What we build

Forge: the shop floor and the office, one database.

Armory Works ships open-source software and charges for the help. Forge is the flagship — the shop floor and the office on the same page, for one-shop operators through mid-sized companies. Free to run, supported when you want it.

Forge is in acceptance testing with live shops. Built in public.
Configured to your shop

Most ERPs ship every module on. We ship the modules you need.

Setup starts with an interview, not a feature checklist. The discovery wizard asks about your shop's shape; nine prebuilt presets cover the common cases; a custom builder handles the exception. Capabilities you don't enable don't show up — not in the navigation, not in dialogs, not in the API.

Forge discovery wizard first question: How many people on your team?
1 / 4 · Interview

Setup starts with a conversation.

Shop size, mode (job-shop / make-to-stock / mixed), single-site or multi, regulated work or not. Eight questions, plain English.

Forge discovery wizard mid-flow showing job-shop versus make-to-stock and quality department questions
2 / 4 · Refine

The questions get specific.

Do you have a quality department? Track lots? Drop-ship? Each answer shapes the recommended capability set.

Forge recommended preset card with a capability list and check or cross next to each
3 / 4 · Recommend

A preset, not a license SKU.

Nine prebuilt shop shapes plus a custom builder. The recommendation explains why each capability is on or off — "Quality module excluded because you said no QC department" instead of an opaque license tier.

Forge dashboard after a moderate preset is applied; sidebar shows only the modules included in the preset
4 / 4 · Apply

The app reflects your answer.

Capabilities you didn't enable don't show up — not in the navigation, not in dialogs, not in the API. Every flip is logged in the capability audit trail.

Default install

Forge with every capability enabled; sidebar maximally cluttered

Your install

Forge with a moderate preset applied; sidebar trimmed to only the modules in use

Same database, same code, same release. Two installs of Forge can show meaningfully different sets of features — and that's the point.

Flagship · Forge — MES/MRP/ERP

From job cards on the floor to quotes and invoices in the office — in one stack. Open source, yours to download and run.

Floor

Kanban production

Drag jobs across configurable tracks. Real-time sync across devices. Shop floor, office and remote all see the same board.

Shop floor + mobile

Shared touchscreen stations for wall-mounted clock-in and scanning. Mobile-friendly site for walking the floor with a phone. Same live data, both directions.

Chat & notifications

Built-in team chat — direct messages, group rooms, file and job sharing — plus real-time notifications with per-user preferences. One less subscription; the conversation stays next to the work it's about.

Shop floor & mobile

Two surfaces. One job done. Zero ERP exposure.

The floor's job is clocking in, scanning, and moving work — not navigating menus. Kiosks and phones run a task-focused UI that keeps the active job front and center. The audit trail is identical either way; what changes is how it got recorded.

Forge kiosk full-bleed Tap your badge welcome screen
1 / 4 · Sign in

Tap your badge.

Wall-mounted, shared. RFID, NFC, or barcode + PIN. No password screen, no Single Sign-On dance, no email-and-OTP.

Forge kiosk tile grid of an operator's assigned jobs
2 / 4 · See your work

Just your jobs, big enough to read.

Square tiles, gloves-friendly, color-stripe by stage. Only the work assigned to this operator. No filters to learn.

Forge kiosk job detail with three large action buttons and a scan field
3 / 4 · Do the work

Five buttons and a scanner.

Start Timer, Mark Complete, Hold. Scan a part to advance, scan a job to clock onto it. The system fills in the rest.

Forge kiosk after Mark Complete with an audit confirmation toast and the next job sliding in
4 / 4 · Advance & next

Done — on to the next.

Confirmation, audit row written (via: kiosk-001), next job slides in. Auto-timeout if you walk away.

Forge mobile login screen on a phone-sized viewport
1 / 4 · Sign in

Open the browser, you're in.

No app store, no install. Add to home screen and it acts native. Biometric unlock if your phone supports it; PIN fallback otherwise.

Forge mobile vertical list of jobs sized for thumbs
2 / 4 · See your work

Same jobs, sized for thumbs.

The same queue the kiosk shows, laid out as a vertical list. Tap a card to open it.

Forge mobile scan UI with the camera viewfinder and barcode targeting reticle
3 / 4 · Do the work

Camera as scanner.

Point your phone at a barcode. The system advances the job, opens the next QC step, or clocks you on — whatever the scan implies.

