Shop Owners
Know what the last job actually made, what your quotes are winning, and what the shop does on a Tuesday you are not in the building.
Whether the shop makes money on the work it just did, before the month closes.
Most owners of a twenty-to-two-hundred-person shop know the bank balance to the dollar and the margin on last month's work to the nearest guess. The jobs that lose money get found at the year-end review, by which point the same part has been quoted the same way four more times. WorkCell closes that loop on the database the floor is already using: the quote carries the estimate, operators post labor and material against the job as it runs, and a Job cost object stamped on every posting means the job's real cost is readable before the parts leave the dock. Pricing is published rather than quoted, because an owner comparing options should not need three discovery calls to find out a number.
The job that ate three times the quoted hours shows up in a review months later, long after the same part was requoted at the same price. The arithmetic is not complicated and the forums do it out loud: forty hours worked against thirty billed is a one-point-three-three factor. The problem is not the math, it is that nobody wrote the hours down against the job.
The estimate comes out of experience, the job runs, and nothing ever compares the two. Win rate is a vibe, the jobs you lost on price are not recorded anywhere, and the ones you won and lost money on look identical in the books. Twenty years of pricing judgment and none of it is accumulating anywhere you can read.
Which job is hot, which customer gets called first, where the fixture lives, what the setup really takes. All of it is in a handful of heads, two of which are yours. You cannot take a week off, you certainly cannot sell the place, and every new hire's first ninety days are spent interviewing the same three people.
The systems you demoed were, in the words of one owner, bloated with a ton of stuff you pay for but do not use, and clunky enough that a new employee needs a week to find anything. Then the quote comes in per user per month and suddenly the forty people who should be clocking in are a line item you are trying to minimise.
One shop on Practical Machinist put over ten thousand dollars into an implementation before abandoning it, calling the process insanely time consuming. The experienced view on those threads is consistent: the real cost is in the learning and the implementation, not the monthly fee, and no vendor will put either number in writing before you have sat through two demos.
Job cost while the job is still open
Labor posts when an operator clocks off an operation and material posts when it is issued, each stamped with a Job cost object. A job running away from its estimate is visible in week two rather than at a review, which is the only window where the price, the process or the conversation with the customer can still change.
Quote to win to actual on one record
The estimate, the order, the work and the final cost are the same thread rather than four systems. Over a year that turns pricing from intuition into a record you can read: which parts you win, which you lose, and which ones you win and then give back on the floor.
Finite capacity scheduling that is actually finite
The scheduler plans against real machine and labor capacity rather than assuming infinite capacity, and a proposal run lets you test a sequence before committing it. When a customer asks you to pull a job in, you can see which promised deliveries move before you answer the phone call.
Dashboards built on the real postings
Throughput, open jobs, estimate against actual, cash in and out, and what shipped, all read from the transactions the shop already created. Nothing here is a number somebody typed into a reporting spreadsheet on Friday, so there is no version of the truth that disagrees with the ledger.
Published pricing, unlimited users
Core is $995 a month, Professional $2,495, Scale $4,995, Enterprise is quoted, and annual is twenty percent off. Every plan includes unlimited users. Implementation is a one-time fee: $2,500, $5,000 or $7,500 by plan, scoped for Enterprise. Those are the numbers, on a page, before you talk to anybody.
The floor keeps its own record
Operators post at terminals at the machine, so the data comes from the people doing the work instead of a clerk transcribing travelers. One owner put the objection perfectly: zero interest in bringing in a full-time employee just for data entry. If a system needs that person, it has already failed.
| Task | What Changes |
|---|---|
| Quote one real job in it | Take the next RFQ and estimate it in WorkCell alongside however you do it today. You will see immediately whether the estimate structure matches the way your shop actually thinks about setup, run and material, which is the fastest honest test of fit there is. |
| Put one machine's work in the schedule | Load the queue for your busiest machine and let the scheduler plan it against real capacity. Comparing that sequence with the one in your head is where most owners either trust the thing or find the assumption it got wrong, and both answers are useful on day one. |
| Clock one operator onto one operation | Pick someone who will tell you the truth and have them run a shift on a terminal. If a good operator finds it slower than paper, you need to know in week one rather than after you have rolled it out to forty people and spent your credibility. |
| Read that job's cost at lunch | Open the job while it is still on the machine and look at what has posted. Seeing hours and material against a live job, without asking anybody for a report, is the thing most owners have never had, and it is the habit the whole system is worth having for. |
| Compare the quote to the actual | When the job ships, read the estimate against what it really cost. Do that for five jobs and you will know something about your pricing that twenty years of instinct has not told you, usually about one family of parts you have been quoting wrong the entire time. |
Quotes and orders, with the estimate that every job gets measured against.
ProductionFinite scheduling and the shop floor terminals that post the actuals.
AccountingGeneral ledger, AP and AR fed by the same postings as the jobs.
AnalyticsThe numbers you check on a Tuesday you are not in the building.
The person who has to make your margin number survive an audit.
Plant ManagersWhoever runs the floor on the Tuesday you are not in the building.
Machine ShopsHigh-mix, low-volume shops where margin is decided job by job.
Job ShopsQuote-driven shops whose pricing judgment has nowhere to accumulate.
What does it cost, and why can nobody in this industry just tell me?
Core is $995 a month, Professional $2,495, Scale $4,995, and Enterprise is quoted. Annual billing is twenty percent off. Every plan has unlimited users. Those numbers are published because the usual answer, book a demo and we will discuss investment, wastes your afternoon and ours.
What is the implementation actually going to run me?
A one-time fee: $2,500 on Core, $5,000 on Professional, $7,500 on Scale, scoped for Enterprise. Your own time is the larger cost, as the forums rightly insist, and it concentrates in loading items, bills of material and routings. We would rather size that with you than discover it in month three.
Is this priced per user? I have forty guys clocking in.
No. Every plan includes unlimited users, so a shop of forty pays the same as a shop of eight on the same tier. Per-seat pricing is why shops end up with one shared floor login, and a shared login is why the labor record is worthless. We would rather not create that incentive.
Do I have to run it in the cloud? I will not put my shop's data on someone else's server.
No. Cloud and on-prem are both offered, and it is the same product either way. That objection comes up on every machinist forum thread about this, and it is a reasonable one. If you want it on a box in your own building, that is a supported configuration rather than a special project.
Am I going to need a full-time person just doing data entry?
No, and if you did we would not expect you to buy it. Operators post labor and material at terminals as they work, receipts are entered at the dock, and job cost accumulates from those postings. The one-time load of items, bills of material and routings is real work, but it is one time.
What is not built yet that I should know before I call?
There is no MRP run, no EDI, no document control or electronic signatures, no payroll, budgeting or fixed assets, no supplier portal, and no bank feeds. QuickBooks Online and Shopify are the only live integrations. SOC 2 is in progress, not complete. Decide with that list in front of you.
See it from your seat.
Tell us how many people you run, what you make, and the last job you know you lost money on, and we will tell you straight whether WorkCell is worth your time.