Editing the plan

The work order detail page is where you assemble the actual contents of the job. Items live on one tab, materials on another, with three more tabs around them for runs, files and history. Most edits are allowed in every status except completed and cancelled, which freeze the plan — and when they do, the editing controls disappear rather than sitting there greyed out.

The five tabs

Tab	What’s there
Overview	The summary of the job, the items it builds, and the linked purchase order. See the Overview tab.
Materials	The merged consumption plan as one editable table: planned quantities, unit costs, availability, shortages, consume-from locations.
Build runs & QC	Every run against this work order, its next step as a button on its row, and the quality control recorded underneath.
Documents & Build Metafields	Uploaded files (drawings, specs, photos, certificates) and the custom values recorded against what this work order builds, edited in place.
Activity	The conversation and the progress feed, in one timeline you can filter down to either half.

Editing an item from the Items card

The Items card on the Overview tab is where you edit what the work order builds. Planned quantity is editable in place while the work order is not finished: type a new number and Assemblified asks whether to re-spread the materials to match (see below). The SKU copies itself when you press it, and a note icon opens whatever was written about the row.

The row’s ⋯ menu holds the less frequent jobs:

Edit note — the row’s own note.
Reset decoupling — only on a row that has been decoupled. It puts the item back on BOM-ratio basis and re-spreads its materials.
Remove — takes the item off the work order.

Each row also offers at most one button — the next thing to do with that item. What it says follows the row’s status, and it acts only when there is no ambiguity about which build run it would touch; with two runs in play it sends you to the Build runs & QC tab instead. Once an item is built the button is gone rather than greyed out: a disabled control says there is something to do.

Adding an item

Press Add item in the Items card’s heading row. The picker offers two kinds: a Bill of materials or an Assembly BOM (defines a subassembly). Materials and bare Shopify variants are not addable as items — items are always things you’re building, not consuming. Tick one or more and press Add.

When you submit, Assemblified runs the spread: it walks the item’s bill (and any nested assembly BOMs) and adds every required material to the Materials tab. For assembly BOM materials it also computes an initial split between pre-assembled inventory on the shelf and quantity-to-build from materials.

The item is added at quantity 1 with its materials spread. Set the real quantity on the row afterwards — that’s where the re-spread question is asked.

Changing a planned quantity: re-spread or keep

Edit Planned quantity on the item row and Assemblified asks “Re-spread materials?” before it writes anything. The question is about the material list, not about the number:

Re-spread materials — the quantity is saved and the material list is resized to match it.
Keep current materials — the quantity is saved and the materials are left exactly as they are. The item is decoupled: it now carries a quantity the BOM does not explain, and it wears a Decoupled badge to say so.

Dismissing the dialog — Escape, the X, a click outside — is neither answer. Nothing is written and the cell falls back to the value it had.

Use Keep current materials when a build run has already happened against the item, or when you have hand-tuned the material quantities and don’t want them wiped. To get back to BOM-ratio basis, use Reset decoupling on the item’s row menu — see material planning → reset paths.

An item with units already built or being picked. The planned quantity cannot go below what is already built or being picked. Re-spread materials still works on such an item as long as its bill has not changed since its materials were spread: the units already built stay planned at what they actually consumed. If the bill has changed since, re-spreading would re-plan those units to a recipe they were not built with, so Assemblified saves the quantity and keeps the item decoupled instead, and Reset decoupling leaves it decoupled too. Either way the page tells you: instead of the usual confirmation, a notice at the top names the item and says why its materials were kept. Edit its materials by hand if the plan should follow the new bill.

The materials table

The Materials tab is one table of the merged consumption plan. The columns that carry the plan itself:

Column	What it is
Material	The material’s name. Press it to expand the Contributions behind it — which items need it, and how much each one asks for.
Available	Live availability at the location this line consumes from. It arrives a moment after the page does.
Planned quantity	Editable. The planned material quantity that will actually be consumed.
Unit cost	Editable. Overrides the material’s own cost for this work order only.
Shortage	The gap between what the line needs and what is available. Blank while availability is still loading, rather than a misleading zero.
Consumed from	The location the line draws from.

The rest are there to read. SKU copies itself when you press it, Picked is what an open build run has reserved and Consumed what a completed one used up, and Consumption shows a Whole units badge when the line rounds up, plus a note icon when the row carries a note.

