Work orders

Where

Manufacturing → Work Orders

Plan

Professional and above

Permission

Manufacturing → Work Order

Feature

Modules → Manufacturing

Read this before you rely on manufacturing costs

Finished goods are booked into stock at zero cost, and materials recorded by hand cost nothing either.

Both forms are missing their unit-cost field — the system expects one, the screen never asks for it, and a blank is treated as zero. There is no roll-up from materials and labour anywhere; nothing computes what a finished item cost to make.

What that means in practice:

• Everything you manufacture enters stock valued at nil, so selling it records no cost of sale and shows 100% profit.
• Because the cost is zero, no accounting entry is written at all when you book the goods in — so work in progress is never cleared and grows indefinitely.

There is one exception, covered below: auto-consume on start does value materials properly. Nothing values the finished item.

Use manufacturing to track quantities, and value your finished goods another way until this is fixed.

How to raise a work order

1. Go to Manufacturing → Work Orders and click New Work Order.
2. Pick the Product — you can scan it — and check the Location.
3. Pick the Bill of Material if you have one.
4. Enter the Planned Qty.
5. Set the Priority and the Type: Standard, Rework, Prototype or Maintenance.
6. Leave Number blank for a generated one, and set the Planned Start and Planned End.
7. Optionally add Operations — the sequence, name, work centre, machine and times.
8. Save. The order is a Draft.

Picking a bill of materials copies nothing

It only stores a link. No components are listed, no quantities are worked out and Estimated Cost is a number you type yourself.

The recipe is read later, when the order first starts — and only if auto-consume is on.

How to move a work order along

Everything uses one control: the row menu → Set Status → pick from Released, In Progress, On Hold, Completed, Cancelled or Closed.

There is no Release button, no Start button and no Complete button.

Status	What actually happens
In Progress	Stamps the start date. On the first start only, may auto-issue the recipe.
Completed / Closed	Stamps the end date. Nothing else.
Released, On Hold, Cancelled	The status is written. Nothing else.

Any status can follow any other

There is no sequence enforced. You can jump a draft straight to Closed, or move a cancelled order back to In Progress. Nothing stops you and nothing warns you.

Only a draft can be edited. The Edit action stays visible on other rows and fails with an error.

How to issue materials to the job

There are two ways, and they behave completely differently.

The automatic way — which is the only one that costs correctly

If your business has auto-consume raw materials on start switched on, moving a work order to In Progress for the first time reads the linked recipe and issues every material automatically — scaled for the batch size and scrap, valued at each component’s standard cost, with proper stock and accounting entries.

This is the path you want.

It is off by default and hard to find

There is no manufacturing settings screen. The switch lives in the general Scoped settings editor — open a company or location’s scoped settings and look under the Manufacturing group — where it appears with a machine-generated name and no explanation.

A work order with no bill of materials selected does nothing even when the setting is on.

The manual way

1. Go to Manufacturing → Material consumptions and click New consumption.
2. Pick the Work order, the Location and the Product.
3. Enter the Actual qty.
4. Save, then Post from the row menu.

Posting takes the stock off the shelf.

Manually recorded materials carry no value

The form has no unit-cost field, so the material is costed at zero. The quantity leaves stock correctly, but no accounting entry is written and nothing is added to the job’s cost.

If you are issuing materials by hand, your work order costs will all read zero.

Material requisitions

Manufacturing → Material requisitions lets you request materials for a job, with a status of Draft, Submitted, Approved, Issued or Partially issued.

An approved or issued requisition does not issue anything

Setting a requisition to Issued writes the status and stamps who did it. No stock moves. No consumption is created. Nothing carries the requested lines forward — you re-key them on the consumption screen.

The Issued qty column can never show anything but zero; the form never sets it.

It is a paper request, useful for asking a storekeeper for something. It is not an issue.

How to record what you made

Production Outputs and Finished Good Receipts are the same screen — two menu entries onto one document. There is no separate finished-goods receipt.

1. Go to Manufacturing → Production Outputs and click New Output.
2. Pick the Work Order, the Product and the Location.
3. Enter the Quantity.
4. Save, then Post from the row menu.

Posting puts the finished goods into stock and adds to the job’s produced quantity.

You cannot record scrap here

There is no scrap field on the form, even though the Work Order Yield report has a column for it. That column will always read zero.

Record wastage on the separate Scrap Records screen.

Lot Number, Received by, expiry dates and serial numbers all appear as columns on the list and cannot be entered — they will always show a dash.

How to see what a job cost

1. Add labour with Add Labor on the work order’s row menu: the Hours, the Hourly Rate, the Labor Type and the Employee.
2. Add other costs with Add Overhead.
3. Click Recompute Cost.

That sums the posted materials, labour and overhead and divides by what you produced.

Three things about this number

You must press Recompute Cost by hand for every job. The Work Order Cost report reads the stored snapshot, so a job nobody recomputed does not appear in the report at all.

It is reporting only. The figure is never pushed into the finished goods’ stock value, the product’s cost, or your accounts.

Labour and overhead post no accounting entries. They move the job’s statistics and nothing else.

Closing a job

Set the status to Completed, then Closed.

Closing does nothing at all

It writes the status and the end date. It does not:

• return unconsumed materials to store
• check that you produced what you planned
• check that consumptions were posted
• clear any remaining work in progress

A closed order can also be reopened by picking another status. Treat closing as a label you apply once you are personally satisfied the job is finished.

What cancelling does

Cancelling a…	Effect
Work order	Nothing unwinds. Posted materials stay consumed, output stays in stock, costs stay booked. It is a badge.
Material requisition	Nothing to unwind — it never did anything.
Material consumption	Real reversal — the stock comes back, and the accounting entry too if there was one.
Production output	Real reversal — the goods come back out of stock.

Two counters are never corrected by a cancel

Cancelling a consumption does not subtract its cost back off the job, so the actual cost stays permanently inflated. Pressing Recompute Cost fixes the report but not the figure on the order itself.

Cancelling an output does not subtract its quantity from the job’s produced total. That overstatement is permanent — and if overproduction is blocked, the phantom quantity can stop you re-entering the output correctly.

Offline

Nothing in this chain works offline.

Related

• Recipes and routings
• Quality and scrap
• Planning and the shop floor