Understanding Work Orders
A work order manages making something: it defines the steps, materials, labour and equipment needed, tracks production as it happens, and records what was produced and what it really cost. If you assemble, manufacture, process or repair, work orders are where that work lives.
What a work order does
- Consumes materials: component products drawn from stock, bought in on purchase orders, or produced by other work orders
- Records labour: time tracked against defined tasks
- Uses equipment: machines and assets required by each step
- Produces outputs: finished products (and by-products) received into stock
- Calculates cost: expected vs actual material, labour and per-unit cost, and margin against sell price
Work orders and Bills of Materials
A Bill of Materials (BOM) is the reusable recipe: the steps, materials, tasks, equipment and outputs to make a product. A work order is one run of a recipe. Setting up a work order from a BOM copies the recipe in and scales every variable quantity by the work order quantity, so a quantity of 10 needs ten times the variable materials of a single run, while fixed quantities (like one machine setup) stay fixed.
You don’t need a BOM (work orders can be built manually), but if you make the same thing more than once, a BOM saves the setup every time.
The phases of a work order
The work order page is organised as phases, top to bottom:
- Setup: define what’s being made and how (details, steps, materials, tasks, outputs), from a BOM or built by hand. See Setting Up a Work Order.
- Approve: sign off the plan. Approval unlocks the operational phases.
- Material Sourcing: decide where every required material comes from (stock, purchase orders, other work orders, kits or non-stock). See Sourcing Materials.
- Production: work the steps, consuming materials, logging time against tasks, and recording produced quantities. See Production, Completion and Costing.
- Completion & Costing: review yield, actual vs expected costs and labour, then close the work order.
The lifecycle
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| New | Being set up |
| Approved | Plan signed off, ready to source and produce |
| Scheduled / In progress / On hold | Optional working states |
| Completed | All steps finished |
| Closed | Reviewed and locked, costing finalised |
| Cancelled | No longer proceeding |
Where work orders come from
- Created directly: for planned production runs
- From a sales order: fulfilling a sales order line from a work order creates one to make the goods, linked to the sale
- From another work order: a material shortfall during sourcing can spawn a child work order to produce the component
Options worth knowing
- Allow steps out of order: let production work steps in any sequence rather than strictly top to bottom
- Use stock pick lists: generate warehouse pick lists for the materials instead of consuming directly
Both have account-wide defaults and can be set per work order.