BOM Pricing

A spreadsheet is the usual way to price a Bill of Materials, and it stops working surprisingly quickly. Even at 20 to 40 components, you are searching for each part, comparing a few distributors, and pasting in prices — and the result is stale almost as soon as you save it. Worse, distributor offers are not the simple numbers a spreadsheet assumes. Price breaks fall at different quantities from one supplier to the next, minimum order quantities and order multiples change the real cost, prices come in several currencies, and many lines have equivalent alternates you would otherwise compare by hand.

PartsBox prices the BOM for you instead, from live offers, and keeps it current.

Projects are BOMs

In PartsBox a BOM is a Project: a list of parts, some linked to an online identity (an MPN), some local. Open a project's Pricing tab and PartsBox fetches current pricing and shows the whole BOM with its sourcing, so it is never out of date.

Offers

For every line with an MPN, PartsBox gathers the distributor offers — often 20 to 40 — and shows the best one in the table. For a meta-part, it gathers offers for every member and compares them together. Required quantities are adjusted for part attrition.

Picking the best offer means handling what a spreadsheet cannot: price breaks that differ per offer, stock and availability, minimum order quantities, order multiples, and multiple currencies. PartsBox ranks offers by effective price — the real cost once any unavoidable excess is counted. It does not discard an offer just because your quantity is below its MOQ or off its order multiple; it rounds up to see how the offer ranks anyway, because a higher price break can still win even after throwing the surplus away.

Because the ranking depends on quantity, the best offer changes with the build size, and sources that only make sense at volume surface on their own. (Not everyone knows Texas Instruments sells directly and is very competitive above 500 pieces.) Expand any offer to see packaging, quantity on order and its ETA, factory lead time, and factory order multiple.

For a part measured by length, weight, area, or volume, each offer shows two prices: per vendor package (a spool, reel, or jar) and per part unit, with the unit symbol — for example $0.14/mm. To rank them, PartsBox reduces every offer to a common unit, so alternates in different packaging or different units compare directly. The amount to buy is shown in the part's unit, rounded up to whole packages.

Lock an offer with the padlock icon to fix the selection for that line.

Your own offers

Plenty of buying happens outside the big distributors — a local supplier, or a negotiated quote for a specific quantity. Add your own offer, from a part or from within a project, and it is ranked alongside the online ones. Like any offer it can have price breaks, a minimum quantity, and an order multiple (in whole vendor packages for a part sold in packages), in any supported currency. It can carry a reference, a date, comments, an expiration date after which it is ignored, and attached files such as the quote or invoice.

Pricing against stock you already hold

A new project needs everything bought, but usually you already have some stock, purchased at a known price. When pricing, choose how parts are sourced:

• only use stock you already have
• only buy new
• use stock first, then buy the shortfall

Each is priced correctly, mixing sources where needed.

Currencies

Offers arrive in many currencies. Pick your preferred currency once and every price is shown in it, converted at European Central Bank rates; your own offers can be in any supported currency. Change your currency whenever you like.

Vendor rules and what-if pricing

Few companies buy from every distributor. Vendor rules encode how you actually source, so pricing reflects it. A rule group is a named, ordered list of rules, each saying which vendors to consider — all of them, only certain ones, all except some, or only your own offers. They are tried top to bottom as a fallback chain: the first rule that produces offers wins. So you can express "prefer our two low-cost vendors, fall back to a major distributor, accept anyone as a last resort" without touching individual parts.

One rule group can be the global default; a project or purchase list can lock its own. Because you switch rule groups with a click in the pricing view, they double as buying scenarios — keep "local only", "preferred vendors", and "any vendor" side by side and compare what each does to the BOM price before you commit. You can also widen the field for a theoretical estimate by including offers from distributors with no stock. The User's Guide covers vendor rules in full.

BOM pricing, multiple currencies, and vendor rules start on the Essentials plan.