Editing is a draft, saved once. Planned quantity and Unit cost are in-place cells: type into as many of them as you like, on as many pages of the table as you like, and one Save bar writes them all at once. Discard throws the lot away. You don’t select rows, and you don’t save each cell on its own.

Two ways to read the same rows. The Merged / By component switch in the toolbar groups the table either as one merged pile (what you actually pick) or split out per component. It only re-orders what is already on screen. The search filters as you type.

Every other row control is an immediate action with its own confirm, from the row’s ⋯ menu:

Edit note.
Consume in whole units only / Allow fractional consumption — the toggle behind the Whole units badge. See build runs → whole-unit consumption.
Reconcile pre-assembled — on assembly BOM lines only. Rebalances this line’s split between the pre-assembled shelf and build-fresh against current stock.
Replace: swaps this material for another one. See Replacing and removing.
Remove — takes the line off the plan. Build runs ignore it from then on.

Adding, replacing and removing materials

Add material, in the heading of the Materials table, opens a menu with three sources. Each one takes you straight to its picker:

Shopify material: pick variants from your Shopify catalogue in the Shopify admin’s own product picker. Each picked variant is registered as a material and then added. A variant Assemblified already knows is reused, never registered twice. This entry only appears inside the Shopify admin, because it uses the admin’s picker.
Virtual material: pick from your virtual materials.
Subassembly: pick from your assembly BOMs.

The Virtual material and Subassembly pickers leave out what the work order already carries.

To put back a material you removed, choose Add material and select it again. The line returns with the quantity, item and optional consumption location you choose now; its previous item needs and any materials beneath a subassembly do not come back. A subassembly added this way starts with its full quantity to build, even if pre-assembled stock is on the shelf. Use Reconcile pre-assembled if you want to use that stock. The line keeps its saved unit cost, rounding preference and material metafields. Adding the line does not move stock in Shopify.

You can pick several materials at once. The Add a material dialog then lists each one with its own quantity, plus one optional Consume from location for all of them. Leave the location blank and the lines use the work order’s own. Press Add material and every row is added, one after the other. If one is refused, the dialog stops there, names the material that could not be added, and keeps only the rows still waiting, so trying again never adds a material twice.

Closing a picker without choosing anything closes the dialog too, and nothing changes.

When the material is already on the work order

Picking a Shopify variant the plan already carries does not fail. The dialog asks “This material is already on the work order. What should happen?” and offers four answers:

Answer	What it does
Add a separate contribution	Leaves the existing line alone and adds a second, manual contribution beside it.
Increase the existing contribution	Adds your quantity onto what is already there.
Merge into the manual contribution	Folds your quantity into the manual contribution the line already has.
Replace the manual contribution	Overwrites the manual contribution with your quantity.

Replacing and removing

Replace is on the material row’s own ⋯ menu. It opens a dialog that asks two things.

Which contributions to replace. By default, All contributions: every item on the work order that needs this material switches to the new one. Choose One contribution instead and pick the item from the list, which shows each item with the quantity it asks for. Then only that one item’s need moves to the new material; what other items ask for the same material stays as it is.

What to replace it with. Choose a source, then pick the new material:

Shopify material (inside the Shopify admin only)
Virtual material
Subassembly

The new material cannot be one the work order already uses. The pickers leave those out, and a Shopify variant that is already on the work order is refused with a note in the dialog. To put more of an existing material on the plan, edit its planned quantity or add a contribution instead.

The dialog then shows the material you picked, with Change if you want a different one. You can swap across kinds too, for example a material for a subassembly. Press Replace to finish.

Quantities are kept. There is no quantity to enter: every replaced contribution keeps the quantity it had. If the new material is needed in a different amount, change Planned quantity in the table afterwards.

A planned quantity you set yourself is kept too. If the old material’s line was added by hand, or its Planned quantity was edited, it does not shrink on its own after a replace; adjust it in the table if it should.

Contributions that come from an assembly flow are left as they are. The dialog tells you how many of them stay, and a line whose contributions all come from an assembly flow has no Replace at all.

If a replace is refused, the reason appears in the dialog, together with the item it stopped at and how many contributions were already replaced before it. The common one: build runs have already consumed more of the old material than would be left on the line after the swap.

