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Surplus on the shelf, reused by the next order

The situation

The lamp is two printed parts, a base and a shade, one of each per lamp. The shade plate makes four shades; order A wants ten lamps, so three shade plates were printed — twelve shades, two too many. The bases came out exactly ten.

Two shades now sit in a box under the bench. Next month somebody orders five lamps, prints five shades, and the box has four. Nobody ever counts the box.

The goal

The two spare shades exist in BamDude: on the product's shelf, where the next lamp order finds them and prints two shades fewer — and where a part somebody printed on a whim, outside any order, lands too.

What is involved

Feature Its part
Free stock of parts The shelf: a ledger of movements per printed part, and a kit count per product.
Bank the surplus The button on an order that moves its extra parts onto the shelf.
Taking kits from stock From stock on a new order line: kits reserved from the shelf count as done.
Prints without an order A print filed under no order is credited to the shelf by itself — good parts only.

Step by step

  1. Order A is printed. On its page, the lamp line expanded shows the shade part with Surplus 2, and the header's Bank the surplus button is live. Press it. The toast says what moved — 2 → free stock of Lamp — and the button goes quiet: pressing it again moves nothing, and says so.

  2. Look at the product. Products → Lamp, section Free stock: the headline says 0 kits — two shades and no bases make no whole lamp — and the parts table below reads shade 2 · base 0. The movements table has one row: today, shade, +2, Surplus banked, with a link to order A.

  3. A base from nowhere. An engineer prints a plate of four bases from the printer's own screen to test a new filament. It belongs to no order, it completes, and the shelf reads shade 2 · base 4 — 2 kits. Nobody pressed anything: an order-less print is credited on completion, good parts only. (A scrapped base would not have counted — see Recording scrap.)

  4. Order B: five lamps. New order, line Lamp × 5. Under the quantity the line row shows From stock with 2 already in it — the shelf has two kits and the line wants five, so two is the default. Save. The line reads 5 ordered · from stock 2; its need is three; the plan asks for three lamps' worth of plates and not five.

  5. The shelf after. shade 0 · base 2 — the two kits went out as a reservation for order B's line; the two extra bases stay. The movements table shows −2 on each part, Reserved for an order, linked to order B.

  6. A count that disagrees. Somebody finds a third shade in the box. Adjust on the product's shelf: the part, +1, and a note you must write — found in the box under bench 3. Corrections are movements too; the ledger never overwrites.

What BamDude does on its own after that

  • The shelf is a ledger, never a counter. A part's balance is the sum of its movements; there are exactly five reasons, and the reason fixes the sign: surplus banked (+), print without an order (+), reserved for an order (−), reservation released (+), hand correction (±). A movement of zero is never written.
  • Kits are the scarcest part. The product's kit count is the minimum over its counted parts of balance ÷ per unit — the same rule that drives a line's progress. Two shades and no bases are two parts and no lamp.
  • A reservation is "done" everywhere at once. Order B's need, progress bar, plan and close the order? banner all count the two kits as made; a line covered entirely from the shelf asks for no prints at all.
  • The reservation follows the line. Delete the line, drop its quantity below the reservation, cancel the order or delete it, and the kits come back with the order was deleted or reservation released in the table. Deleting an unfinished order also credits its finished prints back as order-less prints — they belong to nobody now.
  • Filing changes the credit. File the engineer's base print under an order later and the +4 is taken back; take it out again and it returns. The books follow your mind-changes.

Pitfalls and what-ifs

A completed order gives nothing back

Cancel a completed order, delete one of its lines, delete the order: the kits it took stay gone, and its prints are not re-credited. They left inside the lamps the customer received. The one door that stays open is typing a new From stock number on a completed order's line — that is you correcting what the order took, and a mistake needs somewhere to be fixed.

  • Bank moves the difference. Surplus grows as prints finish; press the button again later and only what is new goes over. It is never automatic — a surplus is sometimes shipped with the order and sometimes binned, and only you know which.
  • Kits from stock never raise a surplus. They lower the line's need, progress and plan, but the surplus is measured against the line's full quantity. Otherwise the same kits would land on the shelf twice — once banked, once released.
  • Reopening a cancelled order re-reserves nothing. The shelf may have gone to somebody else in the meantime; type From stock again if it is still there.
  • A duplicated order takes nothing. A reorder must not quietly empty the shelf.
  • Only counted printed parts have a shelf. A part with per unit 0 is not measured; a purchased part is procurement, not stock.
  • History is not swept up. Prints from before the shelf existed are not counted in; for one you know is still in the box, the archive editor's Count into stock does it — one print at a time, on your say-so, and only for a print that finished successfully and belongs to no order.
  • The whole farm's shelves are one tab. Projects → Stock lists every product with anything on its shelf, the orders holding its kits, and one journal of every movement — the place to look when the question is "what do we have" rather than "what does this product have".