Creating a work order

You create a work order from the Work orders list page under Manufacturing. There are three paths in, depending on what you already know about the job, and one After creating choice that decides what state the work order lands in.

The three creation paths

Create work order is the primary button in the page’s title bar. The other two live in the More actions menu beside it: Create from orders and Create from flow.

All three dialogs share the same set of fields underneath — name, items, production location, default consumption location, priority, due date, assignee, tags, notes, and the After creating choice.

Create work order

Start here when you know what you are building. Give it a name, then press Add items and pick from the entity picker: a Finished good (a bill of materials) or an Assembly bill. Set a quantity per item. Assemblified spreads each item into the materials it consumes for you.

At least one item is required — the primary button stays dead until the dialog has one, with “Add at least one finished good or assembly bill” where the items go. A production location is required too on a shop that has more than one location and no default set; pressing the button is what reveals that message.

Create new assignee… at the bottom of the Assignee dropdown reveals four fields inside the same dialog, so you can add a colleague and assign the job to them without a detour to Settings. See assignees.

Create from flow

Choose this when an assemble flow already describes the recipe. The dialog is a single step: pick a Flow from the select, and its bill and assembly-bill references appear as items with their quantities already filled in. Adjust or remove any of them, fill in the rest of the fields, and press Create work order. The new work order records the flow as its source.

The items are a starting point, not a binding: what gets created is whatever the dialog submits.

Only flows you created yourself are offered. Flows the app generates internally while reconciling pre-assembled stock are not in the list.

Create from orders

Choose this when you’re building stock to fulfil one or more existing Shopify orders.

Press Choose orders and pick them from the order picker — searchable, and filterable by fulfillment status. Assemblified then reads each order’s line items and works out which of them have a finished good behind them. You get back two lists:

The matched lines, as a table you tick. Each row shows the finished good, an editable Quantity, and a Plan as choice:

Plan as	What it does
One merged item	Every ticked line for the same finished good becomes a single item at the combined quantity. The default.
A separate item	One item per order line, kept apart even when they build the same thing.
Reference only	Plans nothing for that line. The order is still recorded on the work order.

Not planned — the order lines with no finished good behind them, listed so you can see what was left out. Nothing is planned for these.

At least one matched line has to be ticked before the primary button comes alive: a work order that plans nothing is not a work order.

The orders you picked are saved on the work order, so completion-time integrations (tagging the linked orders, the per-order metafield overlay) know which orders this job satisfies. See Shopify sync.

What “After creating” does

There is one submit button — Create work order — and a three-option After creating choice above it:

Leave as a draft — lands in draft. The plan is fully editable; nothing is locked.
Mark it ready — runs the same checks as the Mark ready transition, then lands in ready. The plan is still editable but the work order is signalling that the next step is to start building.
Start it right away — mark-ready and start in one go. Lands directly in in_progress, and build runs can begin immediately. This is the transition elsewhere called Quick start.

Both Mark it ready and Start it right away require the work order to pass the readiness check: at least one item, a production location, and no zero-quantity active materials.

Saving a draft from a bill’s Pre-manufacture dialog

You don’t have to start on the Work orders page. On a finished good or an assembly bill, the title bar’s Pre-manufacture action can plan instead of build: beside Cancel and Build it offers Save as draft work order, which turns the items and the production location on screen into a draft and opens it.

Reach for it when the run is worth doing but not right now — components are short, something isn’t stocked at that location yet, or the batch belongs on next week’s schedule. The draft saves whatever the preview said, because nothing is built and no stock moves.

It appears on a build only. A disassembly, a count correction and a write-off are runs whose whole point is what they move, so it isn’t offered for them.
An item that a location rule disables at that location is left out of the draft, exactly as it would be left out of the build.
It needs the Enhanced plan, the same as building from that dialog.
Each press saves a new draft — press it twice and you have two.
On the list, these work orders show Quick build as their source, the same as one the dialog actually built.

Work orders Assemblified creates for an order

One kind of work order is created without anybody pressing a button. When a new order includes a BOM with Auto-generate material list on, Assemblified creates a draft Material List Only work order named Materials Order #1001: one item per such BOM at the ordered quantity, at the order’s location, linked to the order, tagged materials-order, with Assemblified as its creator. It moves no stock — it is the order’s material list, with a pick list you can print. An assemble task of the same name is created beside it and linked to it; the task’s Complete work order finishes the work order in one step. Processing the same order again creates nothing new. A task that points at a flow can also get its work order from its own row menu, with Create work order.

Duplicating

Open the row menu on the list and choose Duplicate. You can pass a name, or let Assemblified default to <original> (Copy), then (Copy 2), (Copy 3), … until it finds a free slot.

What gets copied: the work-order row itself (forced to draft), all items, all materials, all contributions. What does not get copied: lifecycle events, build runs, QC reviews, rework items, notes, documents, the assignee, the due date, and any consumed-quantity progress. The duplicate is a fresh draft, not a snapshot of execution state.

Finding work orders on the list

The list opens on the most recently updated work orders and gives you four ways to narrow that down. They stack: a view, a search term and a set of filters all apply at once.

Views — six built-in ones (All, Draft, Ready, In progress, Quality control, Completed), plus any you save yourself. A saved view remembers the search, the filters, the sort order and the columns.
The counts across the top — Draft, Ready, In progress, Quality control and Overdue. Click one to filter the list down to it.
Search — matches the name, the short ID (#WO-NNNNN) and the names of the items being built. Type at least three characters.
Filters — one or more conditions across status, priority, created from, tags, assignee, due date and overdue, progress, item count and item names, production and consumption location, order references, planned and labour cost, and the created and updated dates. Each condition picks its own comparison, and every condition you add appears as a chip you can edit or remove.

Sort by clicking a column heading: name, short ID, status, items, progress, due date, production location, priority, assignee, planned or labour cost, created or updated. Progress is the total completed quantity against the total planned quantity across the work order’s items.

A work order you created from orders keeps a link to them. Turn on the Order references column to see those orders by their order number; a work order with several orders opens a list of all of them, each linking to the order in Shopify.

Everything you set is in the page address, so a filtered list is a link you can send to a colleague.

Changing several at once

Tick the work orders you want, or select everything the current filters match, and a bar appears above the list. From it you can move the selection to another status, tag it, cancel it, export it, or delete it. Assemblified reports the result per work order: if some of them could not be changed, it names them and lets you retry just those.

Deleting

Open the row menu and choose Delete. The behaviour depends on status:

Status	What happens	Recovery
`draft`	Hard delete — the work order and all its items, materials, contributions, lifecycle events, and notes are removed for good.	None.
`cancelled`	Soft delete — the row stays for audit but disappears from every list.	None from the UI.
Anything else	Blocked. The error tells you to cancel first, then delete.	Cancel the work order, then delete it.

On the work order’s own page, Delete is withheld from the More actions menu entirely while a build run is still picking, and on a draft that has already executed something — a hard delete there would strand a pick Shopify already holds. Cancel work order is offered in its place. Soft-deleted work orders cannot be revived from the UI — the affordance doesn’t exist. Hard-delete from draft is the only path that frees up the original short ID and name.

Lifecycle — what each status means and when each transition is allowed.
Editing the plan — edit items and materials after creation.
Assemble flows — what a flow still is.
Glossary — every work-order term in one place.