Inventory

The Inventory module tracks the consumable side of the shop — filament, sheet stock, fasteners, bits, and everything else that runs out.

Items, variants, and categories

Items live in a category hierarchy you control, with a starter taxonomy (including a full fastener taxonomy) to begin from rather than a blank page. An item can have variants — the same screw in five lengths, the same filament in eight colors — with per-variant SKUs and stock. Attributes (material, size, thread pitch…) are scoped per category, and drive faceted filtering when browsing.

Locations and stock

Physical locations (room → shelf → bin, to whatever depth you use) hold stock, and an item’s quantity is the sum over its locations — so “where is the 3 mm acrylic” has a real answer. Set reorder thresholds and the low-stock view shows what needs buying; members on the floor can scan an item’s QR label to flag it low.

Labels and images

Item and location QR labels are designed in the platform’s label editor and printed on standard label sheets. Item images can be uploaded, cropped in place, or fetched from supplier pages.

Usage guidance

Common consumables carry a usage card — what the material is for, when to choose it over the alternatives, when to avoid it, prep, safety, handling — from a library MakerOps maintains for adhesives (CA, wood glue, epoxy, contact cement, hot melt…), finishes, tapes, abrasives, 3D-printing filaments, laser materials, common fastener classes, solder, and PPE. When you add an item it is matched to a card automatically: exact identifiers link on their own, and a close name match is shown as a suggestion that staff confirm in one click. The card appears on the item’s public catalog page and in the mobile app, next to its location and stock — so “can I use this on acrylic” is answered at the shelf, not by whoever is on shift.

Each shop can add its own shop notes on top of a card — house rules, where the accelerator is kept, which brand you actually stock. Notes stay private to your shop and never change the shared card. The library itself grows over time, and every shop gets the improvements.

Ask the shop

On the public catalog and in the mobile app, a member describes the situation in plain language — “I need to glue a 3D-printed bracket to plywood and it lives outdoors” — and gets an answer drawn only from what your shop actually stocks: one or two picks, why, how to use them, what to watch for, and which shelf they are on. Structural, pressure, food-contact, and other risky joins get a check with staff flag rather than a confident answer. Answers run on Claude.

Every answer can be rated thumbs up or down, so staff see what to correct — usually by fixing a shop note or a card match. If you would rather not offer it, switch it off in the public-page branding settings.

Suppliers and import

Items link to suppliers with part numbers, so reordering starts from the item, not a hunt through old emails. Bring existing inventory in through the template-based importer: download the spreadsheet template, fill it (attribute columns included), and upload — the importer validates each row and reports exactly what it skipped and why. Self-serve import currently covers inventory items; other record types are migrated with our help — see the migration page.