Manufacturing is where you plan and record production. Create work orders to turn components into finished goods, build from a bill of materials, make items to order straight from a sales order, and organize the shop floor into workstations.
Plan and access
Manufacturing requires the Raw-Material Tracking capability, which is included on the Pro and Scale plans. This entitlement is checked on the server for every work-order read and action, so the section stays locked without it.
Manufacturing is currently in Beta and is being rolled out gradually. If your plan includes Raw-Material Tracking but you do not see the Manufacturing section yet, it may not be enabled for your organization. Reach out to support to request access.
Sidebar access is also governed by the "Manufacturing" permission, which you can control per role or per user. Workers can be granted access so they can open the section and be assigned work orders.
Tip: Bill-of-materials editing lives in the Catalog, on a variant's Materials tab. The Manufacturing pages are for planning, building, and reviewing production.
How production works
A work order is a production document. It can be standalone (a free-text title) or linked to a product variant. A linked variant that has a bill of materials can consume its components when built; one without a bill of materials can still add finished goods to stock.
Work orders move through a lifecycle: draft, released, in progress, then completed or cancelled. Releasing freezes the bill-of-materials snapshot, so later catalog edits never change a released work order.
You record production in increments ("build part of the planned quantity"). Builds are the only action that moves inventory, and each build applies the work order's chosen inventory behavior.
What you can do
Work Orders (Manufacturing → Work Orders): Create and track production documents from a filterable list or a kanban board. Release, start, build in increments, pause and resume, close short, or cancel, with assignees, due dates, tags, an assembly-step checklist, and cycle-time tracking.
Bill of Materials (Manufacturing → Bill of Materials): Review every assembly with its component count, rolled-up material cost, and buildable quantity. Open an assembly to see its costed recipe (cost and buildable per location) and build from there. This view is read-only; editing stays in the Catalog.
Templates (Manufacturing → Templates): Create reusable work-order templates that seed steps, tags, notes, a default inventory behavior, and optionally a default assembly, location, and workstation onto new work orders.
Insights (Manufacturing → Insights): A production dashboard over your completed work orders (units built, on-time completion, average cycle time, and planned versus actual cost) with a date-range selector and an optional location filter.
Maintenance (Manufacturing → Maintenance): Track your machines and their upkeep across the Jobs, Machines, and Schedules tabs.
Workstations (Manufacturing → Workstations): Divide a store location into benches, cells, or lines. Managers and admins set a location's default workstation, and every team member can pick a personal default that prefills the New Work Order form.
Make production to order
From any sales-order line item, use the inline Production controls to create a work order prefilled with the item, its quantity, and the originating order. The order then shows work-order chips and a production summary line so you can track progress, and cancelling a sales order automatically cancels its linked work orders that have not built anything yet.
Note: The goods-received inspection checklist is part of Purchasing, at Purchasing → Inspection Checklist.
Need help?
If you have questions or need a hand getting started with Manufacturing, reach out to our support team.