I Built a Free Manufacturing ERP Application In Excel (Patreon)

You can now run your whole shop, from the first quote to the final payment, inside a single Excel file.

When production lives on a whiteboard, stock sits in a spreadsheet, invoices are in another program and purchase orders hide in your inbox, something always slips. Usually you find out a job is short on parts when it’s already stuck on the floor.

The Floor shows every work order by color: green on track, blue scheduled, red rush or late, yellow waiting for material. When plans change, drag the job to a new day, and flip between weeks whenever you need to look ahead. The KPI strip on top keeps your on-time orders, open orders, jobs in production, material shortages, stock value and gross margin in view.

One Orders screen holds your quotes, invoices, work orders and purchase orders, and you can find any of them by order number, customer, supplier, status or notes. An accepted quote becomes a work order with Make Work Order, broken into six steps from kitting through quality packaging. Each step gets marked off with Step Done, or the whole job closes with Complete. A finished quote becomes an invoice just as fast, with subtotal, tax, total, payments and balance on the page, ready for you to record the payment. The Pipeline lays out every order from quoted to paid, one click away.

Every product in Stock carries its bill of materials, routing, cost per unit and picture. A Gaming PC, for example, is about 7½ hours of work per unit. You also get:

• Suppliers with lead days and a quick summary, and Customers with their own summary.

• A Ledger with money in, money out and a monthly mini P&L.

• People for staff time entries.

• Reports for P&L by month and hours by work center.

• Admin, where you set your own work centers, units, payment methods, categories, roles, tax and logo.

Almost every table sorts with a single click on the header.

What if you knew about a shortage before it ever reached the floor? Planning compares your projected material balances against upcoming work orders and flags what’s running short. Then a single click writes the purchase orders for every vendor.

The video covers all 11 tabs with a sample company that builds computers, and the workbook is free, complete and unlocked. Turn off sample mode in Admin when you’re ready to use your own data.

📥Your video and download are below. Open Planning and let one click handle the ordering.