Work Orders

A work orderWork OrderA planned production run: pick materials, build the items, do QC, and complete — all tracked together. Use work orders when you're building stock ahead of demand or running a multi-day project. Read more → is a stateful production job that says “this is what we’re building right now.” It holds a plan you can edit, tracks progress through a status chain, and only moves inventory when you take a deliberate action. Use one when you’re building stock ahead of demand, fulfilling a wholesale order, or running a multi-day project that needs material reservations.

Work orders are different from order-driven BOMBill of MaterialsA bill of materials tells Assemblified how to build one unit of a finished good. When a customer orders the finished-good variant, Assemblified deducts the right component quantities from inventory automatically. Read more → execution. A BOM that fires automatically on a Shopify order is one atomic execution. A work order is a persistent artifact: you can pause it, edit the plan, run multiple builds against it, send it through QC, and only mark it complete when the units are actually finished.

You reach them from the Manufacturing entry in the app nav, which opens the Work orders list.

On this page

• When to use a work order
• What the Work Orders list shows
• Inside a work order: five tabs
• What the Overview tab tells you
• When the page warns you
• Key concepts at a glance

When to use a work order

Reach for a work order when any of these apply:

• You’re building to stock rather than to a single Shopify order.
• You need a paper trail of who built what and when (work orders keep a progress feed alongside the conversation).
• You want a pick list for the shop floor to physically gather materials before building.
• You need quality control as a separate step, with the option to release output only after sign-off.
• You’re building one product across multiple days and need committed materials to persist between sessions.
• One job covers several bills or assembly bills and you want them tracked as one batch.

If you only need “an order came in, deduct the components automatically,” stick with order-driven BOM execution — see Bill of Materials → Execution.

What the Work Orders list shows

The list is the working surface for the whole feature, and it remembers how you like to work.

The title bar. Create work order is the one primary button. Beside it, More actions holds Create from orders, Create from flow and Manage tags.

Views. Six built-in views sit across the top: All, Draft, Ready, In progress, Quality control and Completed. Switch between them with one click. You can also save your own view: set up the search, the filters, the sort order and the columns you want, then save the combination under a name of your choice. Saved views can be renamed, set as your default, and deleted, and they are shared with everyone in the shop.

The counts across the top. Five counts summarise the whole shop: Draft, Ready, In progress, Quality control and Overdue. Click one and the list filters itself down to it, so “what is waiting on QC right now” is a single click rather than a filter to build.

Search. The search box matches a work order’s name, its short ID (#WO-NNNNN) and the names of the items it plans. Type at least three characters; shorter terms are held back and the field tells you so.

Filters. Build as many conditions as you need across the work order’s own fields: 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, created and updated dates. Each condition has its own comparison (is, is not, contains, before, after, between, is empty, and so on), and the conditions you add show up as chips you can edit or clear individually.

Columns. Choose which columns you see and in which order, and pin the ones you always want in view. Every column carries a short description explaining what the number in it means, and column choices are saved with the view.

Order references. Turn this column on to see which Shopify orders a work order was created for, by order number (#1001). The numbers are looked up in Shopify when the column is shown, so they appear a moment after the list itself. A work order made for several orders shows the first one and how many more there are; click the arrow beside it to see all of them, each linking to the order in your Shopify admin. An order that has since been deleted in Shopify reads Order not found. If Shopify cannot be reached, the column shows the order IDs instead and a message above the list says why.

Acting on several at once. Tick the rows you want, or select everything the current filters match, and a bar appears with what you can do to the selection: move them to another status, tag them, cancel them, export them, or delete them. Results are reported per work order, so if one of them could not be moved you are told which one and why, and you can retry just those.

Row actions. Every row has its own menu for the single-work-order jobs: open it, duplicate it, tag it, cancel it, delete it. Tagging is offered on every row including completed and cancelled ones — a tag is metadata, not a lifecycle step. Cancel disappears once the work order is already completed or cancelled.

