Inventory and Services 201 on Sage 50 Canadian Edition

2 minute read time.

Let’s continue Inventory and Services topic in Sage 50 Canada by introducing Build from Item Assembly and Build from Bill of Materials. These two methods allow creating finished items from one or more components available in the inventory. Depending on the end product you might want to use one or the other method. The main difference between Item Assembly and Bill of Materials is the repetition. If you are building a one-time, on-the-fly goods or a customized good then Item Assembly is the best choice. In cases you are building the same item many times you can use Bill of Materials.

When building items, the program will automatically reduce the quantity of components used in building the end product, account for additional costs like labour and increase the end product item quantity on inventory.

Below are some specifics about each inventory building method:

Build from Item Assembly

It is available starting with Pro version. More advanced versions like Premium and Quantum do offer this feature as well. Item Assembly allows creating items from other existing inventory in the database. But with this method the assembled item components parts have to be defined each time. So it might take longer to assemble items by selecting different individual components.

Item Assembly will be better for packages that are not built frequently or finished products contents are different each time.  Example is periodical gift basket. To build from Item Assembly, item components need to be stored and they will be selected from Item Assembly window directly. Costs can be added also like labor or other cost incurred during the build process.

Build from Bill of Materials

It is available starting with Premium version, it allows building items much faster than Item Assembly. To use it, one requirement is to pre-record the finished product (built item) components in that item's record on Build tab. The end product has an item record by itself and component parts have their own records as well. So when the end product is selected in Bill of Materials window, Sage 50 knows already which component parts are required and apply additional cost when specified.

Example of end products that can be built using this method is shaped table. We will need to have different types and shapes of woods, screws… Those items will be component parts of a U-shaped table. Other components will be needed to build another form of table etc…