Job card format in Excel: one row per job, stage by stage

A party calls and asks where the brackets are. The office looks for the job card. The paper card is on the floor, in a tray near the press, with three stages ticked and a note in pencil. By the time someone walks across and calls back, the party has called twice. Nothing was lost. The job card simply lives in one place, and the question comes from another.

A job card register is a copy of every open job card in one sheet: one row per job, with its stage, its pieces done and its promised date. The paper card stays with the material. The register answers the phone.

Job card format: the fourteen columns

Change the list of stages to your own. A sheet metal unit may have shearing, bending and powder coating; a machine shop may have turning, milling and grinding. Keep it to the stages a supervisor can name without thinking, and keep "On hold" as the last one.

One job card, several stages: what goes in a row?

One row is one job card, and it shows only the stage the job is in now. When the job moves, change the stage and write the pieces done at the new stage. If you want a history of every move, keep the paper card on the floor: it carries the ticks and the dates. The sheet is for the question "where is it now?", and one row per job keeps it short enough to read every morning.

If a job is split, for example half the quantity goes ahead and half waits for material, make two job cards. Two rows with two stages are clearer than one row that is half in one place.

Three rules that keep the register honest

1. The supervisor updates it every evening, before leaving. Stage and pieces done, for every open job. A register updated once a week is a record, not a tracker.
2. A job on hold needs a reason and a name. "On hold" with an empty reason goes back to the supervisor. The reason is picked from the list.
3. The promised date is changed only with the customer told. If the date moves, write the new date and note in the remarks who told the party, and when.

How to read it every morning

• Red rows first. These are jobs past their promised date that have not left. Read the stage and the next action, and decide who calls the party today.
• Then the amber rows. A job on hold, or a job due in the next two days. A job due in two days that is still at machining needs a word now, not on the due date.
• Then sort by "Days left". The jobs at the top are the ones the floor should start first.

What to look at every week

Filter the jobs dispatched in the last week and the jobs on hold, and count three things:

• How often each hold reason appears. If "material short" leads every week, the problem sits in purchase.
• Which stage holds jobs longest. If many jobs wait at QC, the bottleneck is one person or one gauge.
• How many jobs left after their promised date. Count them for one week in your own factory, then see whether the number falls.

Sheet or system?

A shared sheet is enough while one or two supervisors update it every evening and the office reads it before the first call. It also builds the habit that matters most: every job has a stage, a date and a name.

The sheet starts to fail when supervisors must update it from a phone on the floor, when a job on hold is known only the next morning, and when sales still walks to the floor for a date. At that stage we set up a Production Job Tracker on your own job cards, in which every job card moves through your stages, a stuck job carries its reason and the owner gets one report in the evening. It is not production planning or costing software, and Tally stays for accounts. You can try the live demo without signing up.

For the shift-by-shift count of pieces on each machine, use the daily production report format beside this register.