Inside a work order: five tabs

Opening a work order gives you one full-width page with five tabs.

• Overview — what the job is, how far it has got, and what it is building. See below.
• Materials — everything this work order consumes: planned against picked against consumed, per line, with the location each line draws from and what each line costs.
• Build runs & QC — every run against this work order and what each one moved, with the quality control recorded against them underneath. Each run shows its own next step as a button on its row.
• Documents & Build Metafields — the files attached to the job (drawings, specs, photos, certificates) and the values you record against what it builds (lot numbers, batch codes, readings), on one tab. Both answer the same question: what this build carries besides quantities.
• Activity — the conversation and progress feed for the job.

The tab you are on is part of the address, so a link to a work order can point at the tab you meant. Older links still land on the right tab.

What the Overview tab tells you

The Summary card

Its heading row carries two things on the right: a quiet Created … by … stamp, and the work order’s status badge. The status is said exactly once on the page and that is where it lives — there is no status stepper.

The card itself reads top to bottom in four blocks:

1. An identity band of five cells — Priority · Assignee · Due · Production location · Default consumption location. Both locations are always shown, even when they are the same, so “they match” never has to be told apart from “one is unset”. A retired assignee keeps their name and is marked (retired).
2. Progress — one bar, with the numbers behind it underneath: how many units are built, how many are in quality control, how many are built outside QC, how many remain and how many were planned.
3. Cost — six money cells under their own Cost heading: Material cost · Labour cost · Additional cost · Planned · Adjusted · Actual. Every one of the six opens a breakdown when you press it, so “what is this £1,240 made of” is one click rather than a guess. Planned is the recipe’s own figure, frozen when the items were spread; Adjusted is the same total after your edits, with its difference against Planned printed under it; Actual is what the builds really consumed, and it stays blank with no difference of its own until the work order has run.
4. Tags, then the Notes for the shop floor, edited with the pencil beside them.

Planned, Adjusted, Actual

The three totals are the ones to learn. Planned = the recipe. Adjusted = the recipe plus your overrides. Actual = what was really consumed. Material planning & costs goes through each of them.

The Items card

Items lists what the work order builds: a picture (or the item’s initials), name, SKU, what Shopify has available at the production location, what is already on the pre-assembled shelf, a Status for the item, the planned and built quantities, and any note on the row. Add item sits in the card’s heading row.

The Status is the one thing to read per row — Draft, Picked, Waiting for QC or Built — and pressing it opens the numbers behind it (what is planned, picked in open runs, built, remaining, and what QC approved, failed, sent to rework or scrapped). Beside it, each row offers one button: the next thing to do with that item, and nothing else. Start a build run while it is a draft, complete the run that holds it while it is picked, review it while it waits for QC, nothing once it is built. When two runs hold the same item there is no single answer, so the button reads “See 2 open runs” (or “See 2 runs” for runs awaiting review) and takes you to the Build runs & QC tab instead of guessing which one you meant.

The Purchase order section

When the Logistified integration is connected, a Purchase order section closes the tab. Without that connection the section is not there at all. See purchase orders.

When the page warns you

Some conditions need your attention rather than a refusal, and the detail page says so with one banner at the top — the most serious thing first, never a stack of them. What you can meet:

The banner says	What it means	The button it offers
Shopify did not accept an inventory movement	A build run pushed stock to Shopify and Shopify refused it. Shopify’s count is behind this work order until it goes through.	Retry sync
Shopify may hold a movement this work order never recorded	Assemblified could not tell whether Shopify applied a push. Check the inventory movements in Shopify yourself.	Mark as confirmed
A build run took stock below zero	A run consumed more than the location held. Nothing is broken; the stock needs reconciling.	—
The pre-assembled split is out of date	Pre-assembled stock moved since the plan was made, so the split between “take from the shelf” and “build fresh” no longer matches.	Reset materials
An item points at something that no longer exists	The bill or assembly bill behind an item was deleted.	Edit items
Follow-up work is still retrying	A background job started by a build run has not finished. Check the run before you treat the work order as done.	—
A bill in this work order is disabled at <location>	A location rule switches that bill off where this work order runs, so it is planned from the base recipe instead.	—

What you can do with one

Assign the work One list of the people who work on your work orders — assign, correct a name once, retire someone who has left.

