Fulfillment and shipping

Fulfillment is everything that happens after an order comes in and before it ships: printing each line, tracking it through your pipeline, packing it and getting it out the door. There are two fulfillment screens and they show the same lines from two angles. Fulfillment in the sidebar is the queue: every line still in production across every order and every restock run, grouped By Order or By Printer, with 2, 3 or 4 cards per row. On each order line's card you can click a status in the pipeline and pick a printer, exactly as on the order's own page; a line that reaches a terminal status leaves the queue. Restock-run lines show only the part of each line that still has to be printed (the run's From pool share is sent as finished stock instead). You click their status the same way, and a finished one leaves the queue too; their printer is chosen on the run's own page. Order lines likewise show only the part still to print: units marked From stock or Sold from shelf are already made, so a store sale logged as an order with 0 to print does not appear in the queue at all. A line taken whole from stock, and a fee or service charge typed as a free-text line (a Design fee, a Rush fee: no product, printer, materials or photos), has nothing to print, so it is never a card. The order itself stays on the board until you move it. Clicking an order number (or the package icon with a tick on the Orders list) opens that order's own fulfillment page, which covers one order: its shipping steps, box numbers, packing slip, item cards, CSV export and import, unit splitting and Mark packed. Use the queue to run the print room; open an order's page to pack and ship it.

Above the queue on the Fulfillment page:

• Search order, customer or line narrows the cards to matching order or run numbers, customers, stores, line descriptions, SKUs, printers and spools.
• All printers is the printer filter: pick one printer, or Unassigned for lines with no printer yet.
• All lines chooses between every line, Order lines only and Restock run lines only.
• Sort orders the cards by Due date (the default: due date, then priority, then order number), Name, SKU, Newest first or Oldest first. Newest and Oldest go by when the line was added to its order or restock run, and each card then shows that date. The sort runs over the whole queue before the 50 are loaded. By Order, an order sits where its first line falls and its lines keep the sort; when some of its lines are not loaded yet, the order says how many and its item cards wait for Show more. A card shows the line's SKU when it has one: the variant's SKU, else the product's.
• Status chips, one per item status, show only the lines at the statuses you tick. Overdue (with a count) appears when lines are past their due date and shows only those.
• The count says how many lines match, such as Showing 50 of 1,284 lines, 12 overdue. The queue loads 50 at a time; Show more loads the next 50. Search and every filter look through the whole queue, not only the lines already loaded. By Printer, with a filter on, only printers with matching lines show.

A card shows the order's priority as a bordered chip when it is High or Rush (Low and Normal show nothing on the card); the Details panel names the priority for every line. A card whose line failed before shows how many times (1 failed print). The queue re-reads itself every 45 seconds while it is open, and at once when an order changes (see Live updates, in Getting started).

When the order has notes, its card shows the first lines of them after Notes:. Click them to open a side panel with the full notes, the line's photos, and the same status buttons and printer picker.

Clicking a status that finishes a line takes the card off the queue, so a message says what happened, with Undo for a few seconds. When that line was the order's last open one and the order moved on, the message names the new column and Undo puts both the line and the order back. Undo cannot restore a due date that the column cleared; the message says so.

When a print fails, press Print failed on the line. It is in the ... menu on the line's card in the Fulfillment queue, in the card's Details panel, and on every open line of the order's own fulfillment page; restock run lines have it too. The Print failed dialog asks:

• Grams lost: what went in the bin. It starts at what one unit of the line uses; type less if the print failed part way, or 0 to record the failure without taking any filament.
• Spool: the spool the print came from. It starts at the line's own spool (its filament, else the product's bill of materials); pick one when the line has none, or the grams come off no spool.
• Note: what went wrong, such as a nozzle clog.

