Assemblies are a great way to automatically build an item from individual items within Retail POS. Assemblies are useful if you receive item parts from vendors and sell them as a fully assembled item, such as a bicycle or gift basket.

Building an assembly

1. From the main menu, click Inventory > New Item. This will be your assembled final item.
2. Enter a description for the assembled item, such as Gift Basket.

3. Select Assembly from the Type dropdown.

   

4. Add any other item details, and click Save changes.

5. From the left menu, click Assembly.

   

6. Select the items to add to the assembly. You can create new parts or add existing parts from your inventory.

   To select from your existing inventory: Under Find Existing Assembly Part, enter the item description in the Item Search field, and then click Find item. If only one item matches your search, the item is automatically added. Otherwise, a list appears from which you can select the item to add.

   You can click Find Item with a blank search to display all of the items in your inventory.

   Create new items with the Create new assembly part section. Enter the item description, specify the default cost for the item, the quantity of the item to use for each assembly, and click + Create Part.

7. After you add all the items you need to the assembly, click Save Changes.
8. Under Build assembly, enter how many assembled items you want to make, then click Build.

Breaking apart an assembly

When you break apart an assembly, the inventory of the assembled item decreases by one and the individual item quantities that make up the assembled item are returned to your regular inventory.

1. From the main menu, click Inventory > Item Search.
2. Find the assembly in the list and click it.
3. From the left menu, click Assembly.

4. Under Break down assembly into individual items, enter how many assemblies you want to disassemble and click Break down.

   

Calculating the cost of assemblies

The cost of an assembly is determined by the cost of its components. When building an assembly, the cost is calculated by adding up the unit cost of all the single units and creating a new inventory lot.

Breaking an assembly divides the cost between its components, weighted by their last-known cost. For example, if a $12 gift basket includes three items:

• A $1 chocolate bar
• A $1 pop
• A $4 box of cookies

Then the items will have a new unit cost of $2/$2/$8 if the basket is broken. The new unit cost of individual components reflects their proportion of the total cost of the assembly. Since this updates the unit cost of the component items, it can impact margin calculations.

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