I Usually Make 105 Candles to Deliver 100 Good Units — How Do I Spread the Cost of the Five Extra Units Across the Final Sellable Candles?

Made over good, and why it multiplies everything

Your question contains the whole method in its own numbers. You pour 105 and you ship 100, so every sellable candle carries 1.05 candles' worth of materials. That is the multiplier: made ÷ good, which is 1.05 here. It is not an allowance, a buffer or a contingency — it is a measured ratio between two counts you already keep, and it is the single most reliable number in a small candle costing because both counts are whole candles that either exist or do not.

The multiplier applies to the whole unit cost. This is the part that trips up otherwise careful sheets. A gram of wax lost in the pot takes nothing else with it; a candle rejected at the end of a shift takes its jar, its wick, its fragrance dose and the wax around them. On the costing below the jar and wick alone are ₹100.30, which is 44.93% of the ₹223.22 unit — so a yield multiplier that touches only the scented wax captures barely half the loss. Apply 1.05 to the scented wax alone and you get ₹229.36; apply it to the unit and you get ₹234.38. The ₹5.02 between them is, precisely, five jars and five wicks spread over a hundred candles.

The second decision is the denominator, and it is worth being pedantic about because both versions look defensible. Five rejects out of 105 poured is a scrap rate of 4.76%, and that is the right number to quote if you are reporting quality — it describes your process. Costing asks a different question: how much did each shipped candle cost. That spreads five rejects over 100 survivors, which is 5.00%, and it is what 105 ÷ 100 produces. If you use the quality figure as the costing uplift you land on ₹233.85 instead of ₹234.38, which is ₹0.53 a candle short — a small error that never corrects itself and always leans the same way.

What one rejected candle actually costs you

A candle fails for ordinary reasons: a sunken top that will not level, a wick set off centre, a jar that chipped on the bench, a surface that frosted badly enough that you would not send it, a fragrance dose you are not sure of. What that failure costs depends on what survives it. The wax and the fragrance are still wax and fragrance — scented soy can be re-melted and poured into a candle you will sell, or into your own test candles. The wick is gone. The jar depends on whether it is broken or just full of the wrong candle.

The spread between those rows is the whole argument for a reclaim habit. Binned whole, your five rejects cost ₹1,116.08 across the order. Reclaimed properly, with the jars cleaned and only the wicks lost, they cost ₹29.50. That is a difference of ₹1,086.58 on a hundred candles, available for the cost of a kettle of hot water and twenty minutes. Whether it is worth twenty minutes is your call and depends on what your time is worth — a line this page cannot fill in for you.

One honest note about the vessel line, since it is the largest single component of a reject here. One customer review on the store mentions containers arriving with a dent or two, and another mentions an order arriving with no damage at all. Both are real, and the practical costing answer is the same: count what actually arrives against what you ordered, and if a pack is short or damaged, that is a supplier conversation rather than a yield figure. Do not silently fold arriving damage into your reject rate — it hides a fixable problem inside a number you treat as fixed.

The batch: what 105 candles consume and what the packs force you to buy

Costing the hundred is one calculation. Buying for the hundred and five is another, and it is the one that hits your bank account. 105 candles at this fill need 14.58 kg of wax and 1166.67 g of fragrance, plus 105 jars and 105 wicks. CSI sells in packs, so what you buy is the next rung up on every line: three 5 kg packs of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 gives 15 kg, eleven packs of ten Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid gives 110 jars, and a 1 kg bottle of Verbena with two 100 gm bottles gives 1.2 kg.

Two things in that table are worth arguing with. The first is the fragrance line: 1 kg plus two 100 gm bottles is ₹5,900.00 for 1.2 kg, while 1 kg plus a 500 gm bottle would be ₹7,198.00 for 1.5 kg. The smaller combination is cheaper today and the larger one leaves you 333 g of Verbena for the next batch, so the right answer depends entirely on whether you will pour this scent again within its shelf life. The second is the jar line: eleven packs give you 110 jars for 105 candles, and those five spare jars are the cheapest insurance in the batch against exactly the reject rate this page is costing.

On pack rates, be precise rather than hopeful. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is ₹520.00 a kilogram in the 500 g pack and ₹507.40 a kilogram in the 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg packs, so the whole step available on this grade is at the bottom of the ladder. Across the CSI wax range most grades are the same rate per kilogram at every pack size. What a bigger pack does change is the number of parcels: the 5 kg pack of this wax stores a packed weight of 6.0 kg, and sending one consignment rather than three is a real and computable saving, unlike a quantity discount that does not exist. CSI also publishes order-value codes — HAPPY5 at 5% over ₹5,000, BIZWIZ8 at 8% over ₹12,000 and YAY10 at 10% over ₹20,000 — which depend on what the basket comes to and not on how large a pack you choose.

Measuring your own yield rather than assuming five

Most makers arrive at a spare count the same way: something went wrong once, they started pouring a few extra, and the number never changed again. That is a reasonable place to start and a poor place to stay, because the spares you pour and the rejects you actually get are two different quantities. Pouring five extra and rejecting two means your cost is carrying three candles you did not need to make. Pouring five and rejecting seven means an order goes out short.

Once you have a measured multiplier, keep it in the same cell discipline as every other assumption: a number, a date and the batches it came from. Re-measure when something real changes — a new vessel, a different wax, a first attempt at a larger format, a festive rush where three people are pouring instead of one. A Diwali run poured in the last week of October, with Diwali on 8 November 2026, is exactly the batch where yield slips and nobody notices until the cost sheet is already printed.

What yield is not

A yield multiplier is a narrow instrument: whole units made against whole units sold, inside your own workshop. Three other losses sit next to it and are frequently stirred into the same cell, which makes every one of them impossible to manage. Keep them apart and each stays measurable — and each has a different remedy, which is the real reason to separate them.

The last word belongs to what the multiplier does to a price rather than to a cost. At ₹234.38 of materials, a hundred-candle order carries ₹23,437.75 of materials in total, of which ₹1,116.08 exists only because of the five candles nobody buys. If you are quoting a corporate gifting order, that is the number that has to be inside the quote before your label, box, courier and time go on top. Quote the hundred at the cost of the hundred and five, or the five come out of your margin — and on an order where the margin is already thin, five candles is the whole of it.

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