Knowledge Base

What ForgePO covers

ForgePO brings together the tools a small manufacturer usually stitches from a spreadsheet, an MRP tool, and a separate quoting/CRM process:

• Purchase orders & vendors — POs, approval workflow, vendor acknowledgment, landed cost.
• Pricing & job costing — bills of materials, labor, overhead, target margin, price lists.
• Sales & quoting — quotes, orders, the customer portal, e-signature.
• CRM — customers, pipeline, tasks, activity timeline.
• Inventory — raw materials, products, counts & valuation.

Every account is a private, separate company — nothing you enter is visible to anyone outside your team.

Your first login

A brand-new account starts loaded with sample data so you can explore every page before touching real numbers. The first time you sign in you'll see a short walkthrough covering purchase orders, pricing & job costing, and quotes/CRM.

At the end of the walkthrough you can either erase the sample data right away (Setup → Data, password-gated) or keep it and erase it later whenever you're ready to enter your own data.

Roles & permissions

Every teammate has a role — the built-ins are Admin, Sales, Production, and Member — and admins can also define custom roles. From Setup → Users → Roles & permissions you control, per role:

• Which page groups they can open (Quotes & customers, POs & vendors, Products & inventory, Pricing & reports, Setup)
• Whether they can send POs without going through approval
• Whether they can approve pending POs

Pages a role can't reach disappear from the sidebar, Ctrl+K search, and the dashboard's "+ New" menu — not just visually hidden, actually inaccessible via direct navigation.

Creating a purchase order

Start a PO from the Purchase Orders page or the dashboard's "+ New" menu. Pick a vendor (searchable by name — admins can add a new vendor on the fly), then add lines by searching your raw materials by SKU or name. Freight and a PO surcharge % (e.g. a card fee) can be added and apply to the totals and the printed document when greater than zero.

PO approval workflow

By default, a non-admin can only save a PO as a locked Draft. "Submit for approval" emails every admin on the account; an admin can approve straight from their dashboard queue or from inside the PO. Approving unlocks the full status dropdown and send actions for whoever created it, and emails them that it's approved.

Grant a role the "Send POs directly" or "Approve POs" permission from Setup → Users if you want to change who's gated.

Landed cost

Every PO line shows a Landed cost column (internal only — never on the vendor-facing document): unit cost plus this PO's freight and surcharge, split evenly per unit across the whole order.

When you save a PO and accept the cost-sync prompt, landed cost becomes the cost that feeds your BOMs and pricing calculator — while the raw vendor price is still what prefills the line the next time you reorder that material. This keeps "what I pay the vendor" and "what actually costs me to land it here" cleanly separate.

Sending a PO & vendor acknowledgment

The Email button opens a send dialog with a letterhead PDF attached, or you can download the PDF directly. A portal link lets the vendor view and acknowledge the PO online — acknowledging requires typing a name, and every view/action is timestamped.

Overhead & target margin

Set your labor rate, overhead (per-hour rate or simple percentage), and target margin under Setup — these feed every product's price via the pricing calculator, so get them roughly right before pricing your catalog.

The pricing calculator

A product's price is built from: raw material cost (via its BOM), labor time × your labor rate, plus overhead, with your target margin applied on top. Change any input and the price recalculates live — useful for quoting a one-off or checking "what if I use a cheaper material."

Price lists

Price lists let you offer different pricing to different customers — a blanket markup/discount, or explicit per-product overrides. Assign a price list to a customer record and every quote for them applies it automatically.

Pricing Health

This page flags products whose price hasn't kept pace with current material or labor cost — useful for catching margin erosion after a vendor price increase before it quietly eats your profit.

Building a quote

Pick (or create) a customer and a "Customer information" card appears with their contact info, billing/shipping addresses, terms, price list, and B2B status. Add lines by searching your product catalog by name or SKU. The shipping address is editable per-quote if this order needs to ship somewhere different than usual.

The customer portal

A quote sent by email or portal link gives your customer a page to accept or decline — accepting requires a typed signature, and every open/view and the final decision are logged with a timestamp so you can see whether they've even looked.

Auto-converting an accepted quote to an order

Turn on Setup → Settings → "Automatically create an order when a quote is marked Accepted" and any path that flips a quote to Accepted — the quote editor, a pipeline deal marked Won, or the customer accepting via the portal — creates the linked order automatically. Off by default; nothing changes unless you opt in.

