Shifts & production data

A shift in CUTL is a scheduled block of production work: one operator, one date, and a bundle of tasks to cut and finish. This page walks through the full shift lifecycle, from the moment tasks land in planning to the moment the shift is closed with real material consumption, and then shows how to export the numbers for analysis.

If you have not yet priced the job, start with nesting and quoting and cost; shifts pick up where the commercial side leaves off.

Where shift tasks come from

A shift task is created whenever work is launched to production. There are three routes:

• From a project. On the project detail page, click Launch to Production. Every project part with a quantity becomes a shift task, keeping its material, part reference, customer, and operation chain (Cutting plus any operations defined on the part).
• From the Part Library. The Launch to Production quick action on any part card creates a standalone shift task, outside any project.
• From the bot or widget. Approved quotes can be pushed to production straight from the Customer Widget Bot (WhatsApp, Telegram or the site widget).

A freshly created task starts in the Created status and is not yet assigned to a shift. It waits in the Planning queue until an operator and a date are chosen for it.

Planning: grouping tasks by material

The Planning screen shows every unassigned task, grouped by material. Each group card gives you the numbers you need to build a sensible shift:

• Material name and default sheet size
• Total task count
• Total planned cutting time
• Total planned area (m²)

Click a group to see the tasks inside. Planning is where the production manager assembles a shift: pick the tasks for a single operator on a single date and add them to a new or existing shift. Tasks pulled into a shift leave the Planning queue.

Creating a shift

From Planning, or from the Shifts list screen:

The shift is created in status Created. Its tasks inherit the shift assignment and move to the Scheduled state.

Nesting: project level versus shift level

CUTL runs two independent nesting flows. They answer different questions and produce different outputs, so it is worth keeping them straight.

Project-level nesting

This lives on the project detail page, under the Nesting tab. Its job is pricing and pre-production review:

• Groups project parts by material and thickness.
• Computes sheets needed, waste percentage, and a layout preview.
• Feeds the commercial offer with accurate material costs.
• Exports production-ready DXF files (CypCut, RDWorks, or standard DXF presets).
• Runs automatically when part quantities change, and can be re-triggered by hand.

Use project-level nesting when you want a quote that reflects real sheet usage, or DXF files for your CAM software. See nesting for the full detail.

Shift-level nesting

This lives on the shift detail page. Its job is operator-ready production planning:

• Groups the shift's tasks by material.
• Produces a layout per material for the sheets that operator will actually cut during the shift.
• Is stored on the shift, so it survives a refresh and is printed into the shift PDF.
• Produces the plan figures (planned area per material) that later feed the plan-versus-actual comparison at close.

Project nesting is about what the customer will pay for. Shift nesting is about what the operator will run that day. The two do not have to agree on sheet count: a project can span several shifts, and a shift can pull tasks from several projects.

Starting a shift

A shift's actual start time, the started timestamp, can be captured two ways.

Explicitly

Tap Start on the shift detail screen. This stamps the start time as the current server time. You cannot re-start a shift that has already started; if you need a clean slate, cancel it and create a new one. The Start button is optional, so forgetting to tap it is not a problem.

Automatically

The first time anyone reports progress on any task in the shift, the start time is stamped automatically, but only if it is still empty. Auto-start fires when someone advances an operation's Done count (on desktop or the QR scanner) or bulk-completes the shift. Once set, the timestamp never moves.

Some shops want operators to explicitly start a shift for clean time tracking; others do not want the extra tap. Both work, and auto-start is the safety net that guarantees a start time is recorded by the time any real work is reported.

Running the shift

Operations on each task are tracked individually. A typical chain is Cutting, Bending, Painting. The short version of the rules:

• Operations run in parallel on the shop floor.
• Each operation has its own Done counter.
• Operation status derives itself: nothing done is Waiting, some done is In progress, all done is Done.
• Task status derives from its operations: all done is Completed, any started is In progress.
• Overall task progress reads as the minimum across operations: cutting at 50 of 100 with painting at 5 of 100 shows 5 of 100, because only fully finished parts count.
• Overproduction is allowed (52 of 50 is fine, since operators often cut extras to cover scrap).

There are two ways to update progress:

• Desktop. Open the shift, click the task's operation, update the count.
• Mobile QR scan. Scan the part's QR code from the printed Shift Task PDF. Each operation has its own input field and Save button, so different operators can update different operations on the same part.

