Please skip this resource if you do not use kit or bundle products in your workflow.
Kitting and bundling products is the process of organizing and grouping items based on a recipe, allowing this grouped item to be sold as a single, bundled product.
Bill of materials is a term to define the component list, or recipe, to a kit/bundle product (or sellable SKU). These parent products, or sellable SKUs, can be pre-assembled, or built, or picked-to-order based on Finale's functionality and settings configuration. For example, the bill of materials of a shampoo and conditioner kit may include one bottle of shampoo and one bottle of conditioner.
Another common use-case is for case listings (or packs) when inventory traditionally flows through your account in eaches. You could have 100 greeting cards, and then sell those cards on different listings, like a single unit, 3-pack, 6-pack, etc. The 3-pack product ID in Finale would include the single greeting card SKU for a quantity of 3 units in its bill of materials. This is especially useful if you are also keeping track of an envelope and card sleeve.
Please note that if the user didn’t want additional SKUs for the packs, a user could use a product lookup with case packing to denote this. This is just one additional feature that is possible.
Expand Bill of Materials Settings
This feature setting has no impact on how the customer sees their order. This doesn’t change the order on your marketplace or shipping platform. This is strictly impacting the order in Finale, most importantly controlling how the stock flows from an inventory perspective.
If your team is grabbing individual items to put in a box when a kit product is sold, then expanding the BOM is the setting to select. If your team is grabbing a finished good off the shelf instead of the individual items, then never-expanding is the setting to select.
As you can see in the graphic above, expanding the BOM allows the user to control the flow of stock at the component level. In this workflow, the user doesn’t need stock in the finished good, or kit product. Instead, the user will take advantage of stock at the component level. When the kit product is ordered, Finale will expand the SKU and place the component product IDs on the sales order for stock reservations.
On the other hand, if you are grabbing finished goods off your shelf then you want the stock to flow from the finished good, or kit product, level. This workflow requires the user to use Finale’s build feature to consume your component inventory and then add inventory to your finished good. The sales are at the kit level here, so the build step is mandatory to move inventory before fulfilling the order.
Most users don't have a one-size-fits-all mentality here, so Finale recommends that the integration-level setting, or global-default setting, is based on the most-used approach. This setting can be found in your pull sales integration task settings.
Products that don’t align with the more common global setting can be configured at the product level, allowing the user full control. The product-level settings trump the global integration settings and can be found on the product detail page of any product.
Reservation Policy Settings
This setting is only relevant if the user elected to use a never-expanding BOM configuration for a product. The reservation policy is specific to how product reservations are handled on a sales order prior to being fulfilled.
The sellable-SKU, or parent-SKU, would be on the sales order in this workflow. If set to “include BOM components,” the finished product will be reserved until all existing stock is accounted for, at which point future reservations will count against the bill of material components. This helps the user prevent over-selling by reserving the inventory of the components versus just holding reservations on the parent SKU, or sellable SKU.
The other setting option is “finished product only.” As the name suggests, this setting holds all reservations on the parent level. This is useful if you don’t pre-build your finished goods, allowing the user to see the reservations versus remaining units and plan to perform builds around these numbers.
These settings can be configured in two ways: globally in your application settings or individually on the product level.
The global setting is located in your application settings under the product tab.
The product-level settings are found on the product detail page of a product.
These configuration settings are vital to the onboarding phase, ensuring your kit and bundle products are handled properly.
All products, component products and parent products, must be created in Finale before you can import and configure the bill of materials. There are two ways to import bill of materials:
- Spreadsheet Import
- Configure Bill of Materials for Single Product
The most popular import option is the spreadsheet method, allowing users to import their recipes in bulk.
How-to Import Bill of Materials Using a Spreadsheet
How-to Configure Bill of Materials for Single Product
Unlike the first import option, this is a manual method, allowing the user to add their bill of materials directly to a product in the product detail screen.
For questions, feedback, or article ideas, email service@finaleinventory.com.
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