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.

The Work Orders list — your starting point for everything below.

On this page

• When to use a work order
• The capability snapshot
• 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 write a lifecycle audit log).
• 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 BOMs or sub-assemblies 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 you can do with one

Create a work order Four creation paths: empty, from a flow, from a BOM, or from one or more Shopify orders. Three save modes from draft to in-progress.

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

Run builds in three modes Pick now and complete later, pick-and-complete in one shot, or pick-complete-and-defer-output until QC approves.

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

Material planning and costs Three cost views — planned, baseline, and actual — plus labour cost and pre-assembled splits.

Pick lists and PDFs Build Overview, Pick List, and Shortage Report PDFs for the shop floor.

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 (BOMs or sub-assembliesSub-AssemblyA reusable assembly block that composes into bigger BOMs. Define it once, include it in any BOM. At execution time, Assemblified expands the sub-assembly into its own components recursively. Read more → ).
• Each item gets spreadSpreadThe step that walks each item's BOM (and any sub-assemblies inside it) and turns the result into the flat list of materials the work order needs. Runs automatically when you add an item — unless you choose "skip for now" and plan the materials yourself. 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 sub-assemblies and BOM items that have already been built and are sitting on the shelf. When a work order needs a sub-assembly, it draws from pre-assembled inventory first and only builds fresh ones if the shelf comes up short. Read more → shelf holds finished sub-assemblies 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.