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Partial shipment and invoice of items inside a BOM

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Posted on by EG-21030933-0

Hello Experts!

I need your help:

My customer designs and manufactures complete plants, including all the machinery inside them.

When they receive a confirmed sales order, there are only high-level (macro) item codes; the bills of materials are created only later.

My problem is this: production can last a year or even longer. When certain parts are completed, they are shipped directly to the customer. However, these assemblies and single items are part of the bill of materials and therefore belong to an active production order. How can I manage the shipment, invoicing, and correct consumption of these components?

Example:

The production order PRODORD001 contains the item Assembly_item for 1 piece, which has a BOM with the following level 1 components:

item1 – Qty. 3

subass_Item2 (with its own BOM and production order) – Qty. 2

item4 – Qty. 3

item5 – Qty. 2

subass_Item9 (with its own BOM and production order) – Qty. 4

The production order PRODORD001 is still in progress, and I want to ship and invoice to the customer (the invoiced value is decided by the customer):

1 × item1

1 × subass_Item2

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thank you.

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Dynamics 365 Business Central

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Alex A 2,924 on at

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You might consider using a Blanket Sales Order, and working within the structure of that for your sales releases.

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OussamaSabbouh 6,876 on at

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Hello ,

This is a standard engineer-to-order case and the key rule is: don’t ship from an open production order. The supported solution is to decouple production from delivery using Jobs (Projects). Keep production orders running normally (with BOMs, sub-assemblies, long lead times), output finished subassemblies to inventory, and use the Job to manage partial shipments and invoicing based on milestones or agreed values—independent of production completion. When the customer wants part of the plant, you ship/invoice via the Job, inventory is reduced correctly, and production can continue. Trying to ship directly from an active production order breaks costing and isn’t supported.

Regards,

Oussama Sabbouh

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YUN ZHU 95,987 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi, If you only need to send it to a customer and it's not an actual invoice, you can try printing the Pro Forma Invoice directly from the order.

Hope this can give you some hints.

Thanks

ZHU

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Dhiren Nagar 397 on at

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Hi,

This is pure case of Machine manufacturing and parts shipments.

There are two solutions to it.

1 - Treat it like a Project: Use Project module of Business Central where you can define separate planning lines for Material you will be shipping/manufacturing and Billing lines. You need to explore the Project module for this and I think you will find a way to use it, as explaining it here will take a long time. Simply to put, you will get your profit by Project, you can have multiple billing and shipment against project and your projection orders are simply at the back of project providing you cost of the project.

2 - Treat it like selling assemblies and not the machine: Create sales orders with assemblies that you will be shipping separately. Create Production order for assemblies and not for Machine.

We've tried both approach in many clients but you have tailor it to your client requirements and tweak it, but I think this gives you hint on how you can achieve it.

Regards,

Dhiren.

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Ben Baxter 6,651 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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This is 100% a use case for the Projects module. If applicable, you can still utilize the Manufacturing module to build the components of the plant, but the majority of the entry will be through the Project.

Best Regards,

Ben Baxter

Accent Software Inc

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