Label Print Tracker — Production Job Tracker

Production tracking for a label printing business. One system covers the whole journey of an order: from the purchase order landing on a desk, through prepress, the presses, slitting, QC and packing, to the labels leaving the building — plus a public portal where the customer can follow their own order without phoning anyone.

Built for the floor, not for a boardroom. Every screen answers "what is the status of this job, and who is holding it up".

Stack: Next.js 14 (App Router) · TypeScript · Supabase (Postgres + Auth + RLS) · Tailwind CSS v3 · GSAP · deployed on Vercel

---

Table of contents

• The two audiences
• Features
• The pipeline
• Departments and permissions
• Architecture
• Data model
• API reference
• Getting started
• Environment variables
• Deployment
• Design system
• Security notes
• Known limitations

---

The two audiences

The same job data is presented twice, in two different vocabularies.

Staff — /admin (authenticated) The control room. Every job, every stage, every internal note, machine queues, shelf stock, analytics and CSV export. Department login decides what can be changed.

Customers — /track (public, no login) A customer types their PO number and sees a clean pipeline of where their order is. Internal notes, machine assignments, other customers' work and anything commercially sensitive never cross into this view — it reads from dedicated Postgres views (client_job_view, client_status_log_view), not from the jobs table directly.

Shop floor — /display (authenticated) Wall-mounted screens for the production rooms, showing the live queue per machine. Auto-refreshing and designed to be readable across a room.

---

Features

Job tracking

• 16-stage pipeline with server-enforced prerequisites — a job cannot jump to Packing without passing QC. Enforced in the API, not just in the dropdown.
• Job types — New, Repeat and Artwork Changed. Repeat orders automatically skip the sample and shade-card stages, which a repeat has already been through.
• Automatic job card numbers — sequential per month (AUG26-1, AUG26-2), allocated by a Postgres counter table so two people adding jobs at the same moment cannot collide.
• Urgent flag with 1–5 priority, surfaced in sorting and on the displays.
• Full audit trail — every stage completion timestamped, every status change logged with the department that made it. Nothing is silently overwritten.
• Inline delivery date editing, restricted to Dispatch and Admin.
• Job duplication — one click copies an existing job into the Add Job form with fresh dates and a blank PO.

Printing and machines

• Printing units — Unit-1 runs Offset, Unit-2 runs Flexo. The unit is the only thing asked for; the printing method is derived from it server-side, so the two can never disagree.
• Machine registry with per-machine run speed, used to estimate how long a queued job will take.
• Machine queues — jobs assigned to a specific press, reorderable.
• Utilisation reporting across machines.

Quality and dispatch

• QC stage with remarks, captured on the job.
• Partial dispatch via print runs — an order can be printed and shipped in several cycles, each run tracked separately through Printing → QC → Packing → Dispatched with its own quantity.
• Scheduled release orders — a PO broken into planned releases with target quantities and dates, tracked against actuals.
• On-time delivery analytics, recorded automatically at dispatch and reported by month.
• CSV export of jobs, scheduled releases and print runs.

Label stock

Printed labels that physically exist on a shelf, in three kinds:

Kind	Meaning
Remaining	Unshipped balance of a partially dispatched order — already promised to that job
Extra	Surplus beyond the order: press over-run, or spares from a reprint
Manual	Stock someone found that the system never knew about

Stock rows outlive the jobs they came from (ON DELETE SET NULL, with job identity snapshotted onto the row) — closing a PO a year later must not erase the record of 40,000 labels sitting on a rack.

• Repeat-order stock match — while a job is being entered, the app checks the shelf for that PM code and shows what is already there, before the quantity is decided. Remaining stock is reported separately and excluded from the usable figure, since it belongs to an open order.

Communication

• Global internal-note feed — notes written on any job, from any stage, surface in a floating panel across the whole admin area with author, department and job. Previously a note was only visible to whoever opened that job. Polls every 25 seconds; opt-in desktop notifications.
• Daily overdue alert — a Vercel cron job at 9:00 AM IST finds active jobs past their delivery date and alerts Admin by email and WhatsApp.
• Customer notifications via Resend (email) and WATI (WhatsApp) — see Security notes before enabling.

---

The pipeline

Sixteen stages. Fourteen are sequential; On Hold and PO Closed sit outside the sequence.

#	Stage	Owner
1	PO Received	Prepress
2	Artwork Pending	Prepress
3	Plate Status	Prepress
4	Job Card Done	Prepress
5	Sample Printing	QC
6	Shade Card Sent	QC
7	Shade Card Approved	QC
8	In Printing	Production
9	Slitting	Postpress
10	Quality Check	QC
11	Packing	Dispatch
12	Ready to Dispatch	Dispatch
13	Partial Dispatch	Dispatch
14	Dispatched	Dispatch
—	On Hold	Production / Postpress
—	PO Closed	Admin only

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