Job Management Software for Fabricators

That is fine. WorkGuru does not need every job to look the same.

That is normal. Keep the changes, extra hours and extra costs on the same job.

A quick job can stay simple. A bigger project can carry more tasks, purchases and detail.

They should not have to. They need the job information, a simple way to record time, then they can get back to it.

Yes, and that is the case it is built for. A fabrication job in WorkGuru starts as a quote and becomes a project that carries its own tasks, materials, labour and purchases. Nothing forces the job to match a previous one. Where work does repeat — a standard bracket run, a common assembly — a project template gives you the structure to start from, and you change what needs changing on the individual job. The practical effect is that your quick one-day jobs stay quick to set up, while a twelve-week structural package can carry the detail it needs, without running two different systems to do it.

Yes. This is the point of job costing. Labour recorded through timesheets, materials issued from stock, purchase orders raised against the project and subcontract or outside-process costs all land on the same job. You compare that running total against what you allowed for in the quote. The number that matters is usually not the final margin but the gap you can see at week three, while there is still time to do something about it. Most fabricators find the first surprise is not material cost. It is the hours going into rework and fit-up that never appeared on any estimate.

Raise them as purchases against the job. Outside processing is bought work, and treating it as a project purchase keeps the cost attached to the fabrication it belongs to rather than disappearing into a general overhead account. You get the supplier cost, the job it was for and the timing in one place. The timing matters as much as the cost: a coater holding your steel for nine days is a scheduling fact, not just an invoice, and keeping the purchase on the job is what makes that visible when you are planning the next fortnight.

No, and this is where keeping the change on the same job pays for itself. Extra hours, extra material and additional purchases go onto the project as they happen. The original allowance stays visible, so at any point you can see the job as quoted against the job as it is being built. The failure mode this prevents is the common one: the shop absorbs three days of unquoted modification, nobody writes it down, and the variation never reaches the invoice. Recording it does not make the customer pay for it, but it does mean the conversation is possible.

Yes. Time is recorded against the project or the task, not against a location, so fabrication hours and site installation hours accumulate on the same job. That is usually what you want, because the commercial result of a supply-and-install job is the two together. If you need to see them apart — and most fabricators who install do — structure the job with separate tasks for shop and site, and the split reports itself without needing two projects.

Yes. Work Areas represent the constrained parts of your shop — a bay, a press, a welding cell, the paint booth — and work is scheduled against them. The value is not the picture of a full week. It is seeing that everything you have committed to converges on one resource in week three, before you promise a delivery date that depends on it. Most shops already know which resource is the bottleneck. What they usually cannot see is how many current promises quietly depend on it.

Yes, keep it. WorkGuru does not nest, does not drive machines and does not replace detailing or CAD. It runs the commercial and operational job around that work: the quote, the project, the labour, the purchasing, the costs and the invoice. The sensible division is that your technical software decides how the part gets made and WorkGuru tracks what making it cost you and whether the job was worth taking.

No, and it is not trying to. WorkGuru runs the operational side — the jobs, the labour, the purchasing, the stock and the job costing — and connects to your accounting system like XERO and MYOB, so invoices and bills flow through to the ledger. Your accountant keeps the system they know. What changes is that the job-level detail behind the numbers lives somewhere that the workshop can actually see, instead of only becoming visible a month later in a P&L that cannot tell you which job lost the money.

It depends on where your problem is. If you are three people and every job is a day long, a whiteboard and a decent invoicing tool may genuinely be enough. WorkGuru starts earning its place when jobs run long enough to lose track of, when more than one person is buying material, or when you have stopped being able to tell which jobs are actually making money. The question worth asking is not how many staff you have. It is whether you could say, right now, which of your last ten jobs made money and which did not.