Real manufacturing for small businesses. Define a Bill of Materials, click Build, and Kantivo consumes components from stock, adds the finished assembly, rolls cost up automatically, and posts the journal entry. Live shortage detection refuses bad builds before they happen.
Try It FreeA surprising number of small businesses don't fit the "service" or "retail reseller" mold. Custom furniture builders. Light-assembly shops. Kit packers. Gift basket businesses. Jewelry makers. Even one-room bike shops assembling complete bikes from frames, wheels, and components. Until now, accounting software either ignored manufacturers entirely or made them buy a separate $200/month MRP system to track a Bill of Materials.
Kantivo bakes the essential manufacturing workflows directly into the accounting product. Define a Bill of Materials per assembly. Build transactions consume components and produce finished assemblies. Costs roll up automatically. The journal entry posts itself. The component shortage check refuses builds you can't actually do. It works the way every accountant expects, with no separate system to integrate.
Create an Inventory Assembly product and add its components â each a regular inventory part you already track â with quantity-per-unit.
Enter the quantity you're building. Kantivo shows a live preview of components needed, on-hand quantities, and total cost â refusing if any component is short.
Component stock decreases, assembly stock increases, unit cost rolls up from component costs, and the journal entry posts for the audit trail.
For each assembly, define which inventory parts go into it and how many. The BOM editor lives right inside the item editor â no separate manufacturing module to learn.
Record the act of building. Pick the assembly, enter quantity to build, optionally add a batch number or note. Kantivo handles the rest â stock, cost, and journal entry.
Made a mistake? Pulled an assembly apart for spares? Click Unbuild on the build history. Components go back to stock, the assembly count drops, and a mirror journal entry posts.
Each build computes assembly unit cost from the sum of component costs at the time of build. The assembly's standing cost updates so future sale of the assembly posts the right COGS automatically.
The biggest source of bad manufacturing data is starting a build you can't actually finish. Kantivo prevents that with a live preview: as you type the quantity, the preview table shows each component, qty needed, qty on hand, line cost, and a clear status â green checkmark if you can build, red SHORT label with exact shortfall if you can't. The Build button stays disabled until everything is green.
Every Build and Unbuild lives in the assembly's history with date, quantity, unit cost, and reference number. Production managers can see at a glance how many bikes were built in March, what each batch cost, and which builds were later unbuilt. Useful for batch tracking, audit defense, and cost-trend analysis.
If your business buys parts and assembles finished products from them â whether that's a one-room bike shop, a small furniture builder, a jewelry maker, or a kit-packing operation â Inventory Assemblies in Kantivo gives you the BOM-and-build workflow without forcing you onto a dedicated MRP platform. Everything lives in the same place as your accounting, your invoicing, and your reporting.
A Group is an invoicing convenience â it expands into editable lines and never touches inventory levels. An Inventory Assembly is real manufacturing â building one consumes component stock and adds assembly stock, with the journal entry to match. Use Group for "Spring Maintenance Service Bundle"; use Assembly for "Mountain Bike built from frame + wheels + seat + handlebars."
Yes. A high-level assembly can include sub-assemblies as components. Kantivo detects cycles â an assembly cannot include itself directly or transitively â and refuses to save the BOM if you try.
The build preview catches it before you confirm. Kantivo shows the exact shortfall per part ("Frame: needed 3, on hand 2, short 1") and disables the Build button until either you reduce the build quantity or restock the missing parts.
Unit cost = sum of (each component's current unit cost à quantity-per-unit). If a frame costs $80, wheels cost $60 each, and the BOM is 1 frame + 2 wheels, the assembly unit cost is $80 + $120 = $200. The assembly's product record updates to this cost after each build, so when you sell one later, COGS posts at $200 automatically.
Yes. Each Build creates an Assembly Build journal entry â debit Inventory (assembly stock added), credit Inventory (components consumed) â at the company's single Inventory account. Each Unbuild posts the mirror entry. Both show up in transaction history and the build's reference number.
Builds currently run against the first active inventory location ("default location"). Multi-location build selection is a planned enhancement; the schema is already designed to support it.
The mechanics â BOM, consumption, cost roll-up â are identical to recipe costing. The yield-percent column on each BOM line is reserved for future restaurant features (a 50lb case of tomatoes yielding 35lb after trim, for example). Restaurant-specific UI like POS integration and theoretical-vs-actual variance reports are roadmap items.
Start your free 30-day trial. Define your first assembly and run a Build in under five minutes.