About the Material Traceability report

The Material Traceability Report follows a material or component lot number through your entire production chain — every purchase, manufacture, and order that the lot touched, including finished products reached through intermediate component manufactures. It's useful for identifying every affected product in a recall or quality-control investigation (such as for GPSR compliance).

This report is available in our Indie+ plans.

Finding this report:

Navigate to your Reports page
Click on the Material Traceability Summary under the Materials heading.

Running this report:

Select the material or component from the Material search box by typing the first couple of characters of its name or SKU.
Enter the Lot Number in the box immediately to the right.
Click the Run Report button to generate the results.

You can start a trace from either a raw material lot or a component lot — the report will follow the chain in either case. New to lot numbers? See About material lot tracking.

Interpreting the results of this report:

The report returns three headings. Under each heading is a table listing the data matched to the lot number you traced.

Purchases	Any purchases of the material for which you logged the matching lot number, including the originating purchase for the batch.
Manufactures	Every manufacture in the production chain that consumed this lot — both the manufactures that used your starting material directly and any later component manufactures that carried it further up the chain. The Chain Level column shows how many steps removed each manufacture is from your starting lot (Level 1 used the material directly), along with whether that step produced a component or a finished product.
Orders	Every order linked to a manufacture in the chain above. The Linked Manufacture column shows the batch code and its chain level, so you can see whether an order was reached directly or through an intermediate component.

Understanding chain levels

When you trace a lot, the report works outward from where that lot was first used and follows it through each stage of production. The Chain Level shows how many steps removed each manufacture is from the lot you entered:

Level 1 — the manufacture that used your traced lot directly.
Level 2 — a manufacture that used the output of a Level 1 manufacture.
Level 3 and beyond — each further step that built on the level before it, up to 10 levels.

Each level is also labelled with what it produced — a component or a finished product — so you can see where the lot moved from one stage to the next.

EXAMPLE: You trace a lot of cacao butter. The batch of chocolate base that used it is Level 1 (component). The truffles made from that chocolate base are Level 2 (finished product). Tracing the cacao butter on its own now surfaces the truffle orders, even though the cacao butter never appears directly on the truffle manufacture.

Following the full production chain

Many products are built in stages — for example, a raw material is made into a component, and that component is later used in a finished product. The report follows these links step by step: it starts from the lot you entered, finds the manufactures that used it, then finds the manufactures that used those outputs, and so on, until it reaches the orders that sold the finished products. Linking your manufactures to orders is what completes this chain through to the customer.

Tracing relies on recorded lot numbers. A manufacture links into the chain only where its lot number was recorded — so if a lot number is missing at any stage, the chain stops there and the products beyond it won't appear in the results. For complete recall coverage, record a lot number on every purchase and manufacture.

Read our blog post here for more details on How traceability is important for your small manufacturing business. For a wider overview of the app's traceability features, see About Traceability.

This report can be downloaded as a print-friendly PDF or a CSV in a spreadsheet for further analysis. The CSV includes the same Chain Level and Linked Manufacture detail shown on screen.