Create a work order Three creation paths — empty, from Shopify orders, or from an assemble flow — plus a draft saved from a bill's Pre-manufacture dialog.

Edit the plan Add items, override material quantities, refresh from the source bills, decouple a row from the live recipe.

Run builds in three modes Pick only, pick and complete in one shot, or pick, complete and send to QC with output held back until it passes.

QC and rework Per-unit dispositions, rework runs that don't re-consume materials, and scrap that reverses produced output.

Material planning and costs Planned, Adjusted and Actual, plus labour cost and pre-assembled splits.

Pick lists and exports Pick list, build overview and shortage report — each as a PDF, an Excel file or a CSV.

Set up exports, QC catalogues and tags Settings → Work orders: export templates with a live preview, failure categories, defect reasons and work-order tags.

Create a purchase order Turn the work order's material demand — or just its shortages — into a Logistified purchase order, or link one you already have.

Assemble tasks A light to-do list for production work that doesn't need a whole work order behind it.

Assemble flows Saved recipes that seed a work order. They no longer run on their own.

Key concepts

The work-order surface picks up a lot of vocabulary. Here are the terms that come up most often — hover any of them anywhere in these docs for a quick definition, or jump to the glossary.

• A work orderWork OrderA planned production run: pick materials, build the items, do QC, and complete — all tracked together. Use work orders when you're building stock ahead of demand or running a multi-day project. Read more → contains one or more items to build (bills of materials or assembly billsSub-assemblyA reusable assembly block that composes into bigger bills: define it once, include it in any bill of materials, and Assemblified expands it into its own components at execution time. The app now calls it an assembly bill. Read more → ).
• Each item gets spreadSpreadThe step that walks each work-order item's bill, assembly bills included, and turns the result into the flat list of materials the work order needs. It runs immediately when you add an item and cannot be skipped; a later quantity edit offers to re-spread. Read more → into a flat list of materials — the components you’ll consume from inventory.
• A build runBuild RunOne cycle of assembly inside a work order: pick the materials, build the units, then complete (or cancel, or reverse). A work order can have many build runs over its life — each one moves a defined quantity of inventory and writes a row to the audit ledger. Read more → is one cycle of pickingPickThe first half of a build run: reserving the materials needed off the shelf and committing them to that run. After picking, the materials are no longer "available" inventory — they're earmarked for the build until you complete or cancel it. Read more → and completing.
• The pre-assembled inventoryPre-Assembled InventoryStock of finished goods and assembly bills already built and on the shelf, counted per location. A work order draws assembly bills from the shelf first, building fresh only if it runs short; an order consumes a finished good's shelf before its components. Read more → shelf holds finished assembly bills you’ve built ahead. New work orders draw from this shelf first.
• A dispositionDispositionA QC reviewer's verdict on a built unit: how many were approved, how many were failed, and an optional reason and category for the failure. One row per item per QC review, written when the operator finalises the review. Read more → is the QC verdict on built units. Failed units go to reworkReworkRe-running failed units through a fresh build cycle to fix them. Rework runs don't consume new materials — the materials were already consumed in the original run. Once a rework run passes QC, the units land in finished stock. Read more → or get scrappedScrapMarking a failed unit as a terminal loss — it won't be reworked. Scrapping a unit from a non-deferred run also reverses the produced output, so the unit count in finished stock drops by one. Read more → .

Where to next

• New to the feature? Read creating a work order, then walk through the end-to-end flows guide.
• Already comfortable? Jump straight to build runs for the three execution modes.
• Need the full vocabulary? The glossary lists every term.