We Said We’d Move Faster
The conversations at Connect 2026 were a good reminder of what matters (if you missed it, read our conference recap). Getting everyone together leads to great conversations about the features that can actually make a difference day-to-day. That said, our customers have always given us excellent feedback. We recognize that Fulcrum is both powerful in many ways, but also rough around the edges in others, and we need to deburr those rough edges much more quickly.
While we delivered on key areas including performance and AI over the past year, and we pushed out hundreds of updates, these still only addressed about 10% of the requests that came out of last year’s conference.
This is the first batch of feature changes we’re shipping following our conversations at this year’s Connect. We said we’d move faster, and this is just the start. More to come…
Job Tracking
A lot of operators have told us the drawing gets buried. Thumbnails were too small, and there was no fast way to clear the clutter and just look at the part.
We added a collapse-all button so operators can focus on the drawing. Thumbnails are sharper, and image defaults are smarter — the right visual is front and center without any manual fiddling.
“A conversation with Taylor from ISC on how much operators rely on quick visual scanning pushed me to spend more time on default image selection and larger thumbnails in job tracking. Conversations with Andrew from EleMETAL and Landon from ARMS Precision around releasing parts of a job while engineering reviews other parts of the BOM. Those discussions are incredibly valuable because they connect product decisions back to real people and real workflows." – Robert Vanderhoef, Creative Director
Packing & Shipping
Once a box is packed, it can get hard to know exactly what's in it and what's still left to ship. That came up a lot at Connect.
We added pack-by-box with auto-split labels so every box is clearly accounted for. Packing error messages are clearer, so you know exactly what went wrong. And a new shipping backlog report gives you a real-time view of what's packed and what still needs to go.
Purchase Orders & Receiving
PO date confusion kept coming up, especially on outside processing orders. We added clearer tooltips on PO dates, bulk receipt actions to reduce repetitive clicks, and vendor custom fields on auto-created outside processing POs.
"We heard feedback on the confusion around two date fields on a Purchase Order: Expected Receive Date and Promise Date. We've since added tooltips that define the difference between those two fields and how Fulcrum uses the data entered in those boxes. This feedback helps us better understand where confusion exists and how we can make the overall Fulcrum experience better every day." – Mitch LaFrance, Launch Manager
Items & Materials
A few things here I'm especially glad to get out the door:
Raw Material Catalog: ~23,000 new materials added. Bar, Tube, and Structural are live. Use the "Recently Added" filter on the materials grid to find them. Pipe is next.
Item grid now sorts by recently created/edited by default. No more scrolling alphabetically to find the part you just made. Before, people were hunting for newly created items because the grid sorted alphanumerically instead of by recency. Hearing about this made it an easy call to flip the Items grid to sort by most recently created by default.
Reactive Save button on the Item page. Save now stays grayed out until you've changed something, then turns blue. the Save button used to look the same whether you'd changed something or not, so we made it reactive. This is a small thing, but it removes a source of uncertainty that will hopefully lead to fewer lost edits. Our goal is for our user interface to be seamless for everyone using Fulcrum.
True Revision Support for SolidWorks imports. When an item already exists in Fulcrum, importing a SolidWorks BOM now lets you add it as a proper revision instead of creating a duplicate — for both assemblies and components.
Primary and document currency toggle on the Sales tab. Useful when you're based in one currency but sold the item in another. Toggle between the two directly on the item page.
"A lot of the feedback at Connect was about small frictions that add up over a full day of work. Operators told us they just want to see the drawing without distractions, so we added a collapse-all button in Job Tracking. We also cleaned up some scroll and reordering issues in Sales Order line items that had been bothering people for a while. There's more coming — a redesigned Invoicing Grid is almost out the door, and it'll be consistent with the rest of the app." – Anna Erickson, Product Designer
Routing Auditor (Beta)
One of the harder problems in a job shop is knowing whether your planned times are still accurate. Over time, we’ve learned that jobs drift — operators get faster, processes change, complexity creeps in — but the planned times in the BOM stay wherever someone sets them.
The Routing Auditor surfaces that drift. The BOM editor now shows a Job Avg next to each step's setup, labor, and machine time, pulled from your actual job history and compared against what's planned. When the two are out of sync, a colored chip flags it: green means you're within 10% of plan, yellow is 10–25% off, red is more than 25%
Click into any flagged step and you'll see the individual jobs behind the average, the operator on each one, and which jobs were excluded as outliers — forgotten clock-ins and bad data are filtered out automatically, so the numbers reflect reality. Hit Apply Avg to push the calculated average straight to planned time, or open Routing Settings to see every metric for the item at once and use Apply All Averages to fix every drift in one click.
The audit shows up anywhere the BOM is editable: items, draft quotes, sales orders, and active jobs.
This is a beta release. Learn more about how averages are calculated →
Nesting
Nestimation and "Download Nest Package" now work whether the DXF is uploaded to a specific operation or directly on the item page. We also added auto-association of materials to nestable operations. Drop a material on a routing with a nestable operation and it's associated automatically. Same if you add a nestable operation to a BOM that already has the material. Fewer clicks, fewer mistakes.
User Experience
Mobile and tablet nav closes automatically after you tap a page. The old behavior required tapping the close icon manually every time. We heard this was sometimes an annoyance on smaller screens.
Dark mode is in beta. This idea emerged after Robert Vanderhoef, Fulcrum’s Creative Director, talked with Abe Ingersoll, President of Badger Metal & Machine Fabrication, about working on a massive monitor. Abe sharing this gave Robert valuable perspective on how dark mode could improve the day-to-day experience of our customers. Reach out to your account manager if you want early access.
Real Time Personnel filter fix. Operators clocked into work order operations were disappearing from the Real Time Personnel view when filtering by department or work center. Jimmy Bagnola, Director of Operational Excellent at American Engineering & Metalworking (AEM), flagged this one. He shared that they display Real Time Personnel on a shop floor TV, so having operators vanish from the view was a real problem (that is now fixed!).
Public API: CreatedUtc on the FileAttachment GET endpoint. If you're building against the API and needed file creation date exposed, it's there now.
Quotes auto-mark as Sent when emailed through Fulcrum. When you send a quote through Fulcrum's email preview page, the quote now automatically transitions from Draft or Approved to Sent. Michael Rachul, General Manager at Special Metal Fabricating, was tired of the manual "Mark as Sent" follow-up click. We were too and now it's gone.
“Sitting down with the Rock Run Industries team and watching them work through the application was a really humbling experience. They walked us through why they were spending hours doing manual work instead of using an import feature — because it didn’t properly support real revisions. Seeing that in practice was a great reminder that we’re never just designing a single interaction on a single page.” – Annika Cederblad, Program Manager
PDF Cleanup
A couple of Connect conversations also surfaced some PDF document polish that was long overdue.
PO documents now show DUE instead of RECEIVE. POs go to vendors. “Receive” is internal language. “Due” is what the vendor actually needs to see.
Paid invoices now display clearly as paid. We had a small paid date at the top of the invoice, but the document still showed “Total Due” in large text. The total is still visible, but the paid status is now front and center.
Transcript
The best part of our annual Connect user conference is the straightforward conversations. People telling us what's working and what isn't, in plain terms. That's where this list came from. Based on your interest at the conference, we also accelerated Archie builder and it is now in beta. Sunny and I will be hosting a webinar to update you all on AI planning — stay tuned.
Even small product decisions can ripple across workflows, departments, and entire shops in ways that aren’t always obvious until you watch someone live through them. It is incredibly valuable to be able to talk through problems together and start building and testing solutions live with Fulcrum customers.
Keep the feedback coming.