Press Record failed print. The grams come off the spool and show in its History as a failed print. The line goes back to the first status of your pipeline (Pending in a new workspace) on the same printer, so it is printed again. The card shows how many prints of that line failed (1 failed print). The failure is written to the order's (or run's) activity with the grams and the note. A print started from the line's Print button can also be marked Failed on the printer's tile or in the printer's detail view, which does the same thing: the grams come off the spools you pick, the line goes back to the first status and one failed print is counted (see Print results under Printers). If you record the failure in both places, it is counted once. Nothing is charged to the customer: to price failures in, see Covering failed or wasted prints, in the Quotes topic.

Every card in the Fulfillment queue has a checkbox. Tick the lines you want, or press Select all on an order's or a printer's heading for its lines, and a bar shows how many are selected (3 selected) with:

• Assign printer: puts every selected line on one printer, or on No printer. Restock run lines get their printer on the run's page, so Assign printer skips them and says so.
• Set status: moves every selected line to one item status, with the same effects as clicking it on each card (a terminal status frees the printer and can move the order). A finishing status asks first, because those lines leave the queue and there is no Undo for several lines at once.
• Clear: unticks them all.

The lines are changed one after another. If some cannot be changed (someone finished one meanwhile, say), the others still are, and one message names what failed and why.

Every line item has an item status from the pipeline defined under Settings → Item statuses (owners and admins). Statuses are grouped into categories, ordered, and one or more are marked terminal, which means the line is done and its printer is freed. Click a status on a card to move the line. Each item status can be linked to an order status (Moves order to), so that when any line reaches it the whole order moves forward on the dashboard board; a terminal status moves the order only once every line is terminal. Without a link, the order status whose name matches the item status or its category is used automatically (a terminal status also falls back to Fulfilled, Done or Completed); when no name matches, the order stays where it is. If your workspace has no item statuses at all, the cards say so and there is no pipeline to move through until you add one.

Terminal is a switch on each item status under Settings → Item statuses, and it means the line is finished. A line that reaches a terminal status leaves the Fulfillment queue, counts towards the Done total on the order's fulfillment page, and frees the printer it was assigned to. Once every line on the order is terminal, Mark packed becomes available and sets the order's shipping status to Packed. Turn Terminal on for the last status in your pipeline only. If you add statuses after it, such as a Send Out or a Delivered after Packed, move the switch to the new last one. Otherwise lines are counted as finished before the work is. With no terminal status at all nothing is ever counted as done, printers stay busy and orders can never be marked packed; the settings screen warns you when that happens. Terminal also changes how Moves order to behaves: a terminal status moves the order only once every line is terminal, so one packed piece among printing ones does not make the whole order Fulfilled.

On an order's fulfillment page each line is a card showing the item, quantity, filament, material estimate and print time where known, a printer picker, the status pipeline and a box number for multi-parcel orders. Move each line through the statuses as work happens. A line that is not done yet, for a variant with a print file, also has a Print button. It opens the print dialog with the line's printer picked (see Printing a file from FoxTrack under Integrations). The print is tied to the line: when it ends, the printer asks how it went, and Failed there puts the line back to the first status of your pipeline and counts a failed print (see Print results under Printers). When everything is done, press Mark packed: it sets the order's shipping status to Packed and the button reads Packed from then on. Tracking details (carrier and tracking number) are typed on the order form's Shipment block.

Sending one order in two parcels: give each line (or each unit, after a split) its Box number, and Print packing slip prints a page per box. An order has one shipping status, one carrier and one tracking number, so FoxTrack does not track two shipments separately; note a second tracking number in the order's notes.

A line with a quantity of 3 is one card with one status. When you want to track each physical piece on its own, open the order's fulfillment page and press Split ×3 on the card. The line becomes 3 lines of 1, each with its own status, printer and box. The first unit keeps the line's current status; the others start at the first status of your pipeline. The order total does not change, and stock is not taken again: a Hybrid line's From stock units are handed out one per unit. The packing slip and an invoice made from the order afterwards list the units as separate lines, and a split cannot be merged back automatically, so split when you start production rather than when you take the order.

