Build your first BOM

This walkthrough builds a single bill of materialsBill of materialsA bill of materials tells Assemblified how to build one unit of a finished good. When a customer orders the finished-good variant, Assemblified deducts the right component quantities from inventory automatically. Read more → end-to-end: a finished-good variant, two raw-material components, and a test order to confirm the inventory math works. It takes about ten minutes on a development or low-traffic store.

Before you start: the app is installed and you’ve worked through initial setup (at minimum, the default location is set).

1. Pick the finished-good variant.

   Click Bill of materials in the app navigation. It opens the Finished goods page — the same thing under two names, which is worth knowing before you go looking for a menu entry called “Finished goods”.

   Click Create. The Create a finished good dialog has two steps; the first, Product and details, is where you choose the product variant customers actually buy (the “finished good”) from your Shopify catalog and give the bill a recognizable name.

2. Add the component materials.

   Step two of the same dialog is Components. Add two, each with a quantity per finished unit:

   • A Shopify-linked material — any variant in your catalog you treat as a component. Adding it registers it as a materialMaterialThe atomic component of a bill of materials or an assembly BOM. Two flavours: a Shopify-linked variant, whose inventory Shopify tracks, or a virtual material, which Assemblified tracks on its own and Shopify never sees. Both sit in the same component picker and are consumed the same way. Read more → automatically.
   • A virtual material — something that isn’t a Shopify product (packaging, a label, a consumable). Create it inline with a name, a unit of measurement, and an opening stock quantity; Assemblified tracks its stock itself.

   You can also leave the BOM empty here and fill it in afterwards on the bill’s Materials tab. The full set of options per component (waste percentage, locations, notes) is covered in Creating a BOM.

3. Activate the BOM.

   A new BOM starts inactive — orders for the variant are ignored until you flip it. When your components and quantities look right, set the status to Active. (What each toggle does is in the Settings reference; for your first BOM the status alone is enough.)

4. Place a test order.

   In your store (a draft order marked as paid works too), order 1 unit of the finished-good variant. Within moments the order webhook arrives and the BOM executes: each component’s inventory drops by its BOM quantity — the Shopify-linked material in Shopify, the virtual material in Assemblified.

5. Verify in the logs.

   Click Logs in the app navigation and find the row for your test order. Open it: the run’s detail page lists exactly what was consumed, where, and why. The logs are your ground truth whenever a number looks off — reading them is a skill worth building early (see Read and repair the execution logs and Execution model).

Cancel the test order — and watch it reverse

Cancel the test order and check Logs again: with the default settings, the consumed components come straight back. The rules behind that reversal (and the Keep assembled on return option) are in Refunds & cancellations.

Where to next

• BOM execution end-to-end — the same journey again, but tracing every internal step, including pre-assembled drawdown and a refund.
• Dynamic adjustment — let Assemblified keep the finished good’s sellable quantity in sync with what you can actually build.
• Migrate your catalog to BOMs — take what you just did to 50 or 5,000 SKUs.