A work order plans one production run as a sequence of steps: schedule a routed bill of materials, tick off each step as the shop floor finishes it, and watch the work-in-progress value build up — then complete the order to move the stock and release the WIP.
Where do I find it?
Open Manufacturing — work orders and capacity are the third and fourth tabs. The Manufacturing module has to be on, and only owners and assistants can create or move an order; an invited accountant reads it.
Why can I not create one?
Work orders run on routed bills of materials. Open a BoM, add routing steps — a work centre, the expected minutes, and which components that step draws — and it becomes available in the work-order form. A BoM with no routing keeps the simple one-step production run it always had.
Running an order
- New work order — pick the routed BoM, the quantity to make, a scheduled start and a due date.
- Start it when the floor begins.
- As each step finishes, enter the actual minutes it took and tap Done. The order shows how many steps are done and a running Open work-in-progress figure.
- Complete the order. Finished goods go in, raw materials come out, and the work-in-progress value is released.
Complete stays disabled until every step is done, and says so: finish every step to complete the order. A draft can be deleted; a draft or in-progress order can be cancelled, which releases the open WIP.
How is work-in-progress valued?
Step by step, in whole paise, from the same routing figures the BoM already uses: the materials that step draws at their standard cost, plus its labour (the minutes you entered at the work centre's rate). The last step absorbs the rounding remainder, so the steps always add up to the run cost exactly — never a paise lost, never one invented.
The WIP total is a fold over an append-only ledger of signed amounts: accruals as steps finish, and a release when the order closes. Nothing in it is ever edited or deleted, and a closed order's entries sum to exactly zero.
Does it hit my accounts?
While an order is in progress and has open WIP, Finocket posts one balanced pair — Work-in-Progress against WIP Absorption — dated at the order's scheduled start. It is an asset against a liability, so it has no effect on your profit and loss, and it is removed entirely when the order is completed or cancelled. No revenue and no expense is ever posted by a work order.
What does the Capacity tab actually do?
It is a planning aid, not a scheduler, and the screen says so. Give each work centre a number of minutes per day, and Finocket spreads each order's remaining step minutes evenly across that order's scheduled window over the next seven days, flagging days that go over. That is the whole heuristic — there is no finite-capacity solver, no sequencing and no dispatch.
It is honest about what it cannot count: a centre with no capacity set shows Not tracked and is never flagged as overloaded; orders with no start and no due date are excluded, and it tells you they are; steps with no work centre or no expected minutes add nothing.
What if I tap twice, or the connection drops?
Nothing double-counts. Each step's accrual, each release and each production run can exist only once, enforced in the database rather than by the screen. Every action re-reads the order from the server first, so a stale screen cannot start an order that is already running or complete one twice.
What it refuses
Each refusal is a sentence, not a silent failure: a due date before the scheduled start, a quantity of zero or less, starting something that is not a draft, recording a step before the order is started, a step that is already done, negative minutes, a step that is no longer on the BoM's routing, an order whose BoM has been archived or has lost its routing, completing an order with steps outstanding, cancelling one that is already closed, deleting one that is not a draft.
Does it use AI or work offline?
No AI at all — every figure is arithmetic. It needs a connection: work orders are not part of the offline queue.
Related: Manufacturing & bill of materials, Inventory & stock.