Assembly items have physical stock of finished good units. In order to ship an Assembly on a Sale Order, it must first be built (i.e. assembled) using an Inventory Maintenance or Work Order transaction.

• Inventory Maintenance is the quick way to build an assembly; it relies solely on the standard recipe and does not allow any changes.
• Work Order transactions allow the user to modify the recipe on-the-fly by adding or removing components, changing component quantities and adding non-inventory expense items to the finished good value.

When an assembly is built (via either method), its recipe components are drawn from inventory and the assembled Product is added to inventory. The components are no longer part of the inventory system; they have been consumed by the assembly build process. Assembly recipes may include inventory and soft costs such as labor and overhead components in the recipe. However, soft costs are ONLY included in the finished goods value when building the assembly via the Work Order process. Inventory Maintenance builds do not automatically include soft costs.

Once built, Assembly items are treated just like any other inventoried item with regard to Qty availability and inventory values.

Assemblies are well-suited for traditional manufactured items where there is a fixed assembly process that rarely changes and where the components are not typically sold a la carte.

Auto-build Assemblies are a bit of a hybrid between Kits and Assemblies. An Assembly that is also marked as an Auto-build (via the Product record) can be built on-the-fly during the Sales Order entry process. This relieves the requirement that inventory (traditional assembly) must already exist in order to ship goods on an invoice. If there is sufficient quantity of component parts available in the selling warehouse, but the assembly item itself is not in stock, AcctVantage will automatically build the quantity necessary to fill the sale when the order is picked.

Soft costs (i.e. GL expense items) on the recipe, will be included in the value of the Auto-built Assembly.

A further attribute for auto-built assemblies is a process that will automatically transfer components from a default warehouse to complete the build if sufficient quantities are not available in the selling warehouse.You indicate the default warehouse on the assembly's Product record recipe page.

Any Product marked as an Assembly item may be pre-built for stock using Inventory Maintenance or Work Orders as indicated above.

Note: To turn on auto-build assemblies, see this article.

Kits are not stocked in Inventory themselves but are comprised of components that are stocked as Inventory items. A Kit could be seen as a virtual assembly. Kit components are not drawn from inventory stock until the Kit is placed on a Sales Order and the Order has been Picked. The Kit itself will never have inventory quantities of its own. There is no build process associated with Kits; the Kit is built as needed during Sales Order entry. Kits are similar to Auto-build Assemblies in this way. This setup allows kit components to remain available as individual inventory units up until the point of sale.

Kit recipes may contain both inventory and non-inventory components. Kit recipes CAN NOT contain soft costs such as labor or overhead.

Kits are especially well suited to products that contain components that could be sold a la carte or as part of a large number of Kits, or in a build to order process.