Work order

Shops use work order, job, and job number almost interchangeably. Whatever it's called, it's the record that says: make this many of this part, at this revision, for this customer, by this date. The traveler is the printed face of the work order on the floor; the work order is the record behind it that accumulates labor, material, and outside processing costs.

A common complaint about heavyweight systems is that creating a work order takes longer than machining the parts, because every field has to be filled before anything saves. In a shop with no dedicated admin, that ceremony is why systems get abandoned.

In Traveler, a job is created automatically when a customer accepts a quote, or manually when a PO arrives by phone, or as an internal job for fixtures and R&D work. Fields can be left blank and filled later, with incomplete records flagged rather than blocked.