Getting Started with CraftOps
You have signed up for CraftOps and you are looking at a fresh dashboard. The good news is that getting your shop fully configured takes less time than you might expect. This guide walks you through the essential first steps: creating your shop profile, adding your machines, building your material inventory, setting up pricing rules, and inviting your team members. By the end, you will have a fully operational CraftOps account ready to accept and manage jobs.
Creating Your Shop Profile and Adding Machines
Your shop profile is the foundation of everything in CraftOps. Start by navigating to Settings and filling in your shop details: business name, address, contact information, operating hours, and a brief description of your capabilities. This information populates your customer portal and marketplace listing, so take a moment to make it accurate and professional. Upload your shop logo, and CraftOps will use it on quotes, invoices, and the customer-facing portal automatically.
Next, head to the Machines section and add each piece of equipment in your shop. For every machine, you will enter the make, model, build volume or work area dimensions, and the types of materials it can handle. CraftOps uses this information to match incoming jobs with compatible machines and to calculate accurate time and cost estimates. If you have 3D printers that support OctoPrint or Bambu Cloud, you can connect them during this step to enable real-time monitoring. For laser cutters and CNC machines, you will configure the machine type, power or spindle specifications, and supported file formats. Even if you start with just a couple of machines, you can always add more later as your shop grows.
Building Your Material Inventory and Pricing
With machines configured, the next step is setting up your material inventory. Go to the Materials section and add each material you stock. For filament, you will enter the type (PLA, PETG, ABS, TPU, and so on), the brand, color, spool weight, and cost per spool. CraftOps automatically calculates the cost per gram. For resin, you enter the bottle volume and cost. For sheet materials used in laser cutting or CNC work, you enter the sheet dimensions, thickness, and cost per sheet. The platform supports custom material types as well, so if you work with specialty materials like carbon fiber composite or flexible TPU blends, you can define those with their own cost structures.
Once your materials are loaded, move to the Pricing section. Here you configure your shop rates, including machine time rates per hour for each machine type, labor rates, and default markup percentages. You can create pricing tiers for different service levels, such as standard turnaround versus rush orders. CraftOps uses these rates combined with your material costs to automatically generate quotes when customers submit job requests. You can always adjust individual quotes before sending them, but having solid defaults saves significant time on every order.
Inviting Team Members and Configuring Roles
If you have employees or collaborators, the Team section lets you invite them by email. Each team member gets their own login and can be assigned one of several roles. Shop managers have full access to all features, including pricing and financial data. Operators can view and update job statuses, manage machine queues, and log material usage, but they cannot modify pricing or access financial reports. The view-only role is useful for stakeholders who need visibility without the ability to make changes.
Each team member can set their notification preferences to control which alerts they receive. An operator might want to know about machine errors and job assignments but not about new customer signups. A shop manager might want daily summary emails covering revenue, job completions, and inventory alerts. These preferences keep everyone informed without overwhelming anyone with irrelevant notifications.
Tip: Before you start accepting customer jobs, run a test job through the entire system yourself. Create a sample job, assign it to a machine, mark materials as consumed, move it through each status stage, and generate an invoice. This dry run helps you catch any configuration gaps and gives you confidence that the workflow matches how your shop actually operates.
What's Next
With your shop profile complete, machines connected, materials loaded, pricing configured, and team members invited, you are ready to start managing real jobs in CraftOps. The next post in this series covers job management in detail, walking through how jobs are created, assigned, tracked, and completed. If you want to go deeper on machine integration first, check out our guide on connecting OctoPrint, Bambu, and other machine platforms. And remember, CraftOps support is always available if you hit any snags during setup. Your first week sets the foundation for everything that follows, so take the time to get it right.