Optional Features
What the Optional features card in Settings is, what each feature does, and how to turn one on or off.
Optional Features
Some steps only suit some farms, such as checking that pallets were scanned onto the truck before an order ships. Sporeline keeps these as optional features. Each one is off until your farm turns it on, and turning it off puts things back as they were.
Who can do it
Managers and Owners. Workers and Viewers don’t see the card.
Turn a feature on or off
- Open Settings in the sidebar.
- Scroll to the Optional features card, below Lot tracking.
- Click the switch next to the feature.
The change saves right away. There is no Save button. You see a message such as Loading scan turned on. While one switch is saving, the others wait.
The features
| Feature | What turning it on does |
|---|---|
| Short lines at packing | When an order line has fewer units allocated than ordered, Mark packed warns you. |
| Loading scan | Ship warns you if the order’s pallets weren’t scanned onto the truck first. |
| Confirm delivery | The order worklist asks for the delivered date and who received the order before you mark it invoiced. |
| Site transfers | Send lots from one of your sites to another through an In transit location, and receive them with shortages and extras flagged. Units in transit can’t be sold or allocated. See Site Transfers. |
| Payments | Instead of marking an order paid in one step, you record each payment (amount, method, reference) until the balance is zero. This is ignored when the farm uses QuickBooks Full invoicing. |
| Lab next stages | A plate, culture or liquid culture can move only to the next stages its item type lists. |
| Status locations | Adds BOXED, PACKED, SINGLES and EXP as locations a lot can be moved to. EXP is a place, not a discard. Turning it on again doesn’t make duplicates, and an existing location with the same name is reused. |
| Lot actions on phones | The Sporeline phone app offers Move, Change stage, Discard (or Report contamination where a Manager releases) and Use in batch on a lot, with or without signal. Off, the phone shows lots read-only. Kiosk scan stations don’t offer lot actions yet. See Lot Transactions. |
| Counts | Turns on counts by scan: count a place and everything under it, review the differences, and post approved changes. See Counts by Scan. |
| Blind counts | New counts start blind, hiding expected quantities from the person counting until the count is submitted. |
| Planning | Adds a read-only Planning page for Managers and Owners: what is on hand, what becomes ready and what is owed by ship week, per recipe, with a suggested quantity to make. Also on Configuration > Lifecycle. See Planning. |
| Raw materials | Adds a Materials page: a catalog of what the farm buys, with stock on hand kept by receipts, use in a batch and adjustments, reorder points, and a Catalog item choice on recipe ingredients. See Raw Materials. |
| Share customer details with AI assistants | A connected AI assistant can read customers’ contact and billing details for Managers and Owners. Off, it sees names only. Workers always see names only, and Viewers can’t look up customers through an assistant at all. |
| Approve every AI change | Every change a connected AI assistant makes waits for a person to approve it in Sporeline before it applies, not only the bulk and destructive ones (those always wait). See Approve AI Changes. |
| Worker switch on shared phones | A phone or handheld shared by several workers asks who is working (badge scan or tap a name) and records that person on every move, stage change, harvest, discard and lot action. Also on Configuration > Stations. See Shared Handhelds. |
| Accounting export (file) | Adds an export of your invoiced orders to your books as one file (CSV, or a Sage 300 AR invoice batch), each invoice sent once. Pick the file under Settings > Integrations. Can’t be on while QuickBooks is set to Full invoicing. See Accounting Export. |
| Notification rules | Managers can make rules that send a message to roles or named members when something happens on the farm. See Notification Rules. |
Features with more than two choices
Short lines at packing and Loading scan have a stricter setting as well. Short lines at packing can refuse a short line instead of warning, and Loading scan can require the scan instead of warning. The card shows More choices with where to find them: Configuration > Fulfillment, under When Mark packed finds a short line and Loading scan before shipping. A feature set to its stricter choice still shows as on, and turning it off sets it back to the default.
Several of these features can also be set from a Configuration tab. See Configuration Tabs.
Setting up a production farm before go-live
A new farm starts with every optional feature off and no stage rules, so nothing changes until someone decides it should. A farm moving its whole operation onto Sporeline usually needs several of these switched on and its item types filled in before the first real day. This section lists that set and where each part lives. Managers and Owners can change all of it.
Switches on the Optional features card
Turn on Site transfers if lots travel between your own sites, such as from a production plant to a packing site. Units on a transfer sit in an In transit location and can’t be sold or allocated until the other site receives them. See Site Transfers.
Turn on Confirm delivery if you want the delivered date and who received each order recorded before it is invoiced, and Loading scan if pallets should be scanned onto the truck before Ship. Loading scan warns at first; to make the scan required, open Configuration > Fulfillment and change Loading scan before shipping.
Turn on Short lines at packing if Mark packed should catch a line with fewer units allocated than ordered. Turning it on warns; to refuse instead, use When Mark packed finds a short line on the same Fulfillment tab. Left off, packing allows a short line and the shortfall shows when the order ships.
Turn on Counts to count a place and everything under it by scan and post the approved differences. See Counts by Scan.
Turn on Raw materials if you want a catalog of what the farm buys, with stock kept by receipts and use. See Raw Materials.
Turn on Planning only once the farm meets its condition. The Planning page shows no numbers while the farm has any unit-tracked block still in production or any standing order that is on and has not ended, and it says which one in a plain sentence. See Planning.
Stage rules on each item type
Stage rules live on Configuration > Item types. Open a type with the pencil and set them for each stage under Stages:
- Hold: not usable yet keeps everything in that stage from being used as an inoculum or put on an order. This is how a quarantine or awaiting-release stage works.
- Released by a Manager means only a Manager or Owner can move an item out of that stage.
- A QC checklist, one question per line, is asked when an item leaves the stage, and Required to leave makes a passing answer necessary. See QC Checkpoints and Release.
- A planned length in days or hours makes items in the stage due and then overdue, and you choose whether leaving early needs a reason. Without a planned length nothing in the stage is ever due. See Stage Schedules and Due Today.
- The Discarded stage is reached only through a discard with a reason, and each type keeps its own list of discard reasons on the same form.
Bags of spawn need item types of the Grain spawn or Liquid cultures kind. An item of the Cultures kind can’t inoculate a batch, so a bag set up as a culture type won’t be offered as a source when you start one.
Lot tracking and batch fields
If every lot of some types must record its spawn generation, tick those types in the Lot tracking card in Settings, under Lots of these types must record a spawn generation. See Lots and Spawn.
Readings you take on a batch, such as temperatures, times or moisture, go under Configuration > Custom Fields > Batch Fields, each with a unit, a target minimum and maximum, and the stage it is read at. A reading outside its range is marked in the batch’s history. See Configuration Tabs.
Contamination types and the other pick lists are under Configuration > Enumerables.
Orders sent from another system
If a customer portal or another ordering system sends orders to Sporeline, have it send an Idempotency-Key header with every new order, so a retry after a lost answer never makes a second order. See Retries from a portal in API Quickstart.
When something goes wrong
- “These settings were changed since you opened this page.” — someone else saved settings first. Reload the page and turn the switch again.
- “Could not save that.” or another error message — the switch stays where it was. Check your connection and try again.
- You don’t see the Optional features card — your role can’t change these. Ask a Manager or Owner.