Getting started

This order works well for most shops:

1. Settings → General: business info and localization, so documents and money read correctly.
2. Printers: add each machine with its power draw, so quotes can price electricity.
3. Filament: add the types you buy to the catalog, then your spools.
4. Products: what you sell, with variants and a bill of materials if you want stock and costs tracked.
5. Your first order, or a quote first. You can create the customer right in the order form, or add customers first on the Customers page.

The dashboard checklist tracks the same steps.

Not sure how custom orders, your own stock and stores fit together? The topic Setting up for how you sell walks through each setup. To print pieces for your own shelf, press Print for stock on the Orders page; that topic has the steps.

FoxTrack is the back office for a 3D printing shop. Quotes, orders, fulfillment, invoices and customers sit in one workspace with your printers, maintenance, filament, products, inventory, replenishment, expenses and reports. Orders are at the center: a job is quoted, becomes an order, moves through your print pipeline, gets packed and shipped, and is invoiced. Stock and money follow along by themselves where they can, and you fill in the rest.

The sidebar on the left has these sections, in this order:

• Dashboard: the overview and the order board.
• Sales: Quotes, Orders, Invoices, Customers.
• Production: Fulfillment, Planner (Farm plan only), Printers, Maintenance.
• Stock: Filament, Products, Replenishment, Inventory.
• Finance: Expenses, Reports.
• Settings.

Replenishment also opens from the Replenishment button on Products, which shows as soon as you have a product. The Planner also opens from the Queue / Planner switch at the top of Fulfillment. On Free and Pro the Planner has no row; More with Farm, just above Settings, opens Settings → Billing, which lists what the Farm plan adds.

At the bottom of the sidebar, the workspace menu shows your workspace name and email, lets you switch to another workspace, create a workspace, and sign out. The top bar holds the Search button (see Searching everything), the notification bell, the assistant button (Pro and Farm plans), the Support button (a question mark) for help articles, feedback and bug reports, and the palette button for the theme. On small screens the sidebar collapses; the button at the top left toggles it.

The dashboard is your shop's home page: this month's money, the orders due soon and the order board. Until your first order or expense it shows only the getting-started card and the order board, and the tiles below appear after that.

• Order value and Order value less expenses, each with a small trend chart over recent months. By default the tile adds up orders by order date, in every board column except those whose Rules say Exclude from revenue. Outstanding and Paid invoices with no order behind them (an invoice made straight from a quote, say) count too, by issue date and before tax. An invoice made from an order is not counted a second time, and a Draft invoice does not count. An issued credit note takes its amount before tax back off Revenue in the month of the credit note's date. To count money when it comes in instead, switch Revenue counts to Payments received under Settings → Reports (see How the figures are worked out, in the Reports topic). The tiles are then named Revenue and Revenue less expenses. The second is the first minus the expenses you log. It is not full profit, because the filament and power used on orders are not taken out.
• Owed to you (owners and admins; on Pro and Farm it shows from the start, on Free it is off until you turn it on in Customize): what customers owe on issued invoices, the overdue part and the money received this month.
• Margin this month (owners and admins, on a plan with Reports; shows from the start): this month's sales less the cost of the orders and their sales channels' marketplace fees.
• Printers busy (owners and admins, on a plan with Reports; off until you turn it on in Customize): how much of their time your printers spent printing. The Job economics card under Reports explains it and Margin this month.
• Orders this month and Expenses this month (owners and admins; off until you turn them on in Customize): the orders placed this month, leaving out columns that do not count as revenue such as Cancelled, and this month's expenses less credits, each with a small chart.
• Orders by status: a donut of orders by status, counting only columns that still count as active.
• Upcoming deadlines: orders due in the coming week, and restock runs with a due date (a run for your default pool has a For stock badge), with arrows to step to the previous or next week. Open work already past its due date sits in an overdue lane above the week. Press Month view at the top right to see the whole month, and Week view to go back. The dashboard always opens on the week.

The order board, the getting-started checklist and Customize each have a section of their own below.

The buttons at the top of the dashboard add an expense (New expense), an order (New order) or a quote (New quote) without leaving the page. On the Free plan, New quote shows a lock once the 3 quotes a month are used up; press it to see why.

The order board on the dashboard has one column per order status. Drag an order between columns to change its status. On a phone or tablet, press and hold the card for a moment, then drag (a quick swipe scrolls the page). Click an order to open it. A card says how much is left to print, such as 3 to print, or Nothing to print when none of the order's lines is print work (a fee line, say), so an order that skips the print queue is not read as done.

A column shows its newest 50 orders. When it holds more, the foot of the column says how many are showing (50 of 312) and Load more brings the next 50. A column whose Rules say Remove from active orders (Fulfilled and Cancelled in a new workspace) reads hidden instead of showing its orders; find those orders on the Orders page. Before your first order the board is plain boxes with one line saying to press New order; the column menus and Add column appear once the first order exists. Adding, renaming and setting rules on columns is covered in Board columns, status rules and revenue.

