This program eliminates the tedium of manually building assemblies as well as updating costs and prices in QuickBooks. Anyone who works with QuickBooks is well aware of the time consuming, error prone, and computer resource intensive process of manually building the assemblies that you sell and keeping your costs and prices up to date as your component costs change. The QuickBooks Community has long desired both a “Build & Close” feature that helps take the tedium out of building assemblies as well as an easier way to update the Cost Block, particularly to match the Total Bill of Materials Cost. Auto Build Assemblies goes one step further by allowing you to enter all your build requirements and cost/price update criteria into a single Excel spreadsheet (if you always 'build back to zero', this is a onetime setup) and then converting those instructions into QuickBooks build orders and cost/price update commands automatically. Initiate the program at the touch of a button and let Auto Build Assemblies take care of the rest or schedule the program to run as a task during off hours.
Read what some recent customers have said about Auto Build Assemblies:
“This is exactly what we’ve been looking for! This program is going to save us an incredible amount of time.”
“I was ready to recommend to my boss that we had outgrown QuickBooks and would need to find a more powerful accounting solution. Your program solves a MAJOR issue for us. We can now keep our significant investment in software, hardware, and, most importantly, training.”
The nuts and bolts of this program are as follows:
On first run, Auto Build Assemblies scans through your item list and puts all of your assembly items, complete with descriptions, on the Build Page of an Excel spreadsheet called Auto Build Schedule.xls. A second page of the same spreadsheet, called the Cost and Price Page, contains a list of all service, inventory, non inventory, other charge, and assembly items together with their current Average Cost, Cost Block, Total Bill of Materials Cost, and Sales Price information. The Build Page has 3 columns next to each item: Quantity to Build, Quantity to Have, and Build Order. You populate your build requirements in the cells next to each item. The Cost and Price Page has criteria you can select for each item type to tell Auto Build Assemblies if you want the Cost Block to be made equal to the Average Cost, the Total Bill of Materials Cost, or any number or formula you specifically enter for each item. You can also specify that you want the Sales Price to be updated with a percent markup of either the updated Cost Block, the current Sales Price, or any other number or formula you specifically enter for each item.
Upon execution, Auto Build Assemblies opens the Auto Build Schedule spreadsheet and first updates all costs according to the criteria you specify and then updates all prices based on these updated costs. It then builds the assemblies by first organizing them according to the build order you specified. It then steps through each item and first determines if there are enough inventory items on hand to build the assembly in the first place. If there are enough parts, then it issues the build order to QuickBooks. It has the ability to ‘drill down’ and build any lower level assemblies that need to be built first in order to complete the upper level build. There is no limit to the number of these layers. If there are not enough component parts on hand to complete all the builds you are requesting, Auto Build Assemblies can be configured to build as many as it can, based on available parts, or to hold off and retry all the builds the next time the program is run.
In addition to reporting its progress on the screen as it runs, an Excel log file is saved giving you details of all build attempts including the number of successful builds, the number of builds that could not be completed, and the first missing component that prevented the build from being completed. The log file also lists all cost updates, including the old cost and the new cost, and all price updates, including the old price and the new price.
If you set Auto Build Assemblies to run as an unattended task during the middle of the night, you will arrive in the morning with your costs and prices updated, your builds complete, and a log file saved.
Auto Build Assemblies is compatible with all versions of QuickBooks through 2012, Excel through 2010, and Windows XP, Vista, and version 7. QuickBooks Premier or Enterprise is required to perform any builds, but the cost/price update feature may be used independently with QuickBooks Pro.