Sirius ERPManufacturing operations Book a walkthrough
Built for make-to-order manufacturers

Stop finding out after the job has shipped.

Most works don't lack data — they lack it in one place, on one screen, at the moment someone has to decide. Sirius ERP joins the quote to the order, the order to the job, the job to the stock and the stock to the ledger, so “where is that order” and “what did it cost us” take one click instead of three phone calls and a spreadsheet nobody trusts.

Book a walkthrough See how it flows

Two flows, one system: make-to-order and buy-to-sell.

The Sirius ERP dashboard, showing money owed in both directions, open sales orders with how many are late, work in progress, shortages waiting for a work order or a purchase order, stock value with items below reorder level, outstanding deliveries, and a list of the orders furthest past their promised date.

The visibility gap

The questions that cost you money are the ones nobody can answer quickly.

None of these need a bigger spreadsheet. They need the shop floor, the stores and the office to be writing into the same record as they work.

“Can we promise that for the fourteenth?”

Answering it means knowing what is genuinely free — not what the stock report said on Monday, before two jobs were kitted and a delivery went out unrecorded.

In Sirius: free stock is on-hand minus what is already reserved, excluding anything sitting in quarantine, and it updates as each movement is confirmed.

“Why is this job late?”

Usually one missing component nobody flagged, on a job whose material was never formally issued, so the shortage never appeared anywhere anyone was looking.

In Sirius: every uncovered demand line raises its own shortage the moment the order is confirmed, and the list says what each one is for.

“Did we actually make anything on it?”

A quoted margin is a guess until the material issued and the hours booked are added up — and if that only happens at the year end, the next quote repeats the mistake.

In Sirius: job cost is material from real stock movements plus labour from real clockings, against the planned BOM and routing, while the job is still open.

One transaction spine

Every step hands the next one what it needs.

Nothing is re-keyed between stages, and nothing gets forgotten between departments, because each transaction creates the one that follows it.

  1. SalesQuote → orderWon quotes convert, keeping the price the customer agreed.
  2. PlanningMRPWhat stock cannot cover becomes a shortage, per demand line.
  3. BuyingPurchase orderRaised straight off the shortage list, per supplier.
  4. ProductionWork orderRelease copies the BOM and the routing, and opens both deliveries.
  5. StoresDeliveriesReceipts, issues and dispatches — picked, then confirmed.
  6. FinanceLedgerEvery movement posts a journal in the same transaction.

Planning

Two lists that tell you what to do this morning.

When an order is confirmed, anything stock cannot cover raises a shortage against that specific line. Buyers work one list, planners work the other.

  • One row per demand line, never merged. Five orders needing ten of something is five rows — because the useful question is not how many, it is what each one is for.
  • Raising supply reserves it. Select rows, raise a purchase order or a work order, and that supply is bound to that demand and leaves the list.
  • Suppliers are never mixed on one purchase order, and a work order is never split across items.
  • Late is obvious — sorted soonest-required first, with anything overdue called out.
The purchase shortage list, with a row per demand line showing item, quantity, required date, the sales order and customer it is for, the supplier, and current free stock.

Production

What the job was supposed to cost, and what it did.

Releasing a work order copies the bill of materials onto its requirements and the routing onto its operations — snapshots, so changing a drawing next month cannot rewrite what the shop floor built last week.

  • Planned against actual, per operation, so the operation that always overruns stops being folklore.
  • Job cost while the job is open — material from the movements that actually left stores, labour from the clockings.
  • Multi-level builds unroll themselves. A sub-assembly on the BOM raises its own shortage, which becomes its own work order.
  • A printable route card for the shop floor, with the operations, the materials and the instructions.
A work order showing material issued against planned, labour booked, total job cost and variance, the requirements copied from the bill of materials with issued quantities, and the operations with planned versus actual minutes.

Shop floor

Time booked where the work happens.

Operators clock on and off operations at a terminal or a tablet. Nothing to interpret later, no timesheets reconstructed on Friday afternoon.

  • Several bookings on one operation is normal — two operators, three shifts, a pause for a breakdown.
  • Clocking off is not the same as finishing. Going home at five does not close the job.
  • Labour is costed at the rate snapshotted onto the booking, so re-rating next year never rewrites last year's jobs.
  • Non-productive time is recorded too, which is the only way to know what capacity you really have.
The shop floor terminal, showing the operations available to work on with large clock-on buttons and the operator's currently running booking.

The schedule

Every job on one board, with the ones that cannot be done marked.

Each work order is scheduled backwards from the date it is wanted, walking its operations in reverse against each work centre's daily capacity. The bar you see is what the routing actually implies — not a guess, and not a bar drawn to fit the space.

  • Operations as segments, in sequence and labelled with the work centre, so you can see which machine the job is sitting on and when.
  • Sub-assemblies nested under the parent they feed, because a multi-level build is one commitment, not four unrelated jobs.
  • Nothing is quietly clamped. If the arithmetic lands before today, the job is reported as impossible rather than redrawn to look achievable.
  • Material lateness shows on the schedule — a component arriving after the job must start is named, with the purchase order to chase.
  • Required dates and today marked across every row, so slippage is visible without reading a single number.
The planning Gantt: work orders as bars across a six-week timeline, each divided into operation segments labelled with their work centre, sub-assemblies indented beneath the parent job, required dates marked with diamonds and today drawn as a vertical line, with a panel below listing what the schedule cannot deliver and why.

