SpoolFab’s design is focused on helping you manage your fab shop. So if you are entering received materials for a given job, you will be able to use the WDTR (Which Drawings To Release) function to help you decide which drawings to release to fab. The WDTR function is described in document K0020 of the knowledge base at spoolfab.com.
If using WDTR you cannot find any drawings for which all required items are in stock, you will probably want to know what is short on each of the drawings that you selected but which could not be released to fab because of shortages. The shortage report provides this information.
In generating a shortage report, we start with all drawings that are currently selected. Any drawings that have already been released to fab are excluded from the report, as are any drawings that have been canceled. This amounts to deselecting any drawings with status F,I,M,C,O,P,Q,S,X,Y or Z as shown on the table below.

Any items appearing on a spool that has status F, I, M, C, O, P, Q or S are regarded as having already been consumed and therefore no longer in stock.

Example Shortage Report

Below is a sample shortage report based on five spools.

For comparison, here is a material summary based on the same five spools:

Note that the shortage report lists only those items that are short, and omits items for which enough stock is present to fabricate all five of the spools for which the shortage report was generated. In this particular instance, there are eleven elbows in stock, but twelve elbows are needed to fabricate all five spools. We decide to omit spool 110283 from the group and re-run the shortage report, with the result below:

The elbows no longer appear in the shortage report because there are enough of them to allow fabrication of all four spools.
Shortage reports reflect the current situation and are impacted by a variety of factors. For example, if you were to release to fab a spool (not on this list) that contains one or more of the featured elbows, that will reduce the stock of elbows and cause elbows to again appear on the shortage report.

Materials Summaries

A Materials Summary is based on the drawings that are selected when the summary is generated, except that any drawings that have been canceled are first removed from the list. Materials summaries are not affected by whether a drawing has been released to fab or not.

Inventory View

The Drawn quantities shown in Inventory View include all drawings other than those marked as Canceled, i.e. those marked with status X, Y, or Z. Inventory view is reached from Fabrication Status by selecting Tools, Job Inventory/Pricing, Items. To ensure that the figures are up to date, first select Tools/ Inventory Update Only. The date and time of the most recent inventory update are shown in the caption of the inventory view, as in the example below.

Inventory is affected when items are received, when spools are drawn or modified, and when drawings are released to fab or canceled. If at any time you are not sure whether there have been any changes since the last inventory update, select Tools, Inventory update only as shown below.