Production Work Orders

1. CREATING A WORK ORDER — STEP BY STEP

1. Choose the finished item to produce and the quantity.
2. Choose the mode:

• Simple (one-step) — a casual, less-structured run, for quick or low-stakes production.
• Routed (multi-stage) — the fully-tracked workflow with formal batch and quality-control steps, for anything that needs traceability and inspection.

1. Choose whether Backflush is on. Off (the default): raw materials must be explicitly issued before you record finished goods received — an intentional checkpoint. On: the moment finished goods are received, the exact components specified in the Bill of Materials are automatically consumed from stock — no separate manual issue step at all, ideal for high-volume, well-understood production where you trust the recipe completely.
2. Save. The order reserves the required raw materials from stock immediately, so they're set aside for this run and won't accidentally get sold or used elsewhere.

2. RUNNING THE ORDER

• If not using backflush, Material/Ingredient Issues is used to formally record raw materials leaving stock for this run (see that guide).
• Finished Goods Receipts records completed production landing back into stock, ready to sell (see that guide) — for batch-tracked items, this is also where the stock-side batch record (batch number, manufacture/expiry date) gets created. Queuing that production run for formal QC inspection is a separate, deliberate step against the Work Order from the Batches list (see the Batch/Lot Tracking & Quality Control guide) — it isn't automatic at receipt.
• Every status change the order goes through — from started, to in progress, to received — is permanently logged, so the complete history of exactly how a production run unfolded is always available, not just its current state.

3. WHY BACKFLUSH IS OPT-IN, NOT DEFAULT

Automatic component consumption is powerful but not always what you want on every run — a business testing a new recipe or dealing with variable ingredient substitutions often wants the manual issue step as a deliberate checkpoint. Backflush is there for the businesses running high-volume, well-proven production who want one less manual step per run, and it's a real no-op (nothing changes) for any order where it's left off — so turning it on for some products and not others carries zero risk to the ones left alone.

4. HOW IT CONNECTS TO THE REST OF THE SYSTEM

• Bill of Materials — every Work Order's component list and quantities come directly from the finished item's BOM/recipe.
• Inventory — raw materials are reserved on order creation and consumed on issue (or automatically on receipt, with backflush); finished goods post to stock on receipt — all through the same central inventory ledger as every other module.
• Production Scheduling — every open Work Order appears on the Kanban scheduling board for shop-floor visibility and status management.
• Batch/Lot Tracking & QC — routed-mode orders producing batch-tracked items connect directly into batch creation and quality inspection.

5. WHY IT SCALES FROM SMB TO ENTERPRISE

Quick Reference

  Work Orders list ......................... Production > Work Orders
  Create a new Work Order .................. Production > Work Orders > New Work
                                             Order (or from Demand Plans)
  Production mode & backflush toggle ....... Work Order entry form