Bill of Materials & light manufacturing when the product is more than one item number.

Sage describes a bill of materials as the structure that defines the relationship between the component items that make up a product.

Each bill contains header information—such as description and bill type—and the component structure beneath it. Those components can include inventory items, miscellaneous charge codes, comment lines, subassemblies, and other bill relationships depending on the bill type.

That structure becomes the foundation for costing, kitting, production activity, options, revisions, and connections into other manufacturing workflows.

• Standard bills: multi-level product structures used in production and work-ticket activity.
• Engineering bills: product structures used for design, estimating, and controlled revisions.
• Inactive bills: bills retained in the system but no longer used for active production.
• Kit bills: single-level assembled-item structures.
• Phantom bills: component groups or interim manufacturing steps that do not represent a stocked inventory item.

The bill type is not decorative metadata. It changes what the bill represents and how Sage is expected to use it.

Sage 100 allows bills with options so a business does not have to maintain a completely separate bill for every possible product configuration.

A base bill can define the standard product while option bills and option categories define the nonstandard choices available to the customer.

In Sales Order Entry, those options can be selected as part of the customer's specifications, helping define the structure that ultimately feeds production activity or a work ticket.

Sage documents engineering change control for recording engineering change notices and implementing controlled changes between bill revisions.

Changes may be driven by error correction, cost reduction, design improvements, quality improvements, or changes in material specifications.

Rather than simply overwriting the original bill structure, changes can be tracked with effective dates while earlier configurations remain on file.

Sage's Bill of Materials functionality includes Production Entry for recording manufactured goods into inventory and consuming the corresponding components after the fact in a single process.

Sage specifically notes that this approach does not directly support a work-in-process accounting system. That distinction is important.

For lighter manufacturing environments, that may be exactly the appropriate level of complexity. If the organization needs deeper WIP, labor, scheduling, and work-ticket tracking, Production Management is the more appropriate conversation.

Sage also documents Disassembly Entry for relieving a parent item from inventory and returning its component items to inventory.

That can support disassembling a manufactured item, salvaging component parts from a purchased item, or reversing a previously posted production entry.

The useful part is not simply that Sage can take an assembly apart. It is that inventory can reflect the reversal in a structured way instead of relying on improvised adjustments.

Sage describes streamlined integration between Bill of Materials and Production Management as supporting improved lead-time calculations, material planning, and resource allocation.

Production Management can also create work tickets from bills and import materials from bills, while Sales Order can use bill options to define customer-specific product configurations.

The result is a connected path from what the product is supposed to be, to what the customer ordered, to what production needs to build.

• What Bill of Materials Actually Does in Sage 100 →
• Bills With Options and Engineering Changes in Sage 100 →
• Light Manufacturing in Sage 100: Production Entry vs. Production Management →
• Sage 100 Production Management →