# Ship-by dates A made-to-order promise isn't just "we'll build it." It's "we'll build it and it'll be out of the building by a specific date." When the last item sells on a Tuesday and the lead time is five days, the ship-by date is the Friday after. Orderkraft computes that ship-by date the moment a made-to-order manufacturing order opens — the order date plus the product's lead time. It's written once and never changes afterward. Even if the product lead time gets edited later, the order keeps the date it was promised against. Production can rely on it; a "we shipped on time" dispute tells you whether the promise kept up. ## What the date depends on The ship-by date only applies to made-to-order work. A build-to-stock manufacturing order has no customer behind it, so there's nothing to promise a date to. Until the sale turns into production, build-to-stock runs without a deadline. ## How urgency shows up in production Three badges tell you where each open order stands against its ship-by date. They appear on the manufacturing orders index and on the order's detail page. - **Overdue.** The date has already passed. If this shows up on an order still open, you're already late. - **Due today.** The ship-by date is today. Ship it now or watch the overdue badge appear tomorrow. - **Due soon.** Tomorrow or the day after. Anything in the next 48 hours counts. Completed and cancelled orders don't get a badge. A shipped order isn't urgent, and a cancelled one isn't your promise anymore. A *Shipped late* badge goes the other way: an order that *was* completed, but finished after its ship-by date. It stays visible so a late order keeps reading as late even after it's out of the queue. ## What the index counts in aggregate Below the filters, the index rolls the same counts up for the whole production queue: how many orders are overdue, how many left for today, how many close. Production sees the fires before they sort into the orders. Those three counts drive the badges themselves, so a red *Overdue* badge over there means "fix this list first." ## How it ties into sorting The sort popover on the manufacturing orders index has *Ship by date* as one of its options, and it's the one that makes the urgency badges useful. Order by promise, and the overdue ones come to the top of the page. Order by arrival and these badges are still there; you just have to read them harder. ## Where the date lives on the order A ship-by date is all over an open manufacturing order: - **The index row.** A `time` element with the date, plus the urgency badge beside it. Where it sits depends on sorting, but every open order shows one. - **The order page.** Same date and badge, same urgency. - **The timeline.** When the order completed, a *Shipped late* badge appears if the completed-at date passed the ship-by date. Build-to-stock orders show no ship-by date and no urgency badges in any of these places, because they never had one to keep.