What Is a Karigar Job? A Plain-English Guide for Jewellery Businesses

Published July 17, 2026 · CaratOS

A karigar job is a tracked unit of work handed to a karigar (a jewellery artisan or goldsmith) by a retailer or manufacturer — a repair, a custom piece, or job-work on an existing item — with a defined due date, an assigned karigar, and a status that updates as the work moves from handoff to completion.

That's the whole definition. The reason it's worth writing down clearly is that almost nobody has: search for it and you mostly get generic "job work" tax and accounting explanations aimed at manufacturers, not the operational reality of how a jewellery shop actually tracks work-in-progress with a karigar.

Why jewellery businesses need a specific term for this

"Job work" already exists as a GST and manufacturing concept — sending raw material to a third party for processing. A karigar job overlaps with that but is narrower and more operational: it's the shop-floor unit that answers three questions at any moment —

1. Who has this piece right now? (the assigned karigar)
2. When is it due back? (the due date)
3. What state is it in? (created, in progress, awaiting parts, ready)

A repair ring going out for resizing, a custom bridal set mid-fabrication, and a bangle sent for re-polishing are all karigar jobs — different work, same tracking shape.

How karigar jobs get lost today

Most jewellery businesses — even well-run ones — track this in a physical register or a karigar's own memory. Both fail the same way:

• No due date enforcement. A repair with no due date becomes a repair nobody follows up on, which becomes a customer who stops coming back.
• No product-level history. If three pieces are out with the same karigar, a register page doesn't tell you which piece is at which stage without flipping back through entries.
• No continuity across staff. If the person who wrote the register entry is off that day, the job's status lives in their head, not on paper.

What a digitized karigar job actually needs to track

To replace a register properly — not just move it into a spreadsheet — a karigar job needs to hold:

• The product or piece it's attached to
• The karigar it's assigned to
• A due date
• A status that reflects real progress, not just "with karigar"
• A link back to the customer, if the job originated from a customer repair or custom order

Software that treats this as a generic "task" object misses the jewellery-specific context — metal weight going out vs. coming back, purity checks on return, and the fact that a karigar job often needs to convert into a sale or invoice once complete.

Where this fits in a jewellery business's daily operations

A karigar job rarely starts in isolation. In practice, it starts one of three ways: a customer repair or return comes in and needs to become trackable work; a retail sale needs custom finishing before it can go out; or a manufacturer's production queue hands a piece to a specific karigar for a defined stage of work. Because of that, a karigar job is most useful when it's connected to the same system as inventory, CRM, and invoicing — not sitting in a separate tracker that needs manual reconciliation.