Full MRP systems are built for a planner whose whole job is the system. MRPLight is for the owner or the shop manager who has ten minutes a day for it.
Materials with quantities, costs and reorder points. Products with a recipe that says how much of each material one unit takes. Jobs that move through your stations and take their material off the shelf on the first scan.
No forecasting module, no multi-level routings, no accounting. If you need those you have outgrown this, and that is fine. Keep QuickBooks or your accountant's system for the books.
Pick a shop type and confirm your stations. Paste your material list from a spreadsheet. Add recipes to the products you make most; the rest can wait. Jobs without a recipe are still tracked, they just carry no material.
Inventory software tells you what you have. MRPLight starts from the jobs you owe customers and works back to whether the shop and the shelf can deliver them on time.
Material requirements planning: knowing what your open orders need, what you have, and what to buy. MRPLight does that part and ties it to a live view of the shop floor.
Yes. A job is a quantity of a product with a due date. It does not matter whether a customer or your own shelf is waiting for it.
Yes. Paid orders arrive as jobs, and shipping a job fulfills the order with tracking. Jobs can also be typed in, pasted from a spreadsheet or sent by API.
More: job shop tracking, raw material inventory, job costing, or pricing.
The demo shop has eleven weeks of jobs, scans and material in it. Nothing to install and no form to fill in.