A reader wrote in asking about a 3rd-party tool that would allow them to 'manipulate' their Bills of Materials within QuickBooks Premier.
While you could jump all the way into products like Fishbowl, ACCTivate, or even NumberCruncher, and MISys, you might want to consider simply migrating from Premier to Enterprise since Enterprise offers Variable Build capabilities.
While both QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise allow for the creation of Assemblies that incorporate a Bill of Materials (BOM) for either an intermediate-level or finished good (inventory item), only QuickBooks Enterprise offers a 'variable build' capability. It's one of the 'extras' that you pay for when you go from Premier to Enterprise, and a major reason why many users migrate up the desktop product-line.
Both Premier and Enterprise rely upon a user controlled feature to Build Assemblies The result of the build process is to reduce the stock levels of the inventory components, and/or increment quantities of non-inventory, or other components in accordance with the BOM, and to produce a ‘finished good’ for your inventory. QuickBooks will support multi-level Bills of Material in which the finished good is inclusive of various sub-assemblies.
The QuickBooks assembly item (BOM) and build function work reasonably well when your assemblies are standardized and built time and again; however, to build customized assemblies you generally must alter the Bill of Materials and that means, if you are using QuickBooks Premier, creating an entirely new Inventory Assembly (with unique BOM) Item. But QuickBooks Enterprise does not have that limitation.
QuickBooks Enterprise offers users ‘Variable Build’ allowing you to modify the bill of materials as part of the build itself.
When you select any Assembly Item at the top of the Build Assembly transaction, you can simply drop down to the displayed Bill of Material components and swap out one component for another to conform the BOM to your ‘variable build requirement’. You can swap out one component for an alternative component when you have insufficient quantities. You can even change quantity values of any component.
QBES - Variable Build Assembly
You can even change quantity values of any component, subtract components, or add components to an empty line at the end of the existing BOM (shown in the red box at the bottom left of the above figure). In this illustration our BOM called for 5 ounces of grease, but in this case we actually used 7 ounces of grease; with Enterprise we simply edit the amount of grease from 5 ounces to 7 ounces prior to finalizing the build.
So you can either incorporate a very expensive 3rd-party solution as an add-on/add-in to your existing QuickBooks Premier, or migrate to QuickBooks Enterprise.