Closing the Order
A Production Order never finishes by itself. Batches complete individually, but nothing rolls that up and flips the order — because "this order is done" is a judgement a manager makes, not a sum a computer does.
Finish Production Order is that judgement, made explicitly, with a readiness report in front of you.
Who can do it
Only a Manufacturing Manager or System Manager. The button appears on a submitted order that isn't already Completed or Cancelled.
The readiness report
Press Finish Production Order and you get a table with one row per batch and three checks:
| Check | Green when |
|---|---|
| Ops | Every operation step is Done (or the batch is already Completed). |
| Cost | Every operation step carries the cost data it needs. |
| Material | Allocated material is fully consumed. |
A red cell carries the count of what is missing, so "3 steps missing cost data" is visible without opening the batch. A batch that is already Completed reads all-green: it has been closed out, and re-litigating a closed batch is not the point of this screen.
What "missing cost data" means
An operation step needs, at minimum, a cost source. If that source is external — Blanket Order, Purchase Order or Purchase Invoice — it also needs a supplier, a service item and an estimated cost.
Miss any of those and that step can never produce an actual cost, which means the batch's cost rollup is quietly incomplete and the order's margin is fiction. This is the check that most often catches something real: an external step created before anyone had negotiated with the supplier.
The same rule drives the Operation Steps Needing Cost Data report, so you can chase them across every open order rather than one order at a time.
Blockers and warnings
Blockers stop you. You cannot finish while:
- the order isn't submitted, or is already Completed or Cancelled;
- the order has no active batches;
- any batch is On Hold — resolve the hold first; a hold is an unanswered question, and closing over it buries it.
Warnings don't stop you, but you have to acknowledge them. Open operations, missing cost data, material not fully consumed, draft batches that were never started. A manager closing an order with a 4-piece shortfall knows something the system doesn't; the acknowledgement is what records that they knew.
What Finish actually does
- Sets the order to Completed, stamping who closed it and when.
- Scraps the remaining WIP on every in-flight batch, one ledger entry per operation, so the operation ledger balances and each batch derives to Completed on its own. You can turn this off, in which case batches are simply marked Completed without ledger changes.
- Optionally cancels draft batches that were never started, as cleanup.
- Writes a comment on the order recording everything above: what was closed over, how many batches were closed, how many units were scrapped, and any note you typed.
Finishing verifies; it never re-posts stock. Consumption and cost already fired during production. Closing an order does not move material or recalculate a cost you have already booked.
The scrap step is what keeps records clean. Without it a finished order leaves phantom balances sitting at operations forever — pieces the ledger thinks are still on a line that shut down last quarter.
Reopening
Reopen returns a Completed order to Released so work can resume. It is there because closing early is a normal mistake, and the alternative — a new order for the tail of an old one — makes the history harder to read, not easier.
Reopening does not un-scrap what Finish scrapped. If the close-out scrapped remaining WIP, those pieces stay scrapped; reopening lets new work be recorded, it does not rewind the ledger.
What to do next
For where the cost numbers themselves come from, read Cost rollup. For the external half of the cost picture, read Subcontracting.