How to create a bill of materials

The bill of materials is the product's recipe: it says which components it takes and how much of each for a base quantity ("10 kg of sauce"). Production orders scale it to what you plan to make.

Before you start

• The product must be an inventory item: what you make goes into the warehouse. If the item is assembled when sold (a coffee, a sandwich made to order), it is a kit and is defined in the item's Package and kit tab. See Recipes, modifiers and kitchen tickets.
• Components must be inventory items too, because they leave the warehouse.
• Each product has a single bill of materials.

Why: SAP Business One has sales, assembly and template BOMs besides the production one. In Nori, sales and assembly BOMs are the item's kits. In Production › Bills of materials, Show sales kits lists them separately with a link to their item.

Set up resources (optional)

If you want to charge labor or machine hours to production:

1. Go to Production › Setup › Resources.
2. Enter the code, the name, the kind (Labor, Machine or Other) and the cost of one hour.
3. If the resource has its own G/L account, choose it. Left empty, it uses the Absorbed labor and overhead account of G/L account determination.

Create the bill of materials

1. Go to Production › Bills of materials and click New bill of materials.
2. In Product, choose the item you make.
3. Enter the Base quantity: what the recipe yields, in the product's inventory unit ("10 kg").
4. Choose the BOM warehouse: components leave from it unless the line says otherwise.
5. Optional: a Price list to see component costs at those prices (without it, at their average cost) and the Portions the base quantity yields, for the cost per portion.
6. Under components, add each component with Item or each resource with Resource, and fill in per line:
   • Quantity and unit: you can enter any unit of the item (kg, grams, liters, piece, box); Nori converts it to the inventory unit.
   • Waste %: what is lost when preparing the component (cleaning, peeling, cooking).
   • Issue method: Manual (someone issues it from the order) or Backflush (it is issued automatically when the product is received).
   • By-product: check it if the line comes out of production instead of going in (bones for stock, trimmings), and choose whether it enters at its average cost, at a fixed cost or at no cost.
7. Click Save.

How waste works

The order asks for more so there is enough: quantity ÷ (1 − waste). If the 10 kg recipe takes 2 kg of chicken with 20 % waste and you plan 37 kg, the order asks for 2 ÷ 10 ÷ 0.8 × 37 = 9.25 kg of chicken. An 80 % yield is a 20 % waste.

Tree and cost

In the bill of materials, Tree and cost shows the components with their cost and the total cost. Type another quantity in For to see the recipe scaled. If a component has its own bill of materials, open it to see its components: the cost of semi-finished goods rolls up from their own recipes.

A component's cost comes from the recipe's price list if it has one; otherwise from the average cost in its warehouses; otherwise from the last purchase price. Resources add hours times cost per hour and by-products subtract their value.

Change a bill of materials

Edit it and save: its Version goes up. Orders already created keep the lines they copied. To stop using a bill of materials without deleting it, uncheck Active.

If you don't see…

• The Production menu: you need the Production, Supervisor or Administrator role and a Supervisor license or higher. The Supervisor role sees bills of materials but doesn't edit them.
• The item in Product: check it is an inventory item; if it isn't, Nori tells you it is a kit.
• "The bill of materials contains itself": a component uses, directly or indirectly, the same product. Remove that line.
• A zero cost: the components have no average cost or purchases yet. Choose a price list in the recipe to see a reference cost.