Ledgr/Documentation/Production
Production
Where the work actually happens. Material planning proposes work orders; Production owns them — releases them, books the hours, issues the material, and tells you afterwards what the difference cost.
Production is included from Manufacturing. See pricing. It shares the module licence with material planning: the two screens are one job split at the point where a plan becomes a commitment.
Material Planning shows you how many are open and points here. It does not carry a second board over the same rows — two lists of the same work orders means two numbers to reconcile and a supervisor who does not know which one is being worked from.
Set up in this order
The tabs read left to right in the order you have to fill them, and skipping one leaves the next with nothing to work from.
- Work Centres
A machine, a bench, a line or a subcontractor. Each carries a labour rate per hour, an overhead rate, its capacity for a working day and which days it works. This is where the cost of an hour is decided — every labour figure downstream reads it from here.
- Routings
How a product is made: the ordered steps, which work centre each runs on, the setup and run hours for each, and the expected yield. The routing is what a work order is measured against, so a product with no routing can still be built — you simply cannot be told whether it took longer than it should have.
- Work Orders
The commitment to build a quantity by a date. Created here or pulled in from material planning.
- Capacity
Four weeks of planned hours against available hours per centre, with overloads highlighted. Public holidays come from the Public Holidays Act, including the Sunday rule; your own shutdowns go in as date ranges.
Running a work order
- Release it
Planned becomes released. The routing's steps are copied onto the order at that moment, so later edits to the routing do not rewrite an order already on the floor. The quantity to start is scaled by the routing's yield — build 100 good units at 96% yield and the order starts 105.
- Start an operation, then book hours against it
Hours add rather than replace, so a step worked across two shifts is booked twice and a mis-keyed entry is corrected by booking the negative. An operation nobody has booked reads "not booked" — it is never quietly assumed to have taken its planned time.
- Issue material
Either backflush the whole bill of materials at once, or pick and place item by item. Stock moves at what the batches actually cost, not at a list price. If there is not enough, the issue is refused and names what is short rather than costing the shortfall at catalogue price and carrying on.
- Complete it
Enter the good quantity and choose whether to close the order or leave it open for a second run. Finished units are received into stock at standard cost and the difference between standard and actual is posted to the variance accounts.
An order can be cancelled while it is released or in progress. A completion can be reversed while the units it received are still in stock — after they have been sold, the correction is a stock adjustment, not an unwind.
Work-order quantities can be fractional, because planning works in good units and scales by yield. Stock cannot. A completion posts the value of the units the stock ledger actually received, and whatever is left over stays in work in progress for close-out to sweep into the variances — so the inventory account and the sum of your batches agree to the cent.
WIP and standard costs
The WIP & Standard Costs tab is account 1315 in detail: what has been issued and booked to open orders and not yet received into stock. It should equal the ledger balance exactly. If it does not, the difference is a posting error somewhere else and this tab is where you will see it first.
The same tab holds the standard cost per item and the roll-up that produced it. The roll-up walks each bill of materials from the bottom up, so a change to a component's cost reprices everything above it in one pass — and it reports a recipe that refers to itself rather than looping.
The seven variances
When an order completes, the gap between standard and actual is split seven ways rather than landed as one number, because the seven have different owners and different fixes. A positive figure is unfavourable — it cost more than standard.
| Variance | What it means | Who can act on it |
|---|---|---|
| Material quantity | You used more (or less) material than the bill of materials calls for. | The floor — scrap, setup waste, a wrong cut. |
| Material price | The material cost more per unit than standard. | Buying, not the floor. |
| Labour rate | The people who did it are paid differently to the work centre's standard rate. | Scheduling — an expensive artisan on a cheap step. |
| Labour efficiency | It took more hours than the routing says. | The floor, or a routing that was never realistic. |
| Overhead rate | Overhead recovered per hour differs from standard. | Costing — usually a stale standard. |
| Overhead efficiency | Overhead over-absorbed or under-absorbed because the hours moved. | Follows labour efficiency. |
| Line scrap | Units scrapped at an operation, valued at standard. | The floor and the Scrap tab below. |
Labour rate and labour efficiency can only be separated if something says how many hours the job should have taken. Without a routing you get one unsplit labour figure — honest, but it cannot tell you whether you were slow or expensive. That is the argument for maintaining routings even on products you think you know.
Scrap
Scrap by reason, work centre, product and operator, ranked by what it cost rather than by how often it happened — the cheap frequent one is rarely the expensive one. Reasons are bucketed into what you control and what you do not, and load shedding is broken out on its own, because a cycle cut mid-process is not a quality problem and should not be counted as one.
Lots in, lots out
Every work order records which supplier batches went in and which finished batches came out. That is what makes a recall answerable in the direction you actually need it: start from the supplier's lot number on their notification and get the list of your own finished batches affected, through however many levels of sub-assembly sit between them.
It works because the batch is captured at the moment of issue, with its supplier and expiry — see inventory for how batch layers move and are costed.
Why the URL says "shop floor"
This screen used to be called Shop Floor. The address kept the old word so that links people already had carry on working. The screen, the guide and the app's sidebar all say Production.
Plan it, then run it
Material planning works out what to build. This is where it gets built.