Remove this contribution, in the ⋯ beside a contribution, drops the link from one item only; the material stays as long as another contribution needs it. Remove on the row’s own menu takes the whole line off the plan. Refresh from bills leaves a removed line off the plan. Choose Add material to bring it back. After you add it back, a refresh keeps the quantity you chose.

Refresh from bills

Refresh from bills sits in the Materials toolbar. It walks every item, re-spreads them, and reconciles against the current materials list:

New bill lines that aren’t on the work order yet → added.
Old bill lines that the work order still has but the bill no longer needs → removed.
Existing bill lines whose quantities changed → quantity updated unless the row was manually overridden.

Manual overrides are sticky. Once you’ve edited a row’s planned quantity, a refresh leaves that quantity alone. New bill lines are still added, even when other rows are overridden — a refresh treats additions independently from quantity changes.

If you want a clean slate (wipe every override, re-spread everything), use Reset quantities, beside it in the same toolbar. The same action is in the page’s More actions menu, where it is called Reset materials — see material planning → reset paths.

An item that already has units built or being picked, and whose bill has changed since its materials were spread, is left out of a refresh: its built units were made to the old recipe. The rest of the work order is refreshed as usual, and a notice above the table names each item that was left out.

Editing while a build run is picking

A build run that is still picking has already reserved its materials, and completing it consumes exactly those. So while one is open, an edit that would take away what it holds is refused and nothing is changed:

Removing or replacing a material the run holds, or lowering it below what the run holds — “A build run has already picked or used this material, so it cannot be removed or replaced. Complete or cancel that run first.” This covers material edits, replace, remove, refresh from bills and the resets.
Removing an item the run is building — “This item has been built or is being picked by a build run, so it cannot be removed. Finish, cancel or reverse that run first.”
Lowering an item’s planned quantity below what is built or being picked — “The planned quantity cannot go below what is already built or being picked.”

An edit that leaves the run’s materials whole still goes through — for example removing another item’s share of a shared material the run’s pick still covers. Separately, no edit may plan less of a material than build runs have already used.

Per-contribution edits

A single material on a work order can be needed by more than one item. The link between a material and an item that needs it is called a contribution, and the Materials table expands each material to show them: one row per contributing item, with the quantity that item asks for.

Inside the disclosure each contribution carries its own ⋯ with one entry, Remove this contribution: it drops the link from one item only. The material’s quantity falls by that contribution’s amount; the material itself stays if other contributions remain.

To swap the material under one item only, use Replace on the material row’s ⋯ and choose One contribution. See Replacing and removing.

This is rarely needed for simple bills but matters when one material is shared across several items in the same work order.

Build metafields

Every material on the work order can carry custom values beyond quantity and location — lot numbers, supplier batch IDs, calibration notes, finish specs. They live on the Documents & Build Metafields tab, in one table beneath the attached files.

Everything is on one table, and you type straight into it. Every material/field pair has a row, including the ones with nothing recorded yet — an empty cell is a cell you can fill, not a missing row. Click the value or the note, type, and press Enter or click away; the change is saved on the spot. Escape puts the old value back, and if a value is refused the reason appears under the cell you typed it in. There is no separate Save step and no dialog per value.

Two ways to read the same table. The switch in the toolbar groups the rows either by metafield (every material under each field — good for “record the lot number for everything”) or by item (every field under each material — good for “finish this one part”). It only re-orders what is already on screen. The search filters as you type.

A Source badge says where a value came from: Prefilled when it was carried over from the material’s own default, Manual when somebody typed it here, and nothing at all on a cell with no value yet.

Two tiers of value exist:

Material-level — one value per material per field, shared across all produced units. This is what the table edits.
Unit-level — one value per produced unit (a serial number per unit built). A material tracked per unit shows a Per unit badge instead of an editable cell, because a single value would contradict the per-unit ones already recorded. The row menu’s Switch to one value moves such a row back to material-level.

The row menu also carries two actions that write back to the material’s own catalogue entry, offered on material rows that actually have a value: Set on the material copies this value onto the material, and Update the material’s default makes it the value future work orders prefill from. Remove value clears the cell.

Material planning & costs — the reset paths and how quantity overrides flow into cost views.
Build runs — how the plan turns into a pick.
Lifecycle — the statuses that freeze the plan.
Glossary.