When a customer order lands in a manufacturing business, it starts a chain. It becomes a job. The job gets a bill of materials. The bill of materials turns into purchase orders. The job goes onto the production schedule, through quality, and out the door, and then it becomes an invoice. In most small and mid-sized manufacturers we talk to, each of those steps is a separate entry into a separate place, and the same part numbers, quantities and customer details get typed four or five times over.
It was never designed that way. The job sheet was a spreadsheet, the production board was a whiteboard, purchasing happened by email and Xero did the accounts. Each one made sense on its own.
What double entry costs
- Time. Add up the hours spent each week moving the same numbers between systems. It is usually a part-time role nobody realised they were paying for.
- Errors. A quantity typed wrong at the purchase order stage becomes a short delivery discovered on the floor. Typed wrong at invoicing, it becomes a credit note and an awkward phone call.
- Lag. The invoice goes out when accounts gets to it, not when the job ships. That is days of cash flow lost on every order.
- No single answer. "Is this job on track and is it making money?" needs the schedule, the purchasing and the accounts, and they do not agree with each other.
Shortcuts that help
Xero and most ERPs will import CSV files, so a well-kept spreadsheet can at least feed invoicing without typing. Email templates for purchase orders, built from the bill of materials, cut the purchasing re-keying. A shared spreadsheet instead of a whiteboard lets the office see the schedule. All of these are worth doing. They reduce the typing, but nothing is actually connected, so the lag and the disagreement between systems remain.
Order to invoice in one chain
Manufacturers who have stopped re-keying have one system that holds the order and everything that follows from it. The job is created from the quote. The bill of materials is attached, and the purchase orders are generated from it and sent to suppliers. The production schedule is a view of the jobs rather than a separate board. Quality checks and holds are recorded against the job. When it ships, the invoice is created from the job and pushed to Xero, coded correctly, the same day.
The accounting system stays. The point is not to replace Xero or the ERP but to build the operational system around them and connect it properly, so data is entered once at the start of the chain and flows through to the end. We did this for Omega Coaters, an Adelaide powder coater, where a client portal, automated pricing and runsheets replaced the manual chain between quoting, the floor and the accounts.
If your orders are still being typed into four places, have a look at what we build for manufacturing, or tell us how an order moves through your business today.