Capacity

Answer "can we take this on?" before you promise it.

The load view lays every scheduled operation against the capacity of the work centre it runs on, day by day. The number that matters is not how busy you feel — it is how many days are already over the line before the new order is added.

  • Minutes against capacity, per centre, per day, with the over-committed days called out.
  • Split across the days an operation spans, so a two-day job does not appear as a spike on the day it starts.
  • Derived from the same stored schedule as the Gantt, so the two can never tell you different things.
  • Honest about what it is: it reports a clash rather than levelling it — the decision to move a job stays with the person who knows the customer.
The work centre load view: for each work centre, a column per day showing the minutes scheduled against that centre's daily capacity, with days over capacity highlighted.

Stock

A stock figure you can put your name to.

Every movement is a ledger entry: what moved, from where, to where, at what cost, by whom. Nothing is edited after the fact — a mistake is corrected by an equal and opposite movement, so the history reads as what happened.

  • Batch and serial traceability recorded at the moment of picking, so a recall is answerable rather than a weekend of paperwork.
  • FIFO, LIFO or standard costing, with cost layers — so cost of sales is what the stock cost, not an average nobody can defend.
  • Quarantine is a location, not a flag. Goods that fail inspection are on site, visible and valued — just not available to promise.
  • Negative stock is refused unless a location explicitly allows it, because it always means a movement was recorded that never physically happened.
The stock on hand screen, listing items with quantity, free quantity, value and warnings where an item is below its reorder level.

Purchasing and money

Pay for what arrived, at the price you agreed.

A supplier invoice is matched against the receipt, not just the order — so the quantity billed, the quantity delivered and the quantity ordered are all on one screen before anyone approves anything.

  • Price and quantity variances are flagged against the order, so an 18p-a-part increase is a decision rather than a surprise at the year end.
  • Approval clears the accrual. Receiving raises goods-received-not-invoiced; approving the invoice clears it and moves it to creditors.
  • Double-entry underneath everything — stock, WIP, cost of sales, VAT both ways — with reversals as mirror entries rather than deletions.
  • Each limited company keeps its own books, its own VAT and its own document numbering, from one installation.
A supplier invoice with its match report, comparing ordered, received and invoiced quantities and costs line by line, with the variance highlighted.

How it is built

Boring where it matters.

An ERP earns trust by being right on the dull days. These are the rules the system actually enforces, not aspirations in a brochure.

The stock ledger is append-only

Movements are never edited or deleted. Levels are a maintained summary of them, and a test holds the two to agreeing after every posting — a cached figure that can quietly drift from its ledger is worse than no cache at all.

Stock and its value move together

The movement, the cost layer and the journal entry are written in one database transaction. There is no window in which stock has moved but the accounts disagree.

Traced goods cannot slip through

A batch-traced line will not confirm without its batches, and a serial-traced line needs one serial per unit. Traceability that can be skipped when someone is busy is not traceability.

Documents are numbered per company

Sequential within each limited company, allocated only when a document is issued, so abandoned drafts leave no gaps in a statutory sequence.

Issued documents are never deleted

An issued invoice is voided with a reversing journal and keeps its number. A reversed payment is stamped, not removed. The record is what happened.

Every figure is in pence

Money is integer minor units end to end, rounded once per line and then summed, so a document total always equals the sum of the lines a customer is looking at.

What's in it

One system, from enquiry to nominal ledger.

Sales

  • Customers and contacts
  • Pipeline and quotations
  • Sales orders and acknowledgements
  • Invoicing, part payments, credit control
  • Automatic collection by card or Direct Debit
  • Customer portal

Purchasing

  • Suppliers, terms and lead times
  • Purchase orders and documents
  • Receipts, including part deliveries
  • Three-way matched supplier invoices
  • Payments and aged creditors

Stock

  • Item master with costing and planning data
  • Warehouses, locations and quarantine
  • Batch and serial traceability
  • Adjustments, transfers and full movement history
  • Valuation and slow-mover reporting

Manufacturing

  • Multi-level, versioned bills of materials
  • Routings, work centres and resources
  • Work orders with issue and receipt
  • Shop floor data capture
  • Job costing and performance reporting

Multi-company

Several limited companies and trading brands from one installation, each with its own books, VAT and numbering.

Roles and permissions

Granular permissions per action, so an operator gets the terminal and nothing else. Two-factor authentication throughout.

Full audit trail

Who did what, when, on every record that matters — alongside the ledger's own immutable history.

Integrations and API

Signed outbound webhooks and API tokens, so the systems you already run keep working alongside it.

Talk to us

See it against your own process.

The useful conversation is not a slide deck — it is walking one of your real orders through the system and seeing where it does and does not fit. That is a half hour.

Book a walkthrough