The item workspace

A Draft item is invisible to the customer; Publish makes it appear in their library. Emailing them about it is opt-in — nothing is sent unless you tick the box when publishing.

Identity and classification: name, SKU and references, type (manufactured vs bought-in), method and material. What you pick here decides which other tabs appear.

Bought-in items: preferred supplier and cost. The last price actually paid on a goods receipt shows here and feeds BOM costing wherever this item is a component.

The recipe (components, materials, labour) and the routing steps that make it. Work orders snapshot this BOM, and routing drives machine/hours suggestions on the schedule.

Rolls the BOM, routing and labour rate into an estimated unit cost and margin against the sell price — costs stay staff-only, never shown to customers.

The customer-facing side: which organisations see this part in their library, price tiers and variations. Costing informs the price you set here.

Machine programs, QA sheets and setup docs. These print into the job pack and their run times feed scheduling suggestions.

Controlled drawing/model versions. The active revision is what production and customers see — work orders pin it when created.

The audit trail for this item — who changed what, when.

On the Overview tab each item has a tracking mode: quantity only (the default), lot-tracked, or serial-tracked. Lot-tracked items take one batch or heat number per receipt and keep a quantity against it; serial-tracked items take one code per unit. Tracked items ask for their codes at goods receipt, mint them when a job completes, and record which units were consumed by a job or despatched on an order.

The mode can only be changed while the item has no stock on hand — otherwise existing quantities would have no unit behind them.

Switch Kanban on for any item you want replenished from the shelf rather than from a report. Set a card quantity; the workspace suggests a reorder point and card quantity from recent usage and the supplier or production lead time, and applies them only when you press Apply. Print the card — the item image, name, SKU, reorder quantity and a QR — and pin it to the bin. Scanning the QR raises a reorder signal for buyers or planners.

Regenerating the card voids every printed copy: the old QR lands on a “card voided” screen, so a lost or superseded card cannot keep triggering orders.

A staff-only note pinned above the tabs and echoed beside Save. Items, jobs, quotes, purchase orders and orders all have one. It is never printed, emailed or shown to a customer.