Recipes and routings

Where

Manufacturing → Bill of Materials

Plan

Professional and above

Permission

Manufacturing → Bill Of Materials

Feature

Modules → Manufacturing

A bill of materials is the recipe: what goes into one batch of something you make.

Three menu items, one screen

Bill of Materials, BOM Routings and BOM Outputs all open the same page. There is no separate routings register and no separate outputs register — both are sections inside a bill of materials.

Use Bill of Materials and ignore the other two.

How to write a recipe

1. Go to Manufacturing → Bill of Materials and click New BOM.
2. Pick the Finished good — the only required field. You can scan its barcode.
3. Give it a Name. Leave Number blank for a generated one.
4. Set the Base quantity. This is the batch size the recipe makes, and it matters more than anything else on the form — see below.
5. Under Components, for each ingredient set the Component, the Item type, the Quantity and the Scrap %. Click Add component for the next.
6. Add Notes and save.

Base quantity is the thing to get right

Component quantities are per batch, not per unit.

With a Base quantity of 10 and a component line of 2 kg at 5% scrap, a work order for 50 units issues:

2 × 1.05 × 50 ÷ 10 = 10.5 kg

Set Base quantity to 1 if you prefer to think per unit. Getting this wrong scales every ingredient in the recipe by the same mistake.

Item type decides what gets issued

Only Material and Sub-assembly lines are issued to a work order. Tool and Service lines are silently skipped — useful for documenting a process, but they will never come out of stock.

Scrap % is real: the issued quantity is increased by that percentage.

How to add the steps

1. Open the BOM and scroll to Routing operations.
2. Click Add operation.
3. Fill in the Seq., the Operation name, the Work center and the Run time / unit.
4. Save.

Routings are documentation only — nothing reads them

The times you enter here feed nothing. Not scheduling, not costing, not capacity planning. I traced every use: the routing list is read only to display it back to you.

Work order operations are not created from your routings either. Somebody must retype the same steps onto every work order, by hand, with their own times and machine.

There is also no Setup time field on the form despite the concept existing, and no machine — a routing can name a work centre but not a machine.

Outputs — co-products and by-products

The Outputs section is where you list everything a batch yields: the main product plus any co-products or by-products.

1. Open the BOM and scroll to Outputs.
2. Click Add output, pick the Output product, the Output type — Primary product, Co-product or By-product — and the Quantity.
3. Save.

No cost is split between outputs

There is no allocation of cost across co-products and by-products — no basis, no split, no calculation of any kind. The section records your intent and nothing more.

When the batch finishes you book each product into stock by hand through Production Outputs and Finished Good Receipts.

How a recipe reaches a work order

By reference, not by copy. A work order stores a link to the BOM. Creating one copies nothing.

The recipe is read at the moment the work order is first started, and only if your business has auto-consume raw materials on start switched on. With that off, the BOM does nothing automatically and you issue materials by hand.

Materials are only issued on the first start, so pausing and resuming never double-issues.

Changing a recipe changes work orders already raised

Because it is a live link with no snapshot:

• Work orders already started keep what they consumed. Nothing is retro-adjusted.
• Work orders raised but not yet started will use the new recipe when they start.

So a change you make today silently alters a job somebody raised last week. There is no warning and no flag on the affected orders.

Do not delete a BOM that open work orders point at — starting those orders will then fail. Set it Inactive instead.

Versions

Editing a recipe resets its version to 1

There is no version field on the form, no clone or “new version” action, and no revision history. Editing replaces the whole recipe in place — every component, routing and output row is deleted and re-inserted.

And any version number above 1 is reset to 1 the first time somebody edits and saves.

To keep an old recipe, create a new BOM with a clear number like BOM-001-B and mark the old one Inactive. Note that Inactive does not stop it being picked — rename it too.

Costing

The Estimated cost on a BOM is a number you type

Nothing calculates it, nothing refreshes it, and nothing reads it. If nobody maintains it by hand, it is wrong.

There is a real roll-up, but it lives in a report: Reports → Manufacturing Reports → BOM Cost. Note it needs a different permission from the BOM screens, so someone who can edit recipes may not be able to see their cost.

Its Computed cost is components × their standard cost. Four things it leaves out:

• Scrap % — so it understates what a job actually issues
• The base quantity — it is the cost of a whole batch, not per unit
• All labour, machine and overhead — routing times contribute nothing
• Nothing for a component with no standard cost, which is counted as zero silently

It also includes Tool and Service lines that will never be issued.

Fields that are stored and never used

Field	Reality
Yield %	Never read by anything.
Type (Standard / Engineering / Phantom / Planning)	Nothing behaves differently. A Phantom BOM is not exploded.
Manufacturing type, Mode	Stored labels; no behaviour attached.
Status	Never filters anything — an Archived BOM is still selectable and will still auto-issue.
Effective date / Expiry date	The header dates are never checked.

Offline

None of this works offline. The list errors and saving fails outright — nothing is queued.

Related

• Work orders
• Kits — the simpler alternative for assembly