How a kitchen and joinery manufacturer runs its back office
A workshop that designs kitchens, makes them and installs them. What follows is one of those jobs from end to end, with every point where a person has to say yes marked.
Four case studies on this site run on the same tools, arranged for days that look nothing alike. This one follows a job through a workshop making kitchens, stairs and fitted joinery to order. Two pieces here are built for work cut from material: the pricing calculator and the unit ledger.
Who it is for
For the New Zealand shops that make the fitted parts of a building to order: kitchen manufacturers, joinery workshops turning out stairs, doors, wardrobes and commercial fit-outs, and the people who cut, edge and fit the surfaces beside them. In all of them the owner or one office person is the back office. It suits five to fifty people who have a spreadsheet for everything, a yard of offcuts nobody can account for, or a whiteboard that is the only record of where a job has got to.
One kitchen, from the first phone call to the last payment
Three things start a step. Somebody asks the agent in the channel the team already talks in. Something arrives in a connected mailbox. Or a date comes round on a job. Asking happens in the chat; approving happens in the admin app, signed in, because the sign-in the agent holds cannot approve anything.
A call comes in, and the agent is told about it in the chat
Somebody in the office types what the caller said. The agent creates the customer from it, with the contact and the address, and opens the job underneath. The measure goes on the job as a task with a date and an owner, and the messaging rule that covers task assignment emails that person.
The design is priced from the price book, area by area
Asked for a price, the agent reads your price book: your categories, your items, your tiers, your rates. Kitchen, scullery and laundry are priced as separate areas. Base units, tall units, the run along the wall, hardware, material by the square metre. The calculator takes the run as segments, cancels the overlap where two runs meet at a corner, and prices edges and cutouts as add-ons against the row they modify.
The quote is drafted, and it stops
The agent assembles the quote from the priced areas and renders the PDF with your branding. The quote is versioned, and a variant can sit beside the original.
It is filed as a proposal in the approval queue. You open it in the admin app, read the document your customer would read, and approve or decline. The agent cannot send it.
A decline is recorded in the queue with what was proposed and who declined it.
Acceptance converts the quote into a job
The project carries the scope and the price the quote sold at. The project template supplies the tasks this kind of kitchen needs, in your order: design sign-off, cutting, assembly, finishing, delivery, install, each with a date and an owner.
The price a quote was accepted at cannot be edited, by the agent or by anyone. A change after that is a new version of it, and the accepted one stays as the record of what was agreed.
The spec fills slot by slot, and the readiness check runs
The agent reads the appliance registry for cutout sizes and attaches the customer’s choices to the area they belong in. The spec fills slot by slot. The readiness check lists the slots still empty, and it runs before anything is cut. Sign-off is a recorded step.
If the customer changes an appliance after sign-off, the amendment is recorded as an amendment and the readiness check reads the spec as it now stands.
Purchase orders are drafted against your supplier list
The agent reads the job’s tasks and the signed-off spec to work out what has to be bought, and drafts one order per supplier, each with its lines and the job it belongs to.
Every order waits in the same queue for a signed-in person. The agent cannot send one, whatever it is asked to do.
What arrives is received against the order that bought it
Receiving is recorded on the dock. Material and the offcuts it leaves are entered as units on the ledger, with their grade, shape and dimensions, reserved to the job that will consume them.
When less arrives than was ordered, the order stays open for what has not arrived, and the outstanding quantity sits on the line.
Staff clock in, and the hours land on the job
A clock-in is matched to the nearest active job whose site is inside the radius your business sets. Leave, New Zealand public holidays and the payroll export are in the same module.
If no site is close enough the entry stays untagged for the office to place, and the clock-out gets a second chance to match. With no coverage the app queues the entry on the phone and sends it when it reconnects.
Supplier invoices arrive in the mailbox on their own
The mailbox poll runs on a schedule. Invoices and statements sent to the connected mailbox are read out of it, and the agent matches each one to the purchase order it bills.
Approving a payable, or recording a payment against it, is a signed-in person’s action.
An invoice that does not match an order is still recorded as a payable and flagged as an issue, and someone in the office links it or leaves it unlinked. When the agent cannot tell which supplier a bill came from, it proposes one and waits. It does not create a supplier.
The invoice comes off the quote, and the job’s cost sits against its price
The agent raises the invoice from the accepted quote, for the stage or the balance it covers. Payments are recorded against it. The orders, the payables, the material and the hours hang off the same job: what the kitchen cost and what it sold for are two figures on one record.
The invoice waits in the queue the way the quote did. A signed-in person sends it.
Stage invoices cannot add up past the quote total. The platform refuses one that would, and cancelling a stage releases its share again.
Questions we get asked
Is this built for New Zealand workshops, or is it a generic tool?
It is built in New Zealand for workshops that make to order, kitchen and joinery businesses among them, and it runs the back office in workshops here today. The price book, the calculators, the project templates and the payroll export all follow how a New Zealand factory works.
Does the calculator use my prices or a built-in rate card?
Your prices. A square metre of material, an edge profile, a cutout and an hour of crane hire are all rows in a price book you own, each with its own basis: per metre, per square metre, each, or per hour.
Does it replace my accounting system?
No. The platform holds the operating records: quotes, jobs, purchase orders, supplier invoices, stock and time. Your accountant’s system stays where it is, and we connect the agent to it when we set it up.
Do I have to draw the job in it, and does it do nesting?
No to both. The platform is not a design or CAD tool. The calculators work from measurements and your price book, and your drawings attach as documents. We record which units a job reserved and consumed; the nest itself is still done in your shop, and automated nesting is planned rather than sold.
Next: one order desk for the suppliers this industry buys from
A kitchen, a stair or a fit-out is assembled out of parts from a long list of suppliers, and every one of them wants the order its own way: a form, a portal login, a spreadsheet, a phone call, an email thread. Ordering ends up being the errand that eats an afternoon a week.
We are building an order desk for it. It will read what the jobs on your board actually need, aggregate that across the suppliers serving the industry, and prepare the purchase orders together in one place, so a single approval covers the lot instead of a dozen separate ones.
None of that exists yet, and we will say so on this page until it does. Purchasing as it works today is a different thing and it ships now: drafting a purchase order against your own suppliers, a person approving it before it is sent, and receiving against the order on the dock, as described further up the page.
We set it up with you
Nobody in a factory has time to become the AI person. We come to the workshop, write down how a job actually moves through it, count what is in the yard, build your price book and templates from that, stand up the agent and stay until the whiteboard is retired by choice.