Looking to get started with Assemblies? The first step is to make sure your ingredients or raw materials are in Thrive. Your ingredients and raw materials will serve as inputs for your Assembly.
Keep in mind that your input products may have already been imported from your integration, or maybe you already created them. This article is still useful since we'll list a few naming techniques to help you in the long run.
If you're wondering what exactly Assemblies are, be sure to check out this article first to make sure it's the right feature for you:
Assemblies are only available for users on current Professional plans and above. Learn more about upgrading your plan here.
Step 1: Get your ingredients into Thrive
Depending on how your inventory is set up, you might not have your ingredients in Thrive, yet. If that's the case, the best way to get those products into Thrive is by doing a Create Products Bulk Upload.
A Create Products Bulk Upload is the fastest way to get those simple or complex products with variants into Thrive. (NOTE: You can even set the products to inactive while creating them). Include details like:
Categories
SKUs
Barcodes
Active/Inactive status
Vendors and vendor IDs
Quantities
Price, default cost, reorder point & target can be set for the entire product or made location-specific.
More information about Bulk Upload Spreadsheets can be found here:
Be sure to add a cost for each item. When you run an assembly, the lot cost of the inputs consumed in the run will be automatically totaled together to form a new lot cost for the output product.
If you see that your lot costs are "Not Set" you may need to run the Advanced task outlined in this article.
Step 2: Name your ingredients
Naming your ingredients or raw materials in a calculated way will save you time in the long run.
When entering your products, or prepping them to be used as inputs in Assemblies, you'll want to make sure you have a clear and concise naming structure.
Commonly recommended practices are:
Include the unit of measurement in the title. For example, if you use five-pound bags of flour in your bakery, you could set up your product like this:
That way, we know exactly what size of bag we are pulling from and we don't need to track down the actual item to set up the Assembly.
Place an indicator in your title. If the product you are using for your ingredient or the raw material is ONLY used for Assemblies try putting "ING" (for ingredient) or "TO RECEIVE" in the title.
That way, no one will get confused about which product to use for the input.
Keep in mind, that if the ingredient or raw material is available for sale on your website, or is customer-facing, the Product Name will show across your integrations.
If the product is not available for purchase by customers, be sure to read the next step to cut down the clutter on your integrations.
Step 3: Make the product Inactive (optional)
Now, this is only for ingredients or raw materials that are NOT customer-facing and you do not want to show up on your POS or e-commerce site.
By setting a product as inactive, you ensure a cleaner POS for your employees to navigate and a more streamlined customer experience on your website.