Kits and Bundles

Kits & bundles

A kit is an item defined as an assembly of other items — a repair kit, a starter bundle, a product you build from components. Gubbins tracks what a kit is made of and works out how many you could build from the stock you currently hold.

Where to find it: the Kit tab of an item's details, once the Kits & bundles capability is enabled (Modular UI).

Defining a kit

On an item's Kit tab, list the component items and how many of each the kit needs:

"Starter electronics kit" = 1 × breadboard + 10 × jumper wires + 5 × LEDs + 2 × resistor packs.

Gubbins then shows a live "how many can I build?" figure, calculated from the current stock of every component — so you can see at a glance whether you can fulfil an order or need to restock a part first.

💡 Tip The buildable count updates as component stock changes, so a kit doubles as an early warning: if you can suddenly only build one, a component has run low. Pair it with reorder points on the components.

Kits inside kits

A component can itself be a kit. When one is, Gubbins shows a second figure alongside the plain buildable count: how many you could make with sub-kits assembled on demand — counting not just the sub-kits already on the shelf, but the ones you could build from their own components, all the way down. It also names the deepest constraint: the raw part at the bottom of the chain that's actually holding the number back, so you restock the right thing rather than the nearest one.

Where a part is shared by two different sub-kits, it's split between them rather than counted twice — the figure is what you could genuinely build, not an optimistic one.

Assembling & disassembling

Defining a kit doesn't move any stock. When you actually build one, use Assemble on the Kit tab: enter how many, and Gubbins consumes the components and adds the finished kits to stock in a single step, recorded in your activity log. You can't assemble more than the buildable count allows.

Choose a Destination to say where the finished kits land — any of your locations, or the kit's own home location by default. Components are drawn from wherever they sit, soonest-expiry batches first.

Disassemble is the exact inverse — break kits back down and the components return to stock.

When a kit contains sub-kits, an assemble sub-kits as needed option appears. With it on, any sub-kit you're short of is built first, in the right order, as part of the same operation — so a multi-level assembly happens in one action instead of several.

⚠️ Heads-up Assembling and disassembling work on items tracked as Bulk. An item tracked another way — a Consumable gauge, for instance — can be a component of a kit, but can't itself be assembled. See Tracking modes.

Kits vs the other groupings

ℹ️ Note A kit is made of other items. That's different from:

• Variants & SKUs — the same product in different sizes/colours.
• Related items — items that work with each other.
• Projects & BOM — a one-off build with its own bill of materials and budget, rather than a reusable kit definition.

Is a kit the same as a bill of materials?

A kit's component list is a bill of materials — a reusable one, attached to a product you make repeatedly, and paired with the assembly step that turns those parts into finished stock. If you'd call something "a BOM for a product we build", that's a kit.

A project BOM is the other kind: the parts list for one particular build. It's a one-off, so it carries the things a one-off needs — a budget, reservations to earmark stock ahead of time, a shopping list for what's missing, a picking worksheet, and BOM import/export. A kit has none of those, because a reusable definition doesn't need them.

The practical test: would you build this again from the same list? If yes, make it a kit. If it's this job, this repair, this build, make it a project. The two don't currently share a parts list — a project BOM can't be filled in from a kit definition, or vice versa.

Kits on your other devices

Kit definitions travel with the rest of your data: they're included in cloud sync, so a kit you build on your desktop shows up on your phone, and in the backup file, so restoring brings your kits back with everything else.

ℹ️ Note If two devices add the same component to the same kit while offline, the merge keeps one line rather than duplicating it — whichever edit was made most recently sets the quantity.

Related pages

• Projects & BOM — for one-off builds with budgets.
• Cloud sync — keeping kits and everything else in step across devices.
• Variants & SKUs — grouping the same product's flavours.
• Reorder & shopping list — keeping components in stock.