Non-essential materials

A material can be marked non-essential. The flag does one thing: it takes the material out of the calculation that works out how many of a finished good you could build. The material is still in the recipe and is still consumed exactly as before — it just stops being allowed to be the bottleneckBottleneck resourceThe component with the lowest available-to-required ratio in a BOM. Determines the BOM's displayed Shopify quantity under dynamic adjustment: the BOM can build at most as many units as the bottleneck allows. Non-essential materials are excluded from this calculation. Read more → .

On this page

• What the flag does
• What it does not do
• A worked example
• When to use it
• Where to set it
• What your storefront can see

What the flag does

When Assemblified recalculates how many of a finished good you can build — for dynamic adjustmentDynamic adjustmentA per-bill toggle that recalculates the bill's Shopify-displayed quantity after every order: the bottleneck-resource count plus pre-assembled stock. One of three mutually exclusive toggles — switching it on switches only-sell-pre-assembled and maintain inventory level off. Read more → , for the buildable figure on the list, for a work order’s readiness — it looks at every essential component and takes the smallest number any of them allows. That number (plus whatever is already on the shelf) is what the finished good’s Shopify quantity is set to.

A non-essential component is skipped in that pass. Its stock does not constrain the answer.

What it does not do

The flag is only a hint about the bottleneck. It does not change:

• What an order consumes. The material comes off stock exactly as it would have.
• Refund and cancellation restoration. It is restored like everything else.
• Pre-assembled shelf drawdown.
• What a work-order pick takes.

Note

The in-app help text on the switch says order execution “continues” or “is blocked”, which is about the consequence rather than the mechanism: an essential shortage drops the finished good’s sellable quantity, so the order never gets placed. Once an order does execute, a non-essential material is consumed like any other.

A worked example

A finished good has these components:

Component	Required per unit	Available	Non-essential?	How many it allows
Wax	0.25	100	No	400
Wick	1	35	No	35
Label	1	5	Yes	(skipped)
Jar	1	90	No	90

Without the flag on the label: the bottleneck is the label at 5, and the finished good shows 5.

With the flag on the label: the label is skipped, the bottleneck is the wick at 35, and the finished good shows 35.

Execution still takes one label per unit. You may run out of labels mid-run — that is the risk you accepted by marking it non-essential.

When to use it

Mark a material non-essential when:

• It is plentiful and almost never the constraint (labels, generic packaging, paper inserts).
• Running out would be awkward but not blocking — you can substitute or reorder quickly.
• You want the finished good’s sellable quantity to follow the components that actually matter.

Do not mark something non-essential if:

• It is critical and hard to substitute.
• It has a long lead time, and you need the calculation to throttle sales.
• You are using it to work around a recipe problem. Fix the recipe instead.

Where to set it

• The material page → Settings tab. One Non-essential material switch, saved the moment you flip it. The help text under it changes to describe the state you just chose.
• The create and Edit material dialogs. A Non-essential material checkbox, alongside the rest of the fields.
• In bulk. Tick rows on the materials list, then Material settings → Non-essential → Enable or Disable.

You can also find them: the materials list has a Non-essential tile above the table, a Non-essential filter, and an optional Non-essential column.

What your storefront can see

Assemblified writes a metafield onto the finished good’s Shopify variant during execution. For each component it records whether that component is essential — the opposite of this flag.

A storefront theme can read that metafield to show “essential components” or reason about availability. Assemblified only writes the data; using it is up to the theme.

Common gotchas

• The flag is a hint, not a guard. A non-essential material running out does not fail orders or stop execution. It only means the availability figure was optimistic.
• A recipe where everything is non-essential has no bottleneck at all. Nothing constrains it, so Assemblified has no number to push and leaves the finished good’s Shopify quantity alone rather than inventing one. Avoid that shape unless you really mean “component stock should not affect this product” — in which case turning dynamic adjustment off for it is the clearer way to say so.
• Changing the flag does not reprocess past orders. Each past recalculation used the flag as it stood at the time; the current figure comes from the most recent one.

Where to next

• Dynamic adjustment — the bottleneck rule this flag opts out of.
• The materials list — the tile, the filter and the bulk action.
• BOM settings reference — how dynamic adjustment is switched on per bill.