How to automatically track and use components?
The products we sell are sold with the same type of packaging, we buy the packaging and have it shipped to our printers who print and pack our products before sending the finished items to our warehouse.
All of the packaging is the same so we keep those numbers in a spreadsheet and have our products listed in Dear Inventory.
We are now looking to have different packaging for different products, going from just 1 type to 3-4 different types of packaging for various products. This will still be sent to our printers and then sent to our warehouse as a finished item. This makes our current spreadsheet a bit redundant and so we would like to have it all tracked in Dear.
We want to be able to order the different types of packaging and have the quantities of each type automatically reduced when we order/receive stock from our printers.
My question is how do I go about doing this? Would it be via BOM with auto assembly ticked? Or is there another way. I don't want to have to issue assembly jobs along with each order if it can be avoided.
Yes the BOM with "auto assembly" will work.
You would create a new inventory item for each of your 4 packaging styles:
box1
box2
box3
box4
You would then create new retail sellable products:
retail1
retail2
retail3
....
retail999
Each of these retail products would have a BOM and would auto-assemb: For example
retail1 BOM:
1x box1
3x red t-shirt
2x blue t-shirt
1x swing tag
With your packaging correctly setup DEAR will automagically decrease the stock level of each item in the BOM and will add items to the "re-order stock" and "re-order back-ordered stock" modules when their levels drop below whatever you've specified.