Advance pieces by barcode

7 min read Updated 2026-08-30 WindoorERP 19.0

What this does

Production › Shop Floor › Scan to Advance is a small dialog for moving a finished piece one step along its stage pipeline by scanning its serial. It is the desktop counterpart to the shop-floor terminal: a barcode field, an Advance button, and a line of text telling you what happened. Production › Shop Floor › Piece Scans is the other half of the story — the read-only trail of who scanned which piece at which stage, and how long the piece spent there.

Both menus belong to the Barcode Scan-to-Advance feature. With that feature off they are not in the menu at all, and the same advance is available as a manual button on the produced unit.

Before you start

The Barcode Scan-to-Advance feature enabled in Settings — it gates both menus, and it gates the scan itself.
Produced units in existence: with this same feature on, they are created when a production order starts, one per piece — and best-effort, so if that step failed you will find only a chatter note on the order and no units to scan.
A scanner configured as a keyboard, or a keyboard. The dialog takes typed input equally well.

Steps

The Scan to Advance dialog with the barcode field, the last result line and the Advance and Close buttons

The Piece Scans list: date, unit, stage, minutes, station, operator and production order

01
Open Production › Shop Floor › Scan to Advance. It opens as a dialog over whatever you were looking at.
02
Put the cursor in Scan / Enter Barcode — the placeholder reads Scan or type a unit barcode… — and scan the piece's serial.
03
Press Advance. The result line under the field reports the outcome and the field clears, ready for the next piece.
04
Read the result before moving on. Success reads "%(code)s advanced to %(stage)s." with the raw stage key, for example welding. An empty field answers "Enter or scan a barcode." and anything unrecognised answers "Unknown barcode: %s".
05
Keep scanning. The dialog re-opens itself after every advance, so a run of pieces is one scan after another without touching the mouse.
06
Press Close when the batch is done, then open Production › Shop Floor › Piece Scans to review the trail the shop-floor terminal recorded.

What the dialog accepts

Question	Answer
Which barcodes work?	Exactly one kind: the produced-unit serial, in the form `U-YYYY-######`. It is matched by exact equality — no prefix, no partial, no fuzzy search.
What about lot, package or work-order barcodes?	Not accepted here. They answer "Unknown barcode: %s" like any other unrecognised string.
How far does one scan move a piece?	Exactly one stage along the pipeline. Scanning twice moves it twice.
Where does it stop?	At Packed. The stock-backed stages — Received (Stock) and Delivered — are warehouse steps and the scan will not cross into them.
What does a packed piece report?	It stays packed and the dialog still says "%(code)s advanced to %(stage)s." naming `packed`. Nothing moved.
Does it write a Piece Scan record?	No. See the callout.

Important

This dialog leaves no trail. The desktop scan path advances the stage and stamps the piece, but it does not create a Piece Scan record. Only the shop-floor terminal's scan builds the who/when trail and the per-stage minutes. If your stage timings and operator attribution matter, the pieces have to be scanned at the terminal — a day advanced through this dialog will show stage changes on the units and an empty Piece Scans list.

Warning

The dialog carries a banner when scanning is off: "Barcode scanning is off in Settings — you can still advance units manually here or from the unit form." The second half of that sentence is not true. With the feature off the scan short-circuits and every barcode — including a perfectly valid serial — comes back as "Unknown barcode: %s". Manual advancing works from the produced unit's own Advance Stage button, not here. In practice you will rarely see the banner at all, because the menu itself is gated on the same feature and disappears with it; the same wording, and the same trap, applies to the scan box on the Dashboard.

Piece Scans — the audit trail

Production › Shop Floor › Piece Scans is a list and nothing else: there is no form and creating a record is disabled, because entries are written by the software when a piece is scanned at the terminal. Every column is read-only. There is no default filter and no period either, so what opens is the whole history: narrow it to an order or a date range yourself before reading anything into the totals.

Column	What it records
Date	When the scan happened.
Unit	The produced unit, by serial.
Stage	The stage the piece was scanned into.
Minutes	Its help says it exactly: "Time the piece spent at this stage (until it was scanned onward). Open (0) while the piece is still at this stage." The column totals across the list.
Station	Where it was scanned. Hidden by default — switch the column on when you need it.
Operator	Who scanned it.
Production Order	The job the piece belongs to. Shown by default.

Each terminal scan does three things at once: it advances the piece one stage, it opens a new scan event with zero minutes, and it closes the previous open event with the elapsed time. If the piece could not advance — it was already at the last floor stage, for instance — nothing is written at all, deliberately, so the trail never contains a scan that did not move anything. Scans replayed by a terminal that was working offline are matched on their own scan identifier, so a scan already stored answers "Already recorded." rather than being counted a second time.

Troubleshooting

"Enter or scan a barcode."	Advance was pressed with the field empty.
"Unknown barcode: %s" on a serial you can see on screen	Either a character is wrong — matching is exact — or the scanning feature is off, in which case every scan answers this.
"Unknown barcode: %s" on a lot or package label	Only produced-unit serials are accepted. Use the unit's own label.
The result says "advanced to packed" but nothing changed	The piece was already packed. Advancing stops there; receiving into stock is a warehouse step, done by marking the production order Done or running the finished-goods receipt.
Stages are moving but Piece Scans stays empty	The pieces are being advanced from this dialog or from the unit form. Neither writes a trail record; only the shop-floor terminal does.
The Scan to Advance menu is missing	The Barcode Scan-to-Advance feature is off. Turn it on in Settings, or advance pieces from the unit form.
A scan shows 0 minutes	The piece is still at that stage. The duration is filled in when it is scanned onward.

Common mistakes

Running a whole shift through this dialog and then looking for stage timings in Piece Scans, which will be empty.
Scanning several times quickly to "catch up" a piece, and overshooting — every press is one stage.
Believing the off-banner and expecting the dialog to work with scanning disabled.
Trying to close a job by scanning it past Packed instead of marking the production order Done.
Reading the success line as a confirmation that something moved: a packed piece is reported as advanced even though it stayed put.
Trying to correct a mis-scan by editing Piece Scans. The list is read-only by design; fix the stage on the produced unit instead.

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