Pipeline & tasks

The Pipeline is a drag-and-drop kanban of deals with an owner, linked quote value, and Won/Lost outcomes with reasons. Tasks can be assigned to any teammate, filtered by person, and show up on that person's dashboard.

Files on a customer record

Open any customer and scroll to the Files card to attach documents that belong with the account — their logo, a signed dealer agreement, a tax-exemption certificate, a contract. Pick a type from the dropdown (Logo, Dealer agreement, Tax certificate, Contract, Other) so the list stays scannable, then Upload file; you can select several at once.

• PDFs, images (PNG/JPG/GIF/WebP/SVG), Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV, TXT, ZIP, EPS and AI files, up to 10 MB each.
• Images show a thumbnail; images and PDFs open in a new tab, everything else downloads.
• Every upload is logged on the customer's activity timeline with who added it.
• Files are stored privately on the server, outside your account's data export — only signed-in users on your company can open them.

Raw materials & bills of materials

Raw materials carry a cost per sell/use unit (fed by landed cost from POs) and an optional purchase-unit conversion (e.g. "1 case = 12 sheets"). A product's BOM lists the materials and quantities that go into building it, and drives both its cost and the shop-floor material pull list.

Inventory count & valuation

Count inventory in whichever unit is convenient per line — switch a material's display unit and the count converts automatically without changing the computed value, since totals are always derived from the canonical stock-unit count.

Product variations

Group size/color/option variants into a variation family and bulk-edit shared fields across the whole family at once instead of editing each variant individually.

Family BOMs — one bill of materials for a whole family

Instead of keeping a separate BOM on every color/size variation, build one family BOM on the parent. Each line is either same for all or varies by an option (Color, Size, Model…): you map the material once per option value — Black → black thread, Coyote → coyote thread — and every variation resolves its own material list and cost automatically. A line can also have its quantity follow a different option (more fabric for bigger sizes) while the material follows Color.

Getting there: Products & Services → expand a family → Family BOM. If the variations already have their own BOMs, ForgePO proposes the family BOM from them — shared lines, lines that vary by option, and any one-off differences (kept on that variation as an extra line so nothing changes cost-wise). Review, name the options, Save.

Material types & colors: Raw Materials → Classify materials guesses a Type (Fabric, Webbing, Thread, Hook Velcro…) and Color for every material; you confirm in bulk. Types filter the material picker on family lines; colors power Auto-match by color. Types are editable under Settings → Material types.

Per variation: a linked variation shows the resolved family lines in its editor (BOM source: Family BOM). Untick a line to leave it out, add extra lines it alone needs, or switch it back to its own BOM. Labor hours stay per variation — edit them in the family editor's Variations table.

The Orders module

An accepted quote converts to an order (manually via "Convert to order," or automatically if you've turned that on). Orders track status from Open through Shipped/Invoiced/Paid, and can push straight to a QuickBooks Online invoice.

Shop-floor Manufacturing Order print

"Print MO" produces a no-pricing traveler for the shop floor: order details, BOM scaled to the order quantity, a consolidated material pull list with a shortage flag against current inventory, and sign-off lines. Users with only "Products & inventory" access see orders in this no-pricing view automatically.

Inviting your team

Setup → Users → Add User sends an email invite with a link to set a password — no password ever changes hands directly. Assign a role on invite; you can change it, resend the invite, or reset a password later from the same page.

Team chat

A built-in Chat page covers a team-wide channel plus direct messages, with unread badges and an email nudge for teammates who are offline when a message comes in (throttled so it can't flood an inbox).

QuickBooks Online

Connect under Setup → QuickBooks (OAuth2 — your keys never leave the server). Once connected, push a sales order to QuickBooks as an invoice with one click; the customer is matched or created by name, and line items keep their SKU and description without mirroring your full catalog into QuickBooks.

WooCommerce / B2BKing

For a store running WooCommerce with the B2BKing plugin, ForgePO can sync approved B2B customers and new orders into its CRM automatically — an optional connector configured under Setup → Website Sync, not required for the rest of ForgePO.

Importing data

Setup → Import Data has a "Download Template" for materials, customers, vendors, products, BOMs, and operations — fill in the spreadsheet and re-upload. Columns auto-map to the right fields.

Backup & restore

Setup → Backup & Restore lets you snapshot your account's data and restore from a prior snapshot if something goes wrong — worth doing before a large bulk edit or import.

Ctrl+K global search

Press Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K on Mac) anywhere in the app to jump straight to a page, customer, product/SKU, PO, quote, vendor, or raw material — much faster than digging through menus.