Manufacturing Module
Bills of Materials & Work Orders
How to define what a finished good is made of, then run a work order to turn raw materials into real, sellable stock — with cost and GL posting handled automatically the whole way through.
Start here
1Before you start
Manufacturing only appears in the sidebar (under Inventory) for a company set to the Manufacturing industry — check this under Companies if you don’t see it. It builds directly on Products and Inventory, so both the raw materials you’ll consume and the finished good you’ll produce need to already exist there first, as ordinary stock-tracked products.
There’s no separate “finished goods” catalog — once a work order produces it, a finished good is exactly the same kind of Inventory item as anything else you stock, and shows up the same way in Sales, POS, and stock reports.
2Create a bill of materials
A Bill of Materials (BOM) is the recipe — what finished good it produces, and what it consumes to produce one batch. Under the Bills of Materials tab, click + New Bill of Materials:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | Required — e.g. “Oak Dining Chair Recipe”. |
| Finished Good | Required. Only stock-tracked products show up here. |
| Output Quantity per Batch | How many finished units one run of this recipe produces. Usually 1, but set higher if a batch naturally yields more than one unit. |
| Materials Consumed per Batch | One or more materials, each with a quantity needed per batch. Click + Add Material for more than one. |
Saving doesn’t touch stock or the ledger — a BOM is just a template a work order runs later.
3Run a work order
Under the Work Orders tab, click + New Work Order, pick a bill of materials, how many finished units to produce, and which warehouse. It’s created as a Draft — nothing happens to stock yet.
-
Start
Consumes the recipe’s materials from that warehouse right away, scaled to the quantity you’re producing (a recipe needing 4 planks per chair, run for 10 chairs, consumes 40 planks). Blocked if the warehouse doesn’t have enough of any material on hand.
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Complete
Receives the finished good into that warehouse as real stock. You can adjust the completed quantity down if some output was lost to spoilage, and optionally add a Labor Cost and Overhead Cost — both get folded into the finished good’s total production cost.
Once completed, a work order is done — its numbers are historical from that point on.
4How cost and GL posting works
Manufacturing uses each material’s Cost Price from Products as its standard cost. Start values the materials consumed at that cost; Complete adds any Labor Cost and Overhead Cost you entered on top, and the finished good’s unit cost is simply total cost ÷ quantity completed.
GL journals post only for companies running in Double-Entry accounting mode. A Simple-mode company still gets real stock consumption/production here — it just won’t generate journal entries.
For a double-entry company, Start and Complete each post a real, balanced journal — see GL accounts used below for exactly what moves where.
Common tasks
Cancelling a work order
Click Cancel on a Draft or In Progress work order. A Draft simply disappears — nothing was ever consumed. An In Progress order has already consumed its materials on Start, so cancelling returns every one of those materials to the exact same warehouse and reverses the Start journal, leaving your books exactly as if the work order had never been started. A Completed work order can’t be cancelled — its finished goods are already real stock, possibly already sold.
Editing a bill of materials
A BOM can be freely edited or deleted while no open work order is using it. Once a work order references it, editing the BOM won’t retroactively change that work order — each work order snapshots its own recipe cost at Start, so past numbers stay accurate even if you later adjust the recipe going forward. Deleting a BOM is blocked while any of its work orders are still Draft or In Progress; complete or cancel them first.
Reference
GL accounts used
| Account | Type | When it’s used |
|---|---|---|
| Work in Progress | Asset | Debited with material cost on Start; debited again with any labor/overhead and credited back out in full on Complete. Nets to zero once nothing is in progress. |
| Inventory | Asset | Credited for material cost on Start (materials leaving stock); debited for total production cost on Complete (finished goods entering stock) — the same account Purchases and Sales already post every other stock movement through. |
| Operating Bank Account | Asset | Credited for any Labor Cost and Overhead Cost entered on Complete. |
All accounts are created automatically the first time you need them — nothing to set up by hand first. Raw Materials Inventory and Finished Goods Inventory also exist on a Manufacturing company’s Chart of Accounts as reference categories, but aren’t posted to directly by this module — everything flows through the one Inventory account above, same as it already does for Purchases and Sales.
Work order statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | Created, not yet started. No stock or GL impact. |
| In Progress | Materials consumed. Sitting in Work in Progress until completed or cancelled. |
| Completed | Finished good received into stock. Final — can’t be cancelled or edited. |
| Cancelled | Stopped before completion. Any consumed materials were returned to stock. |
What this module doesn’t do
A BOM’s materials are ordinary products, not other BOMs — there’s no sub-assembly nesting yet.
A work order doesn’t schedule operations across machines or stations — it’s a single Start → Complete run.
Running low on a material doesn’t automatically suggest or create a purchase order — check Inventory’s own low-stock indicators.