Getting started

FoxTrack is the back office for a 3D printing shop: quotes, orders, fulfillment, invoices, customers, printers, maintenance, filament, products, inventory, replenishment, expenses and reports, all in one workspace. Everything is organised around orders: a job is quoted, becomes an order, moves through your print pipeline, is packed and shipped, and is invoiced. Stock and money follow along automatically 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, Fulfillment, Invoices, Customers.
• Production: Printers, Maintenance.
• Stock: Filament, Products, Replenishment, Inventory.
• Finance: Expenses, Reports.
• Settings.

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 titled Overview and shows a snapshot of your shop this month:

• Revenue and Revenue less expenses cards with a small trend chart over recent months. By default Revenue counts orders by order date, in every board column except those whose rules say Exclude from revenue. It also counts Outstanding and Paid invoices that have no order behind them, such as an invoice made straight from a quote, by their 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. A shop that would rather count money when it comes in can switch Revenue counts to Payments received under Settings → Reports (see How the figures are worked out, in the Reports topic). Revenue less expenses is revenue minus the expenses you log. It is not full profit: the filament and power used on orders are not taken out.
• Owed to you (owners and admins; 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 and Printers busy (owners and admins, on a plan with Reports; off until you turn them on in Customize): this month's sales less the cost of the orders, and how much of their time your printers spent printing. The Job economics card under Reports explains both.
• 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.
• Active orders: a donut of orders by status, counting only columns that still count as active.
• Upcoming deadlines: orders due in the coming week, with arrows to step to the previous or next 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: one column per order status. Drag an order between columns to change its status. Click an order to open it. 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.
• A getting-started checklist for new workspaces: add your first printer, track a filament spool, add a product, add a customer, create your first order, log an expense. Each item links to the right page.

The buttons at the top of the dashboard add a new expense, order or quote (Pro and Farm) without leaving the page.

Customize at the top of the dashboard chooses what shows: 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.

The columns on the dashboard board are your order statuses. 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. A workspace made before Ready to ship was added has no such column, so packing the last line moves its orders straight to Fulfilled; an owner or admin can add a Ready to ship column and give it the 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. On the board:

• Add column creates a new status (Pro and Farm). Each column's menu has Edit (name and colour), Rules, Move left, Move right and Delete. Only owners and admins can change columns.
• Adding a column or renaming a status needs a Pro or Farm plan; changing a column's colour works on every plan.
• Rules per column: 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 cancelled or refunded order. On-enter actions run when an order lands in the column, either setting the shipping status, setting a priority, or clearing 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 get it, so an older workspace can add a Ready to ship column of its own.
• A column can only be deleted when it holds no orders; move them to another column first.
• A busy column shows its newest 50 orders, with 50 of 312 and Load more at its foot for the next 50. 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 → Item statuses, and an item status can be linked so that reaching it moves the whole order forward on the board.

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 keeps four status lists, because a whole order, the pieces in it, the parcel and a restock run each move at their own pace:

• 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 → Item statuses 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 terminal status means the line is finished and frees its printer.
• Shipping status: where the parcel is: Not shipped, Pending, Packed, Shipped or Received (a collection order reads Pending, Packed or Collected). It sits in the Shipment block of the order form, where anyone can set it.
• 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 → Item statuses, 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 terminal status moves the order only once every line is terminal, 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 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.

When you first sign up, one setup screen asks for three things: your display name (the name teammates see), your shop name (printed on quotes and invoices) and your currency. Open my workshop saves them and opens the dashboard, and sets your country from the currency when the browser does not say (GBP sets United Kingdom, for example), so dates and numbers read the local way; change it under General → Localization. Once the workspace has orders or invoices 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.

Once setup is done, the dashboard offers Try it with one order: a one-minute tour that adds a spool and a practice order and moves it to done. These are real records, counted in revenue and stock, so the tour ends by offering Remove the practice order and spool (a spool you already had is never removed).

New accounts see a short guide card at the top of the main pages (Orders, Quotes, Invoices, Customers, Products, Filament, Inventory, Printers, Expenses, Reports, Fulfillment, Maintenance, Replenishment) explaining how that page works in a few steps. Press the X on a card to dismiss it for that page. To bring all of them back, open Settings → General → Onboarding and choose to show page tips again.

A sensible order:

1. Settings → General: business info and localization, so documents and money read correctly.
2. Printers: add each machine with its power draw, so quotes (Pro and Farm) 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. Customers, then your first order, or a quote first on Pro and Farm.

The dashboard checklist tracks the same steps.

Search in the top bar (a magnifier icon on a phone) looks through the whole workspace at once. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl K, or ⌘K on a Mac, from anywhere in the app except while a form or dialog is open. Start typing:

• Pages lists the matching pages from the sidebar.
• 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 colour; 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.