Making things

Manufacturing is for businesses that turn things into other things — a bakery turning flour into bread, a workshop assembling furniture, a bottler filling crates.

If you just buy and resell, you do not need any of this. And if you only assemble simple bundles, kits in the Catalog section are far less work.

Before it appears

The whole section needs two things:

1. The Professional plan or above.
2. The manufacturing module switched on for your business.

Without them the Manufacturing group still shows in the menu, but locked with an upgrade badge — clicking it offers the upgrade rather than opening anything.

The order you do things in

Set up once:

1. Work centres and machines — where the work happens.
2. A bill of materials — the recipe for each thing you make.
3. Routings — the steps, if your process has several.

Every time you make something:

4. Work order — the instruction to make a quantity of something.
5. Material requisition and consumption — taking the ingredients out of stock.
6. Production output — recording what came off the line, good and scrapped.
7. Finished good receipt — putting the finished items into stock.

As you go: record defects and scrap, and log machine time and maintenance.

Which screen for which job

You need to	Go to
Write the recipe for a product	Recipes and routings
Tell the floor to make a batch	Work orders
Take ingredients out of stock	Work orders
Put finished goods into stock	Work orders
Set up your machines and benches	Planning and the shop floor
Plan a week’s production	Planning and the shop floor
Record a fault or wastage	Quality and scrap

The one thing to understand

Making something is two stock movements, not one:

• The ingredients leave stock when you record consumption.
• The finished item enters stock when you post the finished good receipt.

Between those two moments the value is work in progress. If you record one and forget the other, your stock and your accounts will both be wrong — and nothing chases you to finish the job.

Everything here is Professional

Every screen in this section needs the Professional plan. There is no partial access on a lower plan.