AI Blocks › Plan your strategy
Know what every step costs, and turn your waste into money
Describe how you make or deliver your product. Get a cost for every step and a price on each kind of waste.
Cost every step and turn your waste into profit is a free AI workflow for the job "Plan your strategy". It guides your AI through several skills in order, passing each step's output to the next.
Free · No account · Made by AI Blocks · Thinking: high
What it does
Most owners know their total costs but not what each step costs. A product that looks like a winner can lose money once you count the steps, and the scrap, offcuts, idle time and returns that you throw away each month are rarely counted at all. This workflow counts first. It puts a measure on each step, builds a monthly cost per product and ranks products by what they really earn. It then walks the whole process for waste, values each item by the labour in it as well as the material, and asks who would buy it or what it could feed. The method comes from Andrew Carnegie's autobiography, which describes how he tracked cost at every step and treated waste as a source of profit.
You give it
- How each product is made or delivered, step by step
- What you buy, sell and pay for each, if you have figures
- A sales or cost sheet for a closed period (optional)
- Who does each step (optional)
- What you throw away, leave idle or redo, with any amounts you know
- Your results (optional)
You get
- A step list with a measure on each step
- A monthly cost-per-product sheet and a weekly count sheet
- Products ranked by true earnings, and the lines that carry the business and the lines that drain it
- A list of waste with a monthly amount, priced in labour as well as material
- A buyer or reuse for each item (or "no use"), the first three actions with owners and dates, and a re-count date
Use it when
- You do not know which products earn money after all the steps are counted.
- You throw away scrap, leftovers, returns or idle time and suspect some of it is worth something.
- Costs keep rising and you want to find the step to fix first.
Steps
- Step cost tracker: Describe how you make your product. Get a cost for each step, a weekly count sheet and the lines that drain you.
- Waste and by-product finder: List what you throw away, leave idle or redo. Get each item priced as a possible product, reuse or saving.
How to use it
- Download the handoff pack. It's a zip with HANDOFF.md and every skill file this workflow uses.
- Give the folder to Claude (in Claude Code, or as files in a Claude Project) and say "Follow HANDOFF.md".
- Describe your process and add any figures you have. It works step by step and saves each result.
- Hold the count on the dates it sets, and bring the new numbers back for a re-count.