Steel Inventory & Material Tracking in FabTrk

Inventory and Material in FabTrkTracking stock, offcuts, and drops: how the inventory ledger works, how cutting links parts to the steel they came from, and why offcut discipline pays.Material is the biggest line on a fab job and usually the worst tracked. FabTrk's inventory is a live ledger of what steel the shop holds (by profile, length, grade, and where it sits), connected to the parts that consume it. What an inventory item is Each item records the essentials a saw operator or purchaser actually needs: profile type and size (W12X26, HSS 4X4X1/4, plate), material grade, quantity, length, and the bay or yard location where it physically is. Items are created from the Inventory page and edited in place, and each one carries a shape diagram on its detail page so there is no ambiguity about what "L 3X3X1/4" means to a new hand. Stock, offcuts, and drops Every item has a kind: Stock : full mill lengths as purchased. Offcut : a usable remainder from a cut, returned to the rack with its real length. Drop : the short end that is scrap in practice. The distinction matters because offcuts are money. A shop that returns a 14 foot remainder to inventory as an offcut, with its length recorded, will pull it for the next 12 foot part instead of burning a fresh 40 foot stick. A shop that doesn't buys the same steel twice. (The thinking behind this is covered in depth in Offcuts, Drops, and Material Accounting .) Offcuts and drops keep a link to the stock item they came from and the task that produced them, so material lineage is traceable: this brace came from that stick, cut on that task. Cutting from stock When a part is ready to cut, FabTrk suggests matching stock: same profile, sufficient length, closest fit first. Confirming the cut consumes the stock, advances the part to Cut , and, when there is a usable remainder, records it. The operator makes one decision (which stick), and the ledger stays true as a side effect. This is also where the BOM's discipline pays off: because every part carries its profile and length from ingest or from the Designer, the suggestion list is real, not a guess. Practical advice Record locations honestly. "Bay 3" only helps if the steel is in Bay 3. Make moving material update the ledger, or the ledger becomes decoration. Set a drop threshold as shop policy. Decide the length below which a remainder is scrap, and return everything above it as an offcut with its true length. Consistency beats precision. Let purchasing read the ledger. Before a PO goes out, thirty seconds against inventory answers whether the shop already owns half the order in offcuts. Inventory permissions follow the same role model as everything else: creating and editing inventory are their own permissions, held by the office roles by default and grantable to whoever runs your racks.