Closing the shift

Shifts are always closed by hand, even when every task already reads 100 percent. The reason is simple: material consumption is only known after cutting finishes, and someone has to enter it.

The Complete Shift dialog

1. Click Complete Shift on the shift detail.
2. For each material used in the shift, enter:
   • Sheet size, picked from the material's configured sizes. The system multiplies width by height to get m².
   • Number of sheets used, decimals allowed (for example 2.5 when the third sheet was only half used).
   • Used remnants, ticked if the material came from off-cuts rather than fresh sheets. This switches the input to direct m² entry, since remnants have arbitrary shapes.
   • Notes, optional, for overconsumption reasons, scrap rates, or anomalies.
3. Click Complete Shift to finalise.

The shift moves to Completed. Any tasks and operations not already at 100 percent are forced there, and the actual m² is saved per material.

Plan versus actual

Completed shifts show a comparison table per material: Plan (m²) is the sum of the tasks' planned area for that material, Actual (m²) is what was entered at close, and Difference is the gap. Overconsumption is flagged with a warning; under-consumption is shown as a saving.

Remnants and offcuts

A shift that drew on remnants carries the Used remnants flag on its consumption record. That flag surfaces in the plan-versus-actual table and in the Remnant column of the export. It does not change the proportional split: each task on that material still receives its share of the actual area. The flag only tells you where the material came from.

The Shift Task PDF: a paper route card

The Shift Task PDF is a printable work order, not a data export. One PDF per shift, printed once and handed to the operator. Each task page carries:

• Part thumbnail and filename
• Article code, if the task came from the Part Library
• Material and quantity
• The operation route, with checkboxes and "done X of Y" fields per operation
• A QR code for the task, scanned on mobile to update progress (plus one QR for the shift as a whole)
• A signature line for the operator
• A material plan and fact summary for the whole shift

If you want a spreadsheet of production data (plan versus actual, delta columns, material totals) use the report described below. If you want paper for the shop floor, use the PDF. For per-part and remnant tags (QR plus barcode labels), see the Label generator.

Shift status reference

Exporting production data

CUTL has a dedicated Reports section inside the Production module with three reports: Shift Task Execution (covered in detail below), Material Consumption (per material: planned versus actual area, sheets used, the used-remnant flag, and the deviation in both area and money) and Offcut Analytics (recorded offcuts per material, in count, area and money). Each is viewable on-screen as a paginated table and exportable as a CSV file that opens in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice.

Where to find it

1. Open the Production module from the main navigation at app.cutl.online.
2. Click Reports (a sibling of Tasks, Planning, and Shifts).
3. Open the Shift Task Execution report card.
4. Apply filters (date range, material, shift status) or leave the defaults.
5. Click Export to CSV in the toolbar to download.

What the report contains

One row per shift-task, sorted by shift date (newest first), then by task number.

Quantities are whole numbers and areas run to 3 decimals. Prices are deliberately left out: this is a production-floor execution report, not a pricing one. For costs, see quoting and cost and extended pricing.

Filters

• Date range defaults to the current month and filters on the shift's planned date.
• Material limits the report to one material; leave it blank to see all.
• Status has no default, so you see every shift regardless of state. Narrow to Completed for a finished-work report.

Filter changes re-query immediately and reset the on-screen view to page 1. The CSV export always reflects the full filtered set and ignores paging.

CSV specifics

• Encoding is UTF-8 with a BOM, so Excel opens it cleanly on Windows and macOS without a manual import.
• Column headers follow your account language (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian).
• A totals row closes the file with sums of Qty Plan, Qty Done, Qty +/-, Area Plan, Area Actual, and Area +/-, labelled in your language.
• Filename is shift-execution-report-YYYY-MM.csv for a single month, or shift-execution-report-YYYY-MM-DD_YYYY-MM-DD.csv for a multi-month range.
• Streaming: the export streams straight from the database, so even reports with tens of thousands of rows download without straining the server or browser. Every export is a fresh, live query, not a cached snapshot.

How the actual area is split

Actual consumption is recorded once per shift per material at close (sheets multiplied by sheet size, or direct m² for remnants). The report shares that shift-level figure across the individual tasks in proportion to their planned area:

task actual area = (task planned area / total planned area for that material in the shift) x shift actual area

If a material has no consumption record (the shift was closed without it, or is still open), the task's actual area is left empty and the row is excluded from the area totals.

Once your production data is flowing, the next step is pulling it into your own systems: see the Integration API to sync shifts, tasks, and consumption with your ERP.