Orders Overview
Orders are the heart of TimberCloud. Every customer job — a quote, an inquiry, or a paid order — lives in the Orders area and moves through a simple status pipeline from Quote to Delivered. This section walks you through creating orders, moving them through production, sending documents, and shipping.
Note: On the Free plan the Orders area is called Inquiries. Payments are off and your storefront is request-a-quote only — customers submit inquiries instead of paying, up to about 50 inquiries per month. Taking card payment at checkout requires a paid plan (Commerce or higher). See The Free Plan and Subscriptions & Plans.
Where orders come from
Orders reach your dashboard from several places, and they all land in the same list:
| Source | What it is | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Create Order (dashboard) | You build an order by hand — pick a customer, add configured products, save | Phone orders, in-person sales, quotes you write up |
| Embeddable storefront | The catalog/cart/checkout widget you drop onto a site you already run | B2B portals, existing e-commerce sites |
| Hosted website | Your standalone white-label site built with the Site Builder | Your full online presence (Commerce+) |
| 3D Kitchen Designer | A designed kitchen turned into an order with one click | Cabinet/kitchen jobs (see Design → Order) |
Both customer-facing channels — the embeddable storefront and the hosted website — sell from the same catalog and feed the same Orders list. The hosted website and the storefront are Commerce+ features.
The order lifecycle
Every order follows the same pipeline. Most steps are driven by the inline status pill (on the list and on the order page), which both changes the status and stamps the matching date.
Quote → Ordered → In Production → Completed → Shipped → Delivered
↘
Canceled
| Status | What it means | How it usually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Quote | A request awaiting your pricing and the customer's acceptance | You save a new order, or a customer submits a request |
| Ordered | Confirmed job — production can begin | Quote accepted, a required deposit is met, you set a Due Date and confirm the prompt, or you mark it Ordered |
| In Production | The job is being built. If you use stations, the pill can show the current station | You move it to In Production |
| Completed | Manufacturing is finished; ready to pack and ship | You mark it Completed (often after quality checks) |
| Shipped | The order left your shop | You book a shipment or mark it Shipped |
| Delivered | The customer received it | You mark it Delivered, or all tracking numbers report delivered |
| Canceled | The job was called off | You cancel it manually |
When every tracking number on an order reports delivered, the order advances to Delivered automatically. See Package Tracking for how that works.
Note: Two older statuses have been retired. Inspection is no longer a separate stage — quality control now happens by marking each line item "inspected" (see Quality Control). Ready to Ship was folded into Completed. You may still occasionally see one of these on a very old order, but they aren't part of the current flow.
For a full walkthrough of statuses, the dates panel, and how dates get stamped, see Statuses & the Dates panel.
The order detail page
Click any order to open it. Across the top are the main tabs:
| Tab | What it holds | Availability |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | The order's items, options, dimensions, and the details sidebar | Free+ |
| Payments & Documents | Record payments, view balances, and send each Quote / Acknowledgement / Invoice | Commerce+ |
| Print Outs | Cut sheets, packing slip, documents, attachments, and labels to print | Commerce+ (build sheets/labels need Build) |
| Exports | Per-item CSV and ORD (Cabinet Vision) downloads | Build+ |
| Shipping | Set the delivery option, shop carrier rates, book, and add tracking | Commerce+ |
Note: Until a quote is accepted, the order shows only the Overview tab — the other tabs appear once the order is placed. On the Free plan inquiries stay as un-accepted quotes, so you'll typically see only Overview. Customers who sign in to their portal see only Overview and Payments & Invoice.
On the right is the details sidebar, with its own tabs: Details, Shipping, Billing, Notes (order notes and internal shop notes), Attachments, Dates, and Timeline. The Options menu (top of the page) lets you Edit, Duplicate, or Archive the order.
See Managing Orders for a complete tour of the list and detail page.
A few things new users get wrong
Two behaviors surprise almost everyone at first — knowing them up front saves a lot of confusion:
- Automated customer emails are OFF by default for new shops. Nothing is emailed to your customer automatically until you turn automation on. Day to day, you send each Quote, Acknowledgement, or Invoice yourself with the Send Email button on the Payments & Documents tab (and inside Print Outs). See Notifications.
- Editing a placed order is allowed and safe. Changing items or prices on an order that's already past Quote does not bounce it back to Quote — it keeps its status and simply generates a new invoice version. You do not need to cancel and recreate an order to fix a mistake. See Editing an order after it's placed.
Order add-ons
Beyond per-line options, you can attach add-ons to a whole order — a delivery surcharge, crating, a rush fee, and so on — once per order instead of per item. Add-ons can be standard catalog add-ons (filtered by the order's products) or custom one-offs, and they print on cut sheets, invoices, and packing slips. Learn more in Order Add-ons.
Everything updates live
The Orders list and the status pills update in real time. When a customer places an order or a teammate advances a job, everyone sees it without refreshing the page — and customers see their status change in their portal.