Only consume pre-assembled

An assembly bill (also called a sub-assemblySub-assemblyA reusable assembly block that composes into bigger bills: define it once, include it in any bill of materials, and Assemblified expands it into its own components at execution time. The app now calls it an assembly bill. Read more → ) normally cascades: once its pre-assembledPre-Assembled InventoryStock of finished goods and assembly bills already built and on the shelf, counted per location. A work order draws assembly bills from the shelf first, building fresh only if it runs short; an order consumes a finished good's shelf before its components. Read more → shelf is exhausted, demand falls through into its materials and nested assemblies. Only consume pre-assembled stock turns that off for one bill, so sales demand stops at it.

With the switch on, that bill contributes only its pre-assembled stock to anything sales-related. Orders draw from its shelf and nothing below it is ever consumed; availability is computed from its shelf alone. Deliberate builds (work orders, Quick build) are unaffected and still pull materials as before.

On this page

• The switch, and where to find it
• What “stops here” means
• Buildable vs. sellable
• When the shelf runs short (deficits)
• Cancellation and refund behaviour
• Multi-layer trees
• How it differs from the finished-good setting
• Common gotchas

The switch

Every assembly bill has its own Only consume pre-assembled stock switch, on the assembly bill page under Settings → Preferences. It is independent of the parent bill and of every other assembly.

• On. Sales stop at this assembly bill: an order draws only from its pre-assembled stock, and the materials below it are left untouched.
• Off. Sales carry on into this assembly bill’s own materials once its pre-assembled stock runs out. This is the normal behaviour.
• Default: off.
• Plan: Enhanced. On a lower plan the switch is disabled and names the tier it needs.

You can flip it for many bills at once from the Assembly Bills list: tick rows, then Assembly settings → Only consume pre-assembled → Enable / Disable.

The same behaviour, at one location only

An assembly bill can also carry a location rule, which is the second way to get this cut-off. At a location where the rule’s mode is Disabled or Pre-assembled only, the assembly behaves exactly as described on this page: sales demand is drawn from its pre-assembled shelf at that location and never from its components, deficits included. Every other location is untouched.

The switch above is the shop-wide choice; a location rule is the per-location one, and a rule can also change the assembly’s own recipe at that location. Location rules need Multi-location sensitive adjustments turned on in Settings, and they are part of the Enhanced plan.

What “stops here” means

With the switch on, every sales, order and availability traversal that reaches this assembly treats it as a leaf: it contributes its pre-assembled quantity and the walk does not descend into its components.

Concretely, for a cut-off assembly S that an order needs N of:

• N is taken from S’s pre-assembled shelf.
• S’s materials and nested assemblies are not touched.
• Availability counts only S’s shelf as S’s contribution, never the capacity its materials could build.

The decision is per node. A layer-1 assembly with the switch off still passes its remainder down; if a layer-2 assembly underneath has it on, the cut happens there instead. Each node decides for itself.

What is unaffected

Only sales and order demand respect the cut-off. Deliberate physical builds — work orders and building pre-assembled stock with Quick build — still consume materials normally. The rule of thumb: fulfilling an order honours the setting; building stock never does, because building has to consume the materials it is made from.

Buildable vs. sellable

Once a tree contains a cut-off assembly, “how many can I make?” has two different answers:

• Buildable — units you could physically build. Materials inside cut-off assemblies still count here.
• Sellable — what orders and availability actually use. A cut-off assembly contributes only its pre-assembled stock; its materials are never counted.

Example. An assembly bill is set to only consume pre-assembled stock and holds 5 pre-built units; its materials could build 50 more.

• Buildable = 55 (5 on the shelf + 50 from materials).
• Sellable = 5 (only the shelf counts).

Where you see the two numbers:

• On the Assembly Bills and Finished goods lists, the buildable column shows the buildable figure only, and puts the other in a tooltip that reads “N of them sellable”. The column answers one question, so it prints one number; hover it when a cut-off assembly is somewhere in the tree.
• On the structure canvas, a cut-off node is marked with a Pre-only chip, and a Sell value appears beside Max buildable on the nodes where the two differ.

