Attaching to a bill

Both the bill of materialsBill of MaterialsA bill of materials tells Assemblified how to build one unit of a finished good. When a customer orders the finished-good variant, Assemblified deducts the right component quantities from inventory automatically. Read more → detail page and the assembly billAssembly billThe recipe for an intermediate component you build and then use inside other bills — a lid, a wick assembly, a pre-wired harness. It keeps its own pre-assembled stock and can be a work order item in its own right. Read more → detail page (the older word for that entity is sub-assembly) carry an Additional costs card on their Materials tab, below Raw materials and Sub-assemblies. It’s where you say how much of a cost factor one finished unit consumes.

On this page

• Attaching a factor
• Changing a quantity later
• Removing a factor
• The quantity is per one finished unit
• If you have no cost factors yet
• Attaching to many finished goods at once
• Reading it back in the Financial breakdown
• How assembly-bill costs roll up

Attaching a factor

1. Open the detail page and go to the Materials tab.

2. Scroll to the Additional costs card and click Add in its heading row. A small dialog opens.

3. Pick a factor from the Add a cost factor… dropdown. Each option shows the factor’s rate and unit, and factors already attached to this bill are not listed.

4. Type the Qty / unit — the quantity consumed per one finished unit. It starts at 1.

5. Click Add.

Attaching takes effect immediately. The row appears, the card’s total moves, and every cost figure on the page re-computes.

Note

Attaching needs the Enhanced plan. Without it the dialog’s fields are inert behind a panel that names the tier and offers one Upgrade action, the row menus disappear and the quantity cells are read-only. Factors that are already attached stay visible and keep pricing the bill — see What you need to edit this page.

What the row shows

Column	What it is
Name	The factor’s name from the catalogue.
Kind	A Labour or Overhead badge.
Quantity	Editable. What one finished unit consumes.
Unit · Rate	The factor’s unit and its rate, e.g. hour · $40.00 — the two numbers the quantity is multiplied against.
Line cost	quantity × rate.

When at least one factor is attached, the card’s footer shows Additional costs per unit — the sum of every line cost, for one finished unit.

Changing a quantity later

Type over the number in the Quantity column. That edit is a draft, exactly like editing a material quantity on the same page: the figures on screen update as you type, but nothing is written until you Save the page. Leaving with unsaved changes prompts you first.

This is the one place attaching and editing behave differently. Adding and removing take effect straight away. A quantity change waits for Save, like every other edit on the Materials tab.

Removing a factor

One factor: open the ⋯ menu on its row and choose Remove cost factor. You’re asked to confirm, because the factor will no longer be part of this bill. Removal is immediate — there is no Save step for it.

Several at once: tick the rows you want, then use Remove in the bar that appears above the table. The confirmation names how many rows you’re about to remove, and warns you if any of them carry an unsaved quantity edit you’d lose.

A bulk removal can partly succeed. If it does, the card names exactly which rows failed, in a single banner, with actions to select just those rows or retry them. Nothing is reported as removed that wasn’t.

Either way, removing detaches the factor from this bill only — the factor stays in the catalogue and on every other bill that uses it.

The quantity is per one finished unit

This is the one thing worth getting right:

line cost = quantity × rate

The quantity is what one finished unit consumes, not what a batch consumes. If a candle takes one minute of a $40 / hour labour factor, the quantity is 0.0166667 — hours, because that’s the factor’s unit.

Quantities are fractional and stored exactly as typed. Don’t round 0.0166667 to 0.0167 to make it look tidy; on a run of 10,000 units that’s a real number of dollars.

Caution

No waste %. Unlike a raw material, a cost factor has no waste multiplier. Waste describes matter you consume but don’t ship. Process time isn’t wasted that way — if a rework costs you more labour, raise the quantity.

If you have no cost factors yet

A factor has to exist in the catalogue before you can attach it. If your shop has none, the card doesn’t show you an empty dropdown — it says No cost factors yet, explains that you create a labour or overhead rate in Settings first, and gives you a Go to cost factors button that takes you straight there. The Add dialog shows the same thing.

A card that’s simply empty on this bill reads differently: No additional costs yet — add labour or overhead to include it in the unit cost.

Attaching to many finished goods at once

To put the same factor on a whole batch of finished goods, do it from the list instead. Open Bill of Materials in the app navigation — which opens the Finished goods page — tick the rows you want, then choose Cost → Add cost factors in the bulk action bar above the table.

1. Pick the factors. Choose one or more factors from your catalogue.

2. Say how much of each. For a hand-picked selection of up to 100 finished goods you get a grid — one quantity per factor per finished good — so you can vary the amounts. For anything larger, or when you’ve selected every row the current filters match, you set one quantity per factor that applies to all of them.

3. Apply. The dialog reports how many attachments were written and names any finished good it couldn’t write.

Note

This needs the Enhanced plan too. On other plans the menu entry is visibly disabled, carries a lock and names the plan you’d need, and the bar shows a single link to upgrade.

Reading it back in the Financial breakdown

On a bill of materials, the Overview tab carries a Financial breakdown card with three lines — Raw materials, Sub-assemblies and Additional costs — each with its own subtotal and a count of how many items are behind it. Expand the Additional costs line and every attached factor is listed as name · quantity unit × rate with its line cost.

The Additional costs line is always shown, and reads $0 when nothing is attached — the same way the two lines above it read $0 for a bill with no materials.

Under the three lines sits:

Total cost per unit = raw materials + sub-assemblies + additional costs

and, when the bill is linked to a priced variant, a Selling price and a Margin badge measured against that total. A bill whose margin dropped after you attached labour was always making that little — you just couldn’t see it. (A bill with no price shows no margin row at all, rather than a meaningless 100 %.)

An assembly bill shows the same information on its own Overview tab, in a Costs card: Raw materials, Nested assembly bills, Additional costs, then Unit cost (live) and Unit cost (stored). Those last two can differ, and additional costs are one reason why — see below.

How assembly-bill costs roll up

A factor attached to an assembly bill folds into that bill’s live cost, and therefore into the cost of every bill of materials that uses it — automatically, and counted exactly once.

That means the Additional costs card on a bill of materials lists only the factors attached directly to it. An assembly bill’s own factors are already inside the Sub-assemblies subtotal, as part of that assembly bill’s cost. Adding the two together would double-count them.

Note

Nesting works to any depth. A factor on an assembly bill that sits inside another assembly bill that sits inside a bill of materials still reaches the top total, once.

Live cost vs stored cost

An assembly bill has a stored unit cost, written the last time you recalculated it, and that column is materials only — Recalculate writes the live materials cost and leaves additional costs out. So after a recalculation, Unit cost (live) and Unit cost (stored) differ by exactly the additional-costs bucket. That gap is expected, not an error. Work orders close against the stored number; the live number is what the bill costs to make today.

See also

• Additional costs on work orders — where the same factors behave differently.
• Check BOM margin and cost breakdown — the whole Financial breakdown card, walked through.
• Composition — how the material lines work.