# Manufacturing orders Shopify knows what got sold. It doesn't know what still needs to be built. That gap is where a manufacturing order lives. When a made-to-order, personalised, or built-on-the-fly line item sells, Orderkraft creates a manufacturing order for it. That record carries whatever your floor actually needs: the bill of materials for a furniture piece, the engraving text for a stocked towel, the components a customer picked for their own bracelet. One object, whichever shape the order takes. From there it moves through a real status: draft, waiting, in progress, on hold, completed. Anyone can see what's queued without opening a spreadsheet or asking ops directly. When it completes, fulfillment releases. Not before. This is the core object everything else in Orderkraft hangs off. Lead times read from it, the order page shows its status, Shopify Flow fires on its transitions, and it's what you're billed for, never the stocked items that ship straight from inventory. ## Questions **What creates a manufacturing order?** Any sale of a made-to-order product, a personalised stocked item, or a built-on-the-fly product. Regular stocked items with nothing to build never create one. **Can one manufacturing order cover more than one product?** No. Each manufacturing order carries a single output, the same way most production-planning tools work. If an order has three made-to-order line items, that's three manufacturing orders. **What happens to the order line before production starts?** It sits in the queue with a status of draft or waiting. Nothing about how you sell changes. The manufacturing order is what happens after the sale, not instead of it.