The detail pages do not show a sellable figure. Use the list column’s tooltip or the canvas.

Tip

For a finished good with dynamic adjustment on, the sellable number is what gets pushed to Shopify, so the storefront never offers capacity that a cut-off assembly’s materials could theoretically build but that you have chosen not to sell against.

When the shelf runs short (deficits)

If an order needs more than a cut-off assembly has on its shelf, demand does not fall through to materials. That is the whole point. Instead the full demand is consumed from the pre-assembled shelf, which is allowed to go negative.

A negative shelf is an honest record of a deficit: “this many units were sold against this assembly beyond what was physically on the shelf.” It is not clamped to zero and it is not hidden; the negative balance shows in the per-location pre-assembled figures on the assembly bill page.

You resolve a deficit the same way you would top up any shelf: build more, which moves the balance back toward zero and beyond. Note that Quick build’s Correction (count) reason will not take a count below zero, so it cannot be used to create a deficit; it can only bring one back up.

Cancellation and refund behaviour

Restores are symmetric with consumption. When an order against a cut-off assembly is cancelled or refunded, the cascade halts at that assembly (exactly like the keep-assembled halt): the full quantity is restored to its pre-assembled shelf, and nothing below is restored, because nothing below was consumed in the first place.

If the consumption had driven the shelf negative, a partial restore lifts it partway back: −5 then a +3 restore lands at −2, not clamped to 0, keeping the deficit arithmetic honest.

Do not flip the switch mid-order-lifecycle

The return side follows the current setting, not a replay of what happened at order time. If you turn Only consume pre-assembled stock on (or off) between an order and its cancellation, the restore follows the new state, which can break the symmetry. Change it when there are no in-flight orders against the assembly. This is the same class of caveat as the keep-assembled switch, and it applies to a per-location rule in the same way.

Multi-layer trees

Because the decision is per node, you can mix cut-off and cascading assemblies in one tree:

Finished good B
  └── Assembly S        (off — cascades)
       ├── Raw R1
       └── Assembly T   (on — stops here)
            └── Raw R2

For a sales order of B:

• S has it off, so demand beyond S’s shelf passes down to R1 and T.
• T has it on, so demand reaching T is taken from T’s shelf only. R2 is never consumed, and T’s contribution to “sellable” is T’s shelf alone.

Each cut-off node is an independent cut; the walk continues normally everywhere else.

How this differs from the finished-good setting

These two are easy to confuse. Different scope, different effect:

	Only sell pre-assembled quantities	Only consume pre-assembled stock
Lives on	a finished good (Settings tab → Preferences)	an assembly bill (Settings tab → Preferences)
Effect	caps the finished good’s own Shopify availability at its pre-assembled shelf	stops sales demand at this assembly bill inside a tree; materials below are never consumed or counted
Documented in	Bill of Materials → Settings	this page

They are complementary and can be used together: a finished good can cap its own availability while an assembly bill deeper in its tree independently refuses to cascade into its materials.

Common gotchas

• Sellable, not buildable, is what sells. When a cut-off sits somewhere in a tree, the storefront-facing number is the sellable figure. The higher buildable number is informational: it is the physical ceiling, not the offer.
• Deficits are real, not errors. A negative pre-assembled balance on a cut-off assembly means it sold beyond its shelf. That is by design; top the shelf up to clear it.
• Turning it on late does not rewrite history. Orders processed while it was off cascaded normally. Changing it now affects future orders only.
• Builds always consume materials. Do not expect a work order or a Quick build run to respect the cut-off. Those are deliberate builds and always pull materials.

Where to next

• Pre-assembled stock — the shelf this draws from, and how to adjust it.
• Keep-assembled cascade — the other Preferences switch, which halts the return-side walk.
• Nesting & execution — how expansion works, and where this cut-off lands in it.
• Bill of Materials → Settings — the finished-good cousin of this setting.