New workspaces get a checklist on the dashboard: name your shop (only while it still has the name from your email), add your first printer, track a filament spool, add a product, create your first order, add a customer, log an expense, set your labor rate (it opens Settings → Quoting and tax, and checks off once the rate is above 0), add your business address and logo, and send your first invoice (the Free plan includes 3 invoices a month). Each item links to the right page (Create your first order opens the New order form right there on the dashboard) and checks itself off when done. The list closes once every item is checked, and its X closes it sooner.

Customize at the top of the dashboard chooses what shows and in what order. Turn each tile or section on or off, move it up or down, and set Tiles per row (Auto, 2, 3 or 4; a narrow screen shows fewer). Upcoming deadlines and the order board always take the full width, and a tile placed after them starts a new row. Save keeps the layout with your account for this workspace, so it is the same on every device, and nobody else's dashboard changes. Reset to default brings back the standard layout. The list only offers what you can see: members get no money tiles, and Margin this month and Printers busy need a plan with Reports.

Each column on the dashboard board is an order status. Owners and admins add, rename, reorder and delete columns, and each column's Rules decide what happens to the orders in it.

A new workspace starts with Pending, Printing, Post-processing, Ready to ship, Fulfilled and Cancelled. Packing every line of an order moves it to Ready to ship, and marking it Shipped (or Collected) moves it to Fulfilled. If your board has no Ready to ship column, packing the last line moves orders straight to Fulfilled; an owner or admin can add a Ready to ship column and give it the Shipped or Collected rule below. Any other column, such as On hold, was added by someone in your workspace and means what your shop uses it for (often an order that waits on a customer or a part). Its Rules say what happens when an order enters it.

Once there is an order, Add column on the board creates a new status. Adding a column or renaming a status needs a Pro or Farm plan; changing a column's color works on every plan. Each column's menu has Edit (name and color), Rules, Move left, Move right and Delete. Only owners and admins can change columns. A column can only be deleted when it holds no orders, so move them to another column first.

The Rules a column can have:

• Remove from active orders hides orders in that column from the board, the active count and the donut (the column shows hidden).
• Exclude from revenue stops orders in that column counting toward Revenue, Revenue less expenses and customer lifetime spend, and puts back the stock they took, as for a canceled or refunded order.
• On-enter actions run when an order lands in the column: set the shipping status, set a priority, or clear the due date.
• When an order here is marked Shipped or Collected can move it on to another column (a new workspace has this on Ready to ship, moving to Fulfilled). Any column can have it, so you can add a Ready to ship column of your own and give it this rule. Then, under Settings → Statuses and priorities, set Packed's Moves order to Ready to ship, or packed orders still go straight to Fulfilled.

A busy column shows its newest 50 orders and Load more brings the next 50 (see The dashboard order board). Every order is still on the Orders page.

These are order statuses (the whole order). Line items have their own pipeline of item statuses, set in Settings → Statuses and priorities, and an item status can be linked so that reaching it moves the whole order forward on the board. See The four status lists for how they fit together.

FoxTrack updates itself when someone in your workspace adds, changes, moves or deletes an order, or changes a board column. A moment later the dashboard board, the Orders page, the Fulfillment queue and the bell show the change on every screen that has them open, with no reload. A form you have open is never rebuilt under you while you type: if someone else saved the same order meanwhile, your Save says so and asks first (see Someone else changed this order, in the Orders topic). When the live connection drops, for example on a weak signal, those screens still refresh every 45 seconds, and the next reload catches up anything you missed.

FoxTrack has four status lists: order status (the whole order), item status (one line of it), shipping status (the parcel) and run status (a restock run). Each moves at its own pace, so each has its own list.

• Order status: where the whole order is. These are the columns of the dashboard board (Pending, Printing, Post-processing, Ready to ship, Fulfilled and Cancelled in a new workspace). Anyone in the workspace moves an order by dragging it on the board or by picking its Status on the order form. Owners and admins add, rename and reorder the columns on the board itself, and each column's Rules decide whether its orders count as active and as revenue.
• Item status: where one line of an order (or one unit, after a split) is in production. The pipeline is set under Settings → Statuses and priorities by owners and admins. Anyone clicks a status on the line's card in the Fulfillment queue, on the order's fulfillment page or on a restock run's page. A status with Counts as finished on means the line is done and frees its printer.
• Shipping status: where the parcel is: Pending, Packed, Shipped or Received, or none of them yet (a collection order reads Pending, Packed or Collected). It sits in the Shipment block of the order form, where anyone can set it. While a line is not printed yet, FoxTrack asks before Packed, Shipped or Collected.
• Run status: where a restock run is: Draft, Printing, Packed, Shipped or Completed. It is set on the run's own page. A run's lines use the same item statuses as order lines.

