Use Assemblies to fulfill your bill of materials and ensure the proper quantities are deducted and credited. Assemblies take a group of products and turn them into a different final product.
The components/materials you start off with are your input products. The final product will be your output and is usually the end sellable product for your customer. Instead of deducting and crediting quantities at the time of sale like a Bundle, the products are deducted and credited when you choose.
If you are new to Assemblies, please start with this article:
Skateboard Example
We're a skateboard retail shop and while skateboard tricks can be complex, the assembly of a skateboard is pretty simple. The components (or materials) needed for a skateboard include:
1 deck (or board)
4 wheels
8 bearings (to make the wheels spin)
2 trucks (or axels)
8 bolts (to hold the trucks to the board)
grip tape
8 nuts (to fasten the bolts)
There's a good chance you're not selling skateboards, but imagine you are selling a product that consists of other products in your inventory. Whether or not you sell those components individually doesn't matter, they are still considered inventory and should be entered into Thrive.
NOTE: If you do have products in your inventory that you aren't selling to customers directly, you can set them as inactive so they don't show up on your POS or e-commerce platform.
We take those individual products and combine them together for a complete sellable product for our customers. I control the number of complete skateboards (output) that will be added to my inventory. By correctly setting up my template, Thrive Inventory ensures that all the correct materials are deducted from inventory, while we're putting together the skateboards.
We can take this list of materials and quantities from our existing inventory:
NOTE: Having trouble figuring out what to put in the "input quantity" section? We've got you covered in our Math for Assemblies, Bundles, and Modifiers article!
And turn it into this:
Once the template (bill of materials) is saved, we can move on to the Run sections and actually carry out the Assembly. Click on the Run section and then "Start Assembly" as shown here:
Add your template and the number of runs you would like Thrive to perform and select your Starting and Ending locations (and be sure to add any Fees). When that's set, click the "Run" button:
The next screen will be a preview of all the actions that are about to take place. If everything is looking good, click the "Continue Run" button:
NOTE: If you don't have sufficient quantities of a product to complete a Run, you will need to adjust those quantities before moving forward.
And that's it! The correct quantities are credited and debited and now we've got four complete skateboards to sell!