Every bolt, every bearing — tracked from order to workbench

Sourcing is not the hard part; tracking is

Ask any maker what slows down a build and they’ll mention materials before they mention time. That is not because sourcing is hard, since most makers have their suppliers dialled in, but because tracking is. The moment you place an order the information fragments: the confirmation email is in your inbox, The tracking number is in a text from the supplier. The estimated delivery is on a courier website you have to remember to check. And the link between that shipment and the specific project that needs it? That lives entirely in your head.

For one project, this is manageable. For ten, it becomes a background hum of low-grade anxiety. Has the fabric for that commission arrived? You think so — there was a delivery notification at some point. But you’re not certain, and certainty matters when you’re planning tomorrow’s work.

Materials belong to the build, not the inbox

In Vidual, every part you order can be tied to the project it belongs to. Not as a note in a spreadsheet or a forwarded email — as a tracked shipment linked directly to a line in your work order.

You’re building a work order for a custom frame. The Bill of Materials lists Reynolds 853 tubing, a Chris King headset, a Paragon dropout kit. Each of those items has a status: in stock, ordered, not yet sourced. When you order the tubing from your supplier, you add a shipment to the project, enter the tracking number, and link it to the “Reynolds 853” line in the BOM. That’s it. No spreadsheet, no sticky note, no mental bookmark.

From that moment, the shipment lives inside the project. Anyone on your team who opens the build can see what’s been ordered, what’s in transit, and what’s arrived. The project becomes the single source of truth for everything that build needs — not just the conversation and the payments, but the physical materials too.

When it arrives, you know

Vidual integrates with Ship24 to track shipments across hundreds of carriers worldwide. When the status changes — dispatched, in transit, out for delivery, delivered — three things happen:

Your team gets notified. Everyone on the project sees a notification in their bell. Push notifications fire to their phone or desktop. Nobody needs to check a courier website — the update comes to them, in the context of the build it belongs to.

You get an email if you want one. Shipment email alerts are on by default but configurable in Settings. Some makers want the email nudge; others prefer to rely on in-app notifications. Either way, the email tells you what arrived, which carrier delivered it, and which project it’s for.

Your morning briefing mentions it. Vidual’s State of Play — the AI-powered dashboard that tells you what needs your attention each day — now includes shipment deliveries. If the Reynolds tubing arrived overnight, it shows up in your briefing alongside your flagged actions, client replies, and approaching deadlines. “The 853 tubing arrived via Royal Mail — ready for the build.” You know before you’ve opened your inbox that today’s the day you can start mitreing.

The link to the work order is the point

Other tools can track parcels. What they can’t do is connect a parcel to a specific line in a specific work order for a specific client’s commission. That connection is what makes the information actionable.

When a shipment is linked to a BOM entry, the delivered notification doesn’t just say “your parcel arrived.” It says “Reynolds 853 tubing has arrived — ready for the build.” That’s not a parcel update. That’s a signal that a build can move forward. It closes the loop between procurement and production in a way that no courier app ever could, because the courier app doesn’t know what the parcel is for.

It works for fabric, findings, gemstones — anything

We built this for framebuilders, but the pattern is universal. A bespoke tailor waits on a bolt of cloth from the mill, a jeweller on a specific sapphire from a dealer, a furniture maker on reclaimed oak boards from the yard. The shape of the problem is always the same: you ordered something specific, for a specific commission, and you need to know when it arrives so you can plan your work.

Vidual doesn’t care what’s in the box. It cares that the box is connected to a project, and that the right people find out the moment it’s delivered.

What your team sees

Shipment tracking isn’t just for the person who placed the order. Everyone on the project sees the status. If you’re a three-person workshop and one of you handles purchasing, the other two don’t need to ask “did the tubing arrive?” They can see it. The information is democratised across the team without anyone having to forward an email or shout across the workshop.

This matters more as you scale. At ten projects, the purchasing person might be tracking thirty or forty shipments. The rest of the team shouldn’t need to bother them every time they want to know if they can start on a particular build. They just open the project and look.

Control over noise

Not every maker wants an email every time a parcel moves. Some prefer to check Vidual when they’re ready. That’s why shipment email alerts live behind a toggle in Settings — on by default, off in one click. In-app notifications and push alerts still fire either way, and the State of Play still mentions deliveries in your morning briefing. You choose the level of noise that suits your workshop.

The compound picture

Step back and look at what a single project in Vidual now contains: the client conversation, the internal notes, the files and progress photos, the build stages, the Bill of Materials with quantities and costs, the payments and invoices synced to your books, the shipments tied to specific materials — and an AI briefing that weaves all of it into a morning summary that tells you exactly what needs your attention today.

That’s the complete record of a build, from the first conversation to the last delivery, in one place. And when the build is done, it stays — the record of how something extraordinary was made.

If you’re curious about the work order and payments flow, read One flow: work order, payment, books updated. For the bigger picture of how Vidual keeps the admin away from the making, start with Keep making, stop managing.