How they drive each other:

• Item statuses roll up to the order status. Under Settings → Statuses and priorities, Moves order to links an item status to a board column: when a line reaches it, the whole order moves forward to that column. A finished status moves the order only once every line is finished, and the order never moves back on its own.
• The order status and the lines can set the shipping status. A column's on-enter rule can set the shipping status when an order lands in it, and once every line is finished, Mark packed on the order's fulfillment page sets Packed.
• The shipping status moves the order only where a column says so. Marking an order Shipped (or Collected) moves it on only when its column's Rules name a column for that (a new workspace: Ready to ship to Fulfilled). It never touches the lines. On an order from Shopify, Etsy or WooCommerce, saving it as Shipped with a tracking number (in the app or through the API) sends the number to the store.
• A run keeps its own status. A Draft run moves to Printing by itself once one of its lines moves past the first item status. Packed, Shipped and Complete & transfer stock are yours to press. Run lines never move an order.

Quotes, invoices and credit notes have statuses of their own (Draft, Pending, Accepted and so on); their topics explain them.

Right after you sign up, one screen asks for five things: Your name (the name teammates see), Shop name (printed on quotes and invoices), Currency, Labor rate per hour and Default markup. Settings calls the shop name Workspace name (Settings → General). Labor rate and Default markup are optional: leave one blank to keep it as it is. Default markup is the percent added on top of your cost on new quotes (30 turns a cost of 10 into a price of 13), and you can change it on each quote. Without a labor rate, quotes and product profit leave labor out until you set one.

Save and continue needs a shop name. It saves the five and opens the dashboard. When the browser does not give your country, FoxTrack sets it from the currency (GBP sets United Kingdom, for example), so dates and numbers read the local way; change it under General → Localization. Picking a different currency with Repeat setup moves the country with it. The screen warns that you cannot change the currency after your first order or invoice: once the workspace has one, the currency is set and the screen only shows it. Skip for now opens the dashboard without saving, and the screen comes back next time until the shop name and currency are set.

Everything else lives in Settings: country, date and number format under General → Localization; address, email, phone, tax number and bank details under General → Business info; the theme under Account → Appearance; and CSV import under Data. Each can be changed at any time. To see the setup screen again, press Repeat setup under Settings → General → Onboarding.

New accounts see a one-line tip at the top of the main pages (Orders, Quotes, Invoices, Customers, Products, Filament, Inventory, Printers, Expenses, Reports, Fulfillment, Maintenance, Replenishment, and the Planner on Farm) saying what the page is for. Press How this works on the tip to see how that page works in a few steps. Press the X on a tip to dismiss it for that page. To bring all of them back, open Settings → General → Onboarding and choose to show page tips again.

Search in the top bar (a magnifier icon on a phone) finds pages, settings and records across the whole workspace from one box. Its keyboard shortcut is Ctrl K, or ⌘K on a Mac.

The shortcut works from anywhere in the app except while a form or dialog is open. Start typing:

• Pages lists the matching pages the sidebar shows you, so it leaves out the Planner below Farm and Reports for a member. Pages also match words for what they do: restock, print for stock or shelf finds Replenishment, and queue finds Fulfillment.
• Settings lists the settings tabs that match, by name or by what is on them: try dark mode, export or invite.
• Below them, matching records are grouped as Orders, Quotes, Invoices, Credit notes, Customers, Products, Filament, Printers, Inventory and Expenses, up to five of each, most recently changed first.
• When no record matches, a Help group offers Search help for what you typed, which opens the best matching help article in a new tab, and, on Pro and Farm, Ask the assistant.

It matches document numbers, names and line descriptions: orders by number, project title, customer, a connected store's order reference, notes or line text; quotes and invoices by number, customer or line text (invoices also by PO number); credit notes by number, invoice number, customer or reason; customers by name, company, email, phone or customer number; products by name, SKU or variant; filament by number, name, brand, material or color; printers by name, make, model or location; inventory by name or location; expenses by description, vendor or notes.

Use the arrow keys and Enter, or click, to open a record on its own page: the order, quote, invoice or credit note in its form, a customer, product, spool, printer, inventory item or expense in its own view.

FoxTrack runs in the phone's web browser, and you can put it on your home screen like an app. In Safari on an iPhone or iPad, press the Share button and choose Add to Home Screen. In Chrome on Android, open the browser menu and choose Add to Home screen or Install app. The FoxTrack icon then opens the app full screen, without the browser's address bar, starting on the dashboard. It is the same FoxTrack as in the browser, so it needs an internet connection, and you may need to sign in once inside it. On a small screen the sidebar folds away; the button at the top left opens it.