointed at. A centre reads a sample taken through the piece. An agreed tunch is a figure two people chose. What each test actually reads, and where each one stops, is worked through in how a counter really tests purity, which is the guide to read before you buy old gold from anybody.
The certificate is the only one of the three a stranger can check. A BIS mark carries the lozenge, the purity grade and a HUID of 6 characters, and that code belongs to one article alone, so anyone holding the piece can look it up on a phone. The obligation to have the mark applied sits on the person selling, and BIS publishes which districts and which articles it currently reaches. That is why a customer’s unmarked family gold and the unmarked stock in your own tray are two questions with two different answers.
Whichever way the figure was arrived at, it does one job: it turns a weight into fine metal. Grams times purity, and the answer is the quantity everything else in the trade is settled in. A piece marked 916 is 22K, and your karigar will say the same fact a third way as tunch.
Fine metal is what survives being melted, refined and remade. The design goes in a melt. The making and the wastage you paid go with it. The fine metal comes out. That is why a dealer settles in fine grams, a refiner reports in fine grams and a karigar counts in fine grams, while the customer at your counter has never heard the phrase and never needs to.
The decoder at the top of this page keeps karat, fineness and tunch on one line, so a piece can be read back in whichever of the three registers the person in front of you is speaking.
Which weight does a percentage sit on?
Ask what a percentage is a percentage of, before you ask whether it is high. Every percentage in this trade sits on something, and on most paper the something is missing.
Six of them can appear on one job, written by three different hands, and they do not all sit on the same kind of figure. Some sit on a weight, some on a value, and one sits on whatever your shop has always meant by the word.
| The percentage | Where it appears | What it should be a percentage of | What has to be written beside it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wastage, or VA | A quote and a bill | The net gold weight, or the metal value | The weight it is charged on, in the same line |
| Making, where it is quoted as a percentage | A bill | The metal value | The value it is a share of, and whether wastage is inside it |
| Ghat | A bench slip, agreed at issue and reckoned at settlement | The weight you issued, at the tunch you issued it at | The process it was agreed for, and the day it was agreed |
| Kaat | A bench slip, and the counter when you buy old gold | A weight or a value, depending on the shop | The figure it comes off, and the reason it was taken |
| Chhut | Anywhere one side gives something up | Whatever your shop means by the word | Your own shop’s meaning, written once at the front of the book |
| GST | The invoice | The taxable value of what was actually supplied | The value the rate was worked on, beside the rate |
Wastage is where the money is, because its basis is the one that moves. The same figure charged on the gross weight of a stone-set piece bills gold wastage on stone, and what that costs in rupees on one kundan set is worked out gram by gram.
The percentages on a bench slip have the same hole in them and a different vocabulary. Ghat, kaat and chhut each carry a number that means nothing until the basis is written next to it, and the words on your karigar’s slip takes them one at a time.
The last of the six is the one you do not set. Metal and stones carry 3%; a making charge carries 5% only where the making was supplied as a service in its own right, and which of those describes your bill follows from what actually left your counter. On that question three answers circulate, and one of them is wrong.
Written out once, the whole sum is short. Gross weight, less the stones, the lac and the thread, gives the net. Net times purity gives fine metal. Fine metal at the day’s rate gives the metal value. Labour goes on next, in whatever form it was quoted. Hallmarking sits on its own line. Tax lands last, on the value the law says you supplied.
Each answer is the next step’s input. A purity figure settled wrongly reaches the total three more times over: through the metal value, through any labour quoted as a share of that value, and through the tax worked on it. So a wrong purity costs you more than a wrong percentage, and a wrong basis costs you more than a wrong rate.
A percentage quote and a rupees-per-gram quote sit on two different scales until one number brings them together. Both gold calculators print that number under the bill, and the gross-against-net guide linked above sets out what it can rank and what it leaves outside itself.
What the bench cannot do is tell you which convention the shop in front of you writes in. The wastage calculator publishes the usual bands by kind of work and totals a piece on either basis; which basis your own supplier writes in is a question you have to ask him, and it is the thing the total actually turns on.
Which of these guides should I read first?
Read them in the order the numbers bind, and each one lands at the point you will need it.
If the words themselves are the problem, start before the numbers. The words on an Indian jewellery bill gives two lines to a term and then hands you the page that works it out. It is the one to keep open beside a quote you are reading for the first time.
After that, follow the metal. The rate guide first, because the rate multiplies everything else and it is the question you are asked twenty times a morning. Purity next, in two parts: how a counter tests it when metal is coming in, and what has to carry a mark when metal is going out. Then the basis guide, which is the one that changes what you pay. Then the tax guide, which decides what the bill looks like once the arithmetic is done. The bench slip last, because you cannot use it until you are issuing metal yourself.
Sorted by direction the seven fall out cleanly. One belongs to metal coming in, which is testing purity at the counter. One sits on both sides at once, because an unmarked piece asks a different question depending on which of you is doing the selling. Two belong to metal going out: the basis a percentage sits on, and the tax on the bill. One belongs to metal that leaves and comes back, which is the bench. One belongs to the rate, which belongs to the city. And one is the dictionary for all of them.
None of the seven decides a percentage for you. This section can tell you what a number sits on, who settled it, and where the current rule is published. What you charge, what you allow your bench and what you accept from a supplier stay decisions taken in your own shop, in your own city, against costs no page here can see.
Do one thing this week. Take a single finished job — metal you bought, issued, took back and sold — and write it out in fine grams from end to end: fine metal in, fine metal returned, fine metal sold, and what the difference between them is called. That is the only view in which the five numbers can be checked against each other, and one piece is enough to show you which of them your paper cannot account for.