Forge mobile post-action confirmation showing the same audit row written via mobile-web
4 / 4 · Advance & next

Same audit row.

Same job, same stage transition, same operator, same timestamp. The only field that differs: via: mobile-web.

Office

Forge office UI: dense kanban with side panels and integrations visible

Floor

Forge kiosk job detail: minimal UI with three large action buttons

Same database, same activity log, same job number. Each surface fits the work in front of it — the floor stays focused on jobs, the office keeps full reach over planning, books, and reports.

Office

Quote to cash

Estimates, quotes, sales orders, shipments, invoices, payments — one flow, one record. And the books can now live here too: keep them in Forge, or connect the accounting system you already run.

Customer portal

A magic-link portal where your customers see their own orders, quotes, invoices, and shipments — and accept quotes without a phone call. Off by default, on when you want it.

People & compliance

Employee portal, W-4 / I-9 workflows, training LMS, certifications, time correction audit trail.

Reports & dashboards

A 30+ report library across sales, production, inventory, people, and finance — plus a builder for the report we didn't think of. Configurable dashboards per role, charts included.

Books

Accounting, built in

A real double-entry ledger inside Forge: journal and general ledger, trial balance, P&L, balance sheet and cash flow, AR/AP aging, period and year-end close, bank reconciliation. Posted entries are permanent — corrections happen in the open, the way an auditor wants them. Mistyped something? Find it, reverse it, repost it — the history stays honest.

Learn the books, safely

A built-in training academy with a sandbox ledger: realistic history, deliberately planted mistakes, and guided fix-it exercises checked against the actual books. Two tracks — one teaches double-entry from scratch, one un-teaches QuickBooks habits. Reset and try again, zero risk.

Leaving QuickBooks

A guided cutover loads your opening balances from the old system's closing trial balance and proves the two match before the new books go live. Until they tie out, Forge won't let you flip the switch — on purpose. Old system stays as a read-only archive.

Integrations

Rather keep your books where they are? Eight accounting connectors with real OAuth + HTTP behind each — QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks, Sage, NetSuite, Wave, Zoho — or the built-in ledger, switchable later. Multi-carrier rate-shopping across UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL simultaneously. USPS address verification, SMTP, DocuSeal signing. There's optional AI too — fully local, off by default. It gets its own page.

Planning

Parts & inventory

BOMs, lot and serial tracking, multi-location bins, cycle counts, reservations and replenishment, barcode scanning, low-stock alerts, auto-PO generation. Real warehouse discipline, not a quantity column.

Planning: MRP & scheduling

Material requirements planning against real BOMs and lead times, master scheduling, finite-capacity work-center scheduling, OEE tracking. The planning conversation moves out of the spreadsheet.

Visit Forge Source on GitHub
Who runs Forge

Armory Plastics

An injection molding shop running [TODO: machine count] presses. Job tracking, scheduling, and the books run in Forge — the floor it was designed on.

Compliance & standards

Built to meet the bar.

Armory Works is a small firm selling self-hosted software, and we don't sell compliance certifications (those belong to the operator, not to us). But the products we ship meet the recognized standards. Where the architecture has to do the work, it does the work.

WCAG 2.2 Level AA

Full accessibility compliance, enforced at build time via ESLint rules and axe-core audits in CI.

Section 508 (via WCAG 2.2 AA)

Federal accessibility requirements met through the WCAG work.

OWASP Top 10 alignment

CSP, HSTS, parameterized queries, rate limiting, rotating tokens.

GDPR-friendly architecture

Self-hosted means the operator is the data controller. Zero telemetry; soft-delete with audit trail.

21 CFR Part 11 capable

Immutable audit log, user attribution, tamper-evident timestamps, signatures. Capable, not certified.

IRS / USCIS form flows

W-4, I-9, and state withholding workflows with signatures, retention timestamps, and per-submission audit trail.

Roadmap · What’s next

Native mobile app

The PWA already runs offline today — Service Worker cache, IndexedDB queue, sync-conflict resolution. The native app is next: camera-first scanning, tighter offline guarantees, push notifications routed through the platform.

EDI transports

The EDI seam ships today. AS2 and SFTP transports for a specific trading partner are built during customization. Ask.

Got a shop problem we don’t cover?

Armory Works is structured to carry more than one product over time. If Forge doesn’t fit, the shortest path is telling us the shape of the problem. Sometimes the answer is a side project, sometimes it’s a referral, sometimes it’s already on the backlog.

Tell us the shape