An Order Arrives at 9:12. What Happens Next?

An ERP for a fabrication business earns its place in the first ten minutes after a PO arrives: the order is made without retyping, the floor knows about it, and the money side starts counting. If a package cannot do that, the rest of its feature list is decoration.

Here is one order, from the inbox to the dispatch gate. The customer, the part and the figures are invented. The steps are what Fab ERP does.

The example order (illustrative). Pragati Components mails PO-1042 at 9:12: 120 MS brackets from 6 mm plate, laser cut and bent, delivery in 14 days, at ₹640 each.

What happens in the first minute?

In many shops, nothing. The PO sits in whoever's inbox it reached. Somebody reads it after lunch, types the quantity and date into a sheet, and the order exists from that moment, not from 9:12.

In Fab ERP you connect the company mailbox: Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or any other IMAP mailbox. Mail files itself into folders as it arrives: purchase orders, supplier bills, banking, enquiries. PO-1042 lands in the purchase orders folder. Quantity, rate and deadline are read from the mail, or from the PDF attached to it.

Anything the system is unsure of waits for a person. A rate that does not match, a date it cannot read: those lines are yours to check before anything moves. You check 120, ₹640 and the date, and tap Accept. The order exists.

What does the order carry once it is made?

The order is the one place the job is tracked from PO to dispatch. Every order shows its money and its timeline.

If you quoted first, the same path works from the other side: a won quotation becomes an order. And if a PO arrives with a drawing and you want a second opinion on material before you commit, Job Estimate on the Tools screen (Gold) turns a drawing or PO into a draft bill of materials. You check the draft before you buy plate against it.

Who sees the order on the floor?

The supervisor should not need to ask the office. On Gold, the Production Board holds every open order by its production stage, with a quality check before a batch ships and the dispatch papers kept with the order.

The same phone shows the supervisor his crew for the day. Attendance is marked on the phone, contractor crews included. Attendance is on Gold, or on Silver as an add-on.

What goes out of the gate with the material?

A delivery challan. For this order it is one challan against PO-1042, filed against the order, numbered by the system. You can share it on WhatsApp from the Database screen, along with the quotation, the proforma and the tax invoice for the same job. Your party's store gets the paper on the app the store already uses.

Dispatch papers stay with the order, so a month later nobody searches three folders to find which challan went against which PO.

When does the invoice start counting its days?

The moment you raise the invoice, the party's dues carry a date. The arithmetic on our example (illustrative figures; your GST rate depends on the item):

That ₹90,624 now sits in the Clients Ledger against Pragati Components, aged day by day. Statements, credit limits and the 60+ days list are in the same ledger, on Silver and Gold. On the day that invoice is 61 days old and unpaid, it is on the list you call from.

Transactions holds the invoices, receipts and notes with the bank feed beside them. GST working papers (GSTR-1 and 3B, and a 2B reconciliation) are hints for your accountant to confirm. They are not a filing, and Fab ERP does not file returns.

What does the owner ask at six in the evening?

The owner is not in the office. Fabio, the assistant, answers from your books. Ask "Who should I chase for payment?" and it returns the furthest past due, with amounts. Ask it to walk you through a screen and it does that too.

Fabio only knows what is in your books. If the PO was never accepted, it cannot tell you about the order. That is why the first step matters more than the last.

What should you check in any ERP for a fabrication business?

Use PO-1042 as the test for whatever you are shown, ours included. Five questions:

1. Does it read the PO? Ask the vendor to send a real PO to a test inbox and show you the order it makes. If the answer is "enter the order manually", you have found the first gap.
2. Does it age the dues? Ask for the party list by age on the first screen after login, not in a report you request.
3. Can the supervisor use it standing up? If marking a crew or checking an order needs a computer, it will be done in the evening from memory.
4. What does your accountant keep? Whatever the ERP does, he should not have to change how he works. Ask what it reads from his books and what it writes to them.
5. What is the price per month, with GST, in writing? Ask what leaves with you if you stop.

Many ERP packages are built around a warehouse and a stock list. A fabrication shop works to a customer's drawing, a PO with a deadline and material that changes with every job, so the questions start at the PO, not at the store.

What does it cost, and what does it not do?

Prices, plus 18% GST, per month:

• Silver: ₹4,999 for a limited time (regular ₹9,999). Dashboard, Mailbox, Orders, Database, Transactions, Cashbook, Clients Ledger with statements, credit limits and the 60+ days ageing, Fabio, and the phone app with PIN lock.
• Gold: ₹9,999 for a limited time (regular ₹19,999). Everything in Silver, plus the Production Board, Attendance, Tools, guided create with Fabio and priority WhatsApp support.

Every plan has a 14-day free trial. You set up auto-pay when you start, nothing is charged during the trial, and we email you 3 days before every charge. Cancel any time. Your access runs to the end of the paid period, then you have 30 days to export your data.

What Fab ERP does not do today: it does not generate e-invoices or e-way bills, and it does not run payroll. If those are your first need, keep your current tools for them.

Does every shop need this yet?

No. A shop where one person holds every PO, due and attendance mark in his head, and nothing is slipping, can run on a register and a spreadsheet for a while. The signal to look for is not size. It is the second week in which a PO was entered late, a dispatch went to a party that had not paid, or the 30th was spent adding up the muster.

Questions owners ask us

Where to look next

The product page lists every module. The pricing page has the plan table. When you are ready to put one real order through, the start page is open.