Print packing slip on an order's fulfillment page downloads one PDF with a page per box, listing what is in each parcel. The slip shows each distinct item once, from A to Z, with the quantities added up: three order lines (or three split units) of the same product print as one row with quantity 3, so the packer can check the box against a short list. Lines count as the same item when their descriptions read the same, and numbers sort by value (15cm comes before 100cm). On a shipping order the ship-to block prints the customer's company first, the contact person on the line under it, then the address; a customer without a company prints just the name. At the top it prints your logo, shop name, address, email and phone from Settings → General (or the document logo from Settings → Documents), so the person opening the box can see who sent it. A replenishment run has its own packing slip for the stock being sent to a store, laid out the same way, with a page per box once a line is in Box 2 or later (see Boxes for a run under Replenishment).

Print item cards prints one card per physical unit (a line with quantity 4 gives four cards) on A4 pages with dashed lines to cut along; a line of more than 6 units prints one card marked × N instead of a stack of identical cards. The button opens a menu. Pick the card size first: Large is 94 × 90 mm, six to a page, and Small is 70 × 50 mm, ten to a page; the small card holds the same facts in smaller type and leaves out the handwritten notes line. The size you pick is remembered in this browser. Then choose one of two views. Shop cards show the order or restock-run number, the customer or store, the due date, the item, which unit of how many it is, the filament, the printer, the material and print time, and your whole status pipeline as a tick list with the current status filled in; they travel with the piece from the printer to the parcel. Cards printed from an order's or a run's own page also show the box; cards printed from the Fulfillment queue leave it out. Customer cards show only the customer's name and the item, large, with the order number small at the foot (and 2 of 4 when a line has several units); they go inside the parcel or the piece itself so the right item reaches the right person. The button is on an order's fulfillment page (all lines, whatever their status), on a restock run's page (every unit the run prints) and next to each order or run on the Fulfillment queue (only lines still open). Cards are a PDF you download and print; FoxTrack does not send them to a printer itself.

Export CSV on an order's fulfillment page writes one row per line: Item ID, order number, description, quantity, grams, print hours, filament, the Status text, then one column per status in your pipeline with an X under the current one, then printer and box number. Printed, it works as a tick list in the print room. Import CSV opens the same import dialog as Orders and Customers: upload the file, check the column mapping (the Import docs button explains every column), and it updates status, printer and box for every row whose Item ID is on the order. A column you skip is left alone. The right-most ticked status column wins; only when no status column is ticked is the Status text used. Unknown ids, statuses or printers are skipped and counted, never guessed. A file that cannot be read, or has no Item ID column, is refused before anything changes.

Each item status can be linked to an order status in Settings → Item statuses under Moves order to. When any line reaches a linked status, the whole order moves forward to that column: set a line from Pending to Printing and the order shows Printing. A terminal status moves the order only once every line with something to print is terminal, so one packed piece among printing ones does not make the order Fulfilled. Fee lines and lines taken whole from stock are not queue cards and do not hold the order back: it moves on once every line with something to print is done. The order only ever moves forward on its own: moving a line back never pulls the order back, and a column you dragged the order to further along, such as On hold, is left alone. The column's on-enter rules (shipping status, priority, clear due date) run as if you had dragged the order there, and the change appears in the activity log. New workspaces link statuses by name and the terminal one (Packed) to Ready to ship, which sets the shipping status to Packed; marking the order Shipped or Collected then moves it to Fulfilled. A workspace made before Ready to ship existed links Packed to Fulfilled. A workspace whose names do not match links nothing until you choose. Leave a status on Auto with no matching column name to switch it off for that status.

The toggle at the top of both fulfillment screens sets 2, 3 or 4 cards per row, or a single full-width list on an order's page; the choice is remembered in this browser. Every card shows the filament, the material estimate and the print time when they are known: a Made to order line uses the materials captured on the line, and a Hybrid or From stock line falls back to its variant's bill of materials.

Press Create invoice on the saved order (in the pipeline strip or at the foot of the form); lines and totals carry over. Creating invoices needs a Pro or Farm plan; packing, packing slips and item cards work on every plan.