Groups

A group is a named set of records you define: Summer range, Made in Leeds, Discontinued, Metals. It carries no behaviour at all. Nothing is consumed differently, costed differently or synced differently because it is in a group. A group exists so you can find a set again, and act on it.

Groups come in three kinds, one per catalogue:

Group of	Managed from
Finished goodsFinished goodThe sellable product a bill of materials builds — the Shopify variant a customer orders, together with the recipe behind it. "Finished goods" is also the name of the page that lists them. Read more →	The Bill of Materials list
Assembly billsAssembly 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 →	The Assembly Bills list
Raw materialsRaw materialThe atomic component of a bill of materials or an assembly bill. Two flavours: a Shopify-linked variant, whose inventory Shopify tracks, or a virtual material, which Assemblified tracks on its own and Shopify never sees. Both sit in the same component picker and are consumed the same way. Read more →	The Raw Materials list, and a material’s own page

A group of one kind can never hold a record of another: a group of raw materials holds materials only. The three catalogues are independent, so the same name can exist once in each.

A record can be in any number of groups at once.

On this page

• Managing the catalogue
• Putting records in a group
• Filtering a list to a group

Managing the catalogue

More actions → Manage groups in the title bar of any of the three lists opens that catalogue.

The dialog lists every group of that kind with a badge counting its members, and lets you:

• Create a group. A name (up to 100 characters) and an optional description (up to 500). The description is a note to your colleagues about what belongs in the group.
• Rename a group, or edit its description.
• Delete a group. The confirmation says what it means: the group is removed from every record that is in it, and the records themselves stay exactly as they are. Deleting a group never deletes a bill, an assembly or a material.

A name has to be unique within its kind. If you reuse one, the dialog says so next to the name field and keeps your other edits — it does not throw the form away or suggest a different name.

Note

Groups are per shop, not per user. What you create, your colleagues see.

Putting records in a group

There are three ways in, and they all open the same dialog.

• In bulk. Tick rows on the list, then choose Add to group from the bulk bar. On the Bill of Materials and Assembly Bills lists it sits under Edit; on Raw Materials, under Maintenance. This works with Select all matching too: the app resolves the whole matching set first, then opens the dialog for it.
• For one row. The ⋯ menu at the end of any row offers the same Add to group.
• From a material’s page. A raw material’s own page carries Add to group in its title bar.

The dialog

Each group in the catalogue offers three choices, and the default for all of them is Leave as is:

Choice	What it does to the selected records
Leave as is	Nothing. Their membership of that group is untouched
Add	Puts every selected record in that group
Remove	Takes every selected record out of that group

The dialog does not pre-tick the groups your selection is already in. With a large selection there is no single answer to “is this selection in that group”, so each group is an explicit choice and Leave as is is the default.

You can also create a group from inside the dialog: type a name at the top and press create. The new group appears in the list already marked Add, because creating a group here is only ever the first half of “put these records in a new group”. A duplicate name is refused inline, exactly as it is in the manager.

Press Apply and the changes are made group by group. If something goes wrong part way through, the dialog says which step it stopped on. Applying the same thing twice is safe — adding a record that is already a member, or removing one that is not, changes nothing — so you can simply press Apply again.

Filtering a list to a group

All three lists carry a Groups filter in Add filter. It offers the groups of that list’s own kind, by name, with four operators:

Operator	Matches
is one of	Records in any of the groups you pick
is none of	Records in none of them
is empty	Records that are in no group at all
is not empty	Records that are in at least one group

A group that has since been deleted matches nothing under is one of and everything under is none of, which is the same way a group of the wrong kind behaves.

There is no Groups column on any of the three tables: a group is a way of narrowing a list, not a value to read down it.

Because it is an ordinary list filter, it combines with every other filter, it survives in a shareable list URL, and it can be stored in a saved view — so “the Summer range bills that are low on stock” is one saved view rather than two steps every morning.

Tip

Searching from the home page finds groups by name. A group of finished goods opens the Bill of Materials list already filtered to it.

Where to next

• Saved views — store a group filter, with its columns and sort, as a named view.
• The materials list — where the raw-material group actions live.
• AI and agent access — groups are available over agent access too.