Inventory Assemblies are used for entering a bill of material to detail the components which are required to build a finished good or a sub-assembly.

The advantage of this method over groups is that the individual components are actually removed from your inventory and the associated costs are rolled up into the finished good or sub-assembly. This feature is available in QuickBooks Premier and QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions.

However, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions has two additional features related to the inventory assembly items:

1. Variable Bill of Materials - what this means is that as the build is entered you can change the bill of materials on the fly. So if this build actually required more of a specific item you can update it. If a different component was used you can change it. All of this can be completed right on the build screen rather than editing the bill of materials from the item list as is required with Premier.
2. Print the Build - With QuickBooks Enterprise it is possible to print the build to provide a paper trail for the process. This is not possible with Premier.