You define the processes. The board follows the material.

Every other system makes you fit its manufacturing order. This one has no opinion about what you make. Name your steps, say where the material goes, and the floor is on screen. A candle shop, a millwork shop and a co-packer run the same engine.

Join the waitlist See the three gaps

Pre-launch. No credit card and no demo call. Edit the board on the right first.

Your production line

Rename a step, drop one, add one. The board below rebuilds as you type.

Live floor Synthetic data, shown so you can see the shape of the thing.

Three gaps every shop already lives with

None of these is a missing feature. Each one is a modelling decision the rest of the category made years ago and cannot walk back.

Your material disappears while you are making things

Pull components for a run and they leave raw materials. They are not finished goods yet. For the whole length of an active production they are nowhere: inventory value is wrong and cost of sales is a guess until the order closes.

The workaround the accounting community recommends is to create an inventory site called “WIP” and move items by hand. QuickBooks community guidance · Enterprise only

Here the deposit carries the account. A phase moves material from one deposit to the next, so work in process balances by construction, not at month end.

A batch cannot be split, and regulation assumes it can

A run gets blended from three supplier lots and packed into two presentations with two expiry dates. That is an ordinary Tuesday in food, cosmetics and supplements, and it is the case the market leader refuses.

“The entire MO quantity must be assigned to a single batch. You cannot split one MO into multiple batches.” Katana support documentation 21 CFR 111.415(f) requires a lot number for each packaged and labeled lot from a finished batch. US Code of Federal Regulations · dietary supplements

Nobody records what stopped the work

A supervisor asks five questions a day: where is the work, what step is next, who has it, what is holding it up, and can it still ship on time. The fourth one lives on a sticky note, so the delay never becomes data.

Here a phase does not close without a reason. Not free text. A short seeded list, so a month of stops becomes something you can sort.

Same engine, two very different reasons to buy

The processes are yours to define, so the product does not need a version per industry. What changes is which gap costs you money.

Regulated: food, supplements, cosmetics

A recall report that closes in under four hours, with mass balance, on a batch blended from three lots and packed into two presentations. That is the BRCGS clock, timed, and it bites long before the FDA does.

Genealogy as a graph, forward and backward
Expiry on the lot, not on the SKU
Every step signed and server-sealed, at the time of performance
Yield outside its band opens an investigation on its own

Made to order: millwork, glass, assembly

A door at 90×210 and one at 70×180 are both “one unit” and they do not cost the same. Moving-average costing flattens exactly the variation your business creates, and that is what the two cheapest tools in this market use.

Cost from the actual input lots consumed, frozen when consumed
Component quantity from a formula over your own measurements
Offcuts return to stock as a child lot, not as scrap
Batches of one are normal here, and the board is built for it

What the price tags do not tell you

Competitor figures are their own published prices and documentation, checked August 2026. Verify them yourself. We cite nothing we cannot show.
Capability	Katana	Stocksmith	scalebatch
Lot traceability	Add-on · $249/mo	Top two tiers only	Included
Split a batch mid-run	Refused by design	No per-lot balance	The base model
See the journal entry before it posts	Not available	Not available	Preview, then approve
Costing method	Moving average only	Weighted average only	Actual cost of the lots consumed
Quality module	Not available	Not available	Inspection, hold, release, rework
Runs with no accounting connected	Pushes to QuickBooks Online	Needs QBO Plus or Advanced	Standalone or connected
Comparable monthly cost	$896	$199	$149 – $749

The alert does not depend on the AI

Material expiring in three days is a query with a date on it. Yield outside its band is a comparison. Neither should sit behind an upgrade, and here they do not: deterministic observers measure and raise the signal with its evidence, on every plan.

What the senior agent adds is the part a query cannot do: why this yield dropped across shifts, suppliers and input lots, and what to change. It proposes; it never measures.

Priced by what you produce

By production orders per month. Unlimited users, because charging per seat makes an owner ration who can open the board, and the person you most need on it is the operator recording scrap.

$149/mo A single line, one facility Order volume per tier: being set

$349/mo Several lines or a growing co-packer Order volume per tier: being set

$749/mo Multi-facility, high mix Order volume per tier: being set

Traceability and quality are included in all three. Katana charges $249 a month for lot traceability alone. That is the exact capability people leave it over.

Get in before the first shop does

scalebatch is being built now and has no customers yet. We would rather say that than fake a testimonial. Early access goes out by vertical, and the shops on this list shape what ships first.

You are on the list.

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