I have searched the forum and of course the app - great app by the way! - for to be able to create stock of an assembled item. For example, I have item ‘a’ and item ‘b’ that together make item ‘c’. Sure I can use Production Kits to do so, but seemingly on the fly - that is only when customer walks and buys item ‘c’ by me creating a sales invoice. But what if I want to create a whole batch of item ‘c’ and keep them in inventory ready to sell? How do I do that?
What you have described is an inventory kit. What you want is a Production Order:
https://forum.manager.io/t/using-production-orders-to-manufacture-inventory-items/7767
Thanks for the reply. I think I confused by using the wrong term - I did mean Inventory Kit. Yes, I get that - and sure that’s possible, as I described. But that would mean having to add all the components every time I processed this. Which is what I though the idea behind the Inventory Kit was meant to avoid. some of the kits I have have many article in them and it would so much easier just to create a ‘kit’ the once which essentially acted like any other inventory item. And then what I am looking at doing is something a little less than processing a production order, merely to identify that ‘x’ number of inventory kits have been made up and their location.
And it would go something like this;
Assemble Kits
Date ________
Add to Inventory
'x’ X ‘Inventory Kits’__
Inventory Location
___Unspecified location _____
[ ] Add non-inventory cost into production
CREATE
and
[ ] Custom Income account
[ ] Custom Expense account
added to Inventory Kits
An inventory kit is not something you make up in advance. It is something you sell, made up of inventory items that are individually bought or manufactured and tracked as individual items. For example, if you manufacture picture frames and buy hanging hardware packets, you would track both of those as inventory items. You sell them both individually. But you may also advertise “picture frame complete with hanging hardware.” On the sales invoice or cash receipt, you enter the inventory kit and the shipping department picks one picture frame and one hardware packet and ships them out together. In this situation, you do not assemble kits in advance.
A production order is for putting together a finished inventory item from other inventory items, possibly with additional costs added in. For example, you may stock as inventory items jars, lids, sugar, and fruit juice. From these, you manufacture and package jelly. You stock the finished jar of jelly as a finished inventory item and sell it. You do not sell the raw components. On the production order, you list the bill of materials for producing X units of the finished good. Manager subtracts the raw materials from inventory and adds the finished goods. You can clone the production order the next time you want to produce the same finished good. Input and output quantities can be adjusted. Of course, the easiest thing is to clone a previous production order for the same number of finished goods.
No, once you have created an Inventory Kit Item, just select that item from the Sales Invoice’s Item field - no need to re-create the item for each sale to a walk in customer
Thanks Tut. OK, I must confess that I hadn’t experimented with the clone option as I had assumed it would merely duplicate the previous rather than drag up the previous for editing. So this kinda does the job. Far better though would be to have the means, then, of creating within the production order the mechanism of creating say, templates. That is, unprocessed production orders that could be called upon when required. What I am really after, say, is the ‘assembly’ options available in Mamut, or the BOM tools available for Sage. Many thanks for delving into this - I do appreciate it. 
Thanks Brucanna - but I have items that are not made up on the fly when a customer walks in but are made up in advance and need to be accounted for as their own separate line items as soon as they are made up. The production order is, essentially the tool I need, if only it had the ability to have saved templates to work with. Eg the last thing I need is to be making up a lengthy production order for an item I have not yet sold in that tax year (and I have not a previous example to clone) when it would be easy for me to knock up a database of productions on say a spreadsheet and import them into a template repository on Manager for use when required.
A Bill of Material feature has been discussed as an future improvement - no time frame - where you can store such data.
Then that BOM would be called into the PO, just enter number of FGs to be produced and all will be calculated out
If I were you, @goshawk, I would look for opportunities to generate production orders for various quantities. A big build would be the perfect opportunity. Make one for 5 FGs, one for 10, one for 20, etc. Then you would essentially have a range of templates to choose from. (We need to be careful using that word, template, since it means something different in Manager.)
A production order only transfers raw materials inventory into finished Goods Inventory, as such there is no affect on income/expenses or Tax, unless it includes some non-inventory cost recovery.
1 Like
ok thanks
OK I shall use the clone feature of the PO until this feature pops up - looking forward to it. As far as I see it, so far in my looking, I think addressing these warehousing type issues in Manager would allow it to stand shoulder to shoulder with the main players quite comfortably - better in some respects (especially cost )