We were in the same boat. We had to have our Sage Reseller write a script that looks to see if all components are shipped and if so, it ships the Parent SKU in Box 9999 which then means it gets invoiced correctly. That was the only way we could make it work for us many years ago when we ran into this exact same problem.

By any chance are/were either of you using a third party integration for shipping orders? There is a good chance that is the cause if the integration is/was only shipping the components.

No, we scan the components in Sage Shipping Data Entry. Remember that the Parent does not actually exist so there is no way to scan the Parent. The Parent is a collections of items and the items are what are actually scanned.

That isn't quite right. When a kit is exploded onto a sales order, then both the parent item and the component items are added to the lines. When processed in Invoice/Shipping Data Entry, both parent and component are available to ship, sage 100 will internally handle relieving quantities based on whether or not a kit is exploded. When a kit is exploded, the parent kit's quantity will not be relieved, only its components, when a kit is not exploded, the components are not added to the lines, the components will not have their quantity relieved, only the parent kit's quantity will be relieved.

Here is a sample kit from the MFG sample company.

Here is that kit exploded on a sales order.

Here is that sales order being processed in Shipping Date Entry.

I am able to ship the parent kit item instead of shipping the component. If i enter a quantity in the parent's kit quantity shipped and as soon as i step of the parent kit item's line, sage will process and ship the kit's components automatically.

Also, for your process, in which you are scanning the components to make sure the components at an individual level are being tracked by the shipper, i can see where it would make sense for you to do it that way, but there isn't any reason the shipper couldn't first ship the parent kit item and then process each component.

"couldn't first ship the parent kit item"

We scan everything for accuracy. If the Parent is made of Children, there is no Parent to scan. Or am I missing something?

"couldn't first ship the parent kit item"

We scan everything for accuracy. If the Parent is made of Children, there is no Parent to scan. Or am I missing something?

The problem sounds like your business process combined with how Sage 100 functions. 

Sage relieves inventory from the exploded kit components, but invoices based on the exploded parent kit line.  You have to enter quantities for that too (somehow).

Phew. I was a little worried we had missed something simple years ago when we switched to Sage 100. Our Reseller wrote a script and it works flawlessly. I am just glad to confirm that the script was needed based upon our business process and how Sage 100 functions.

If your kits are truly set up the way sage 100 should be set up and they are being exploded onto the lines, then there should be a parent to scan on the lines in shipping data entry. The parent is visible in the screenshot i posted a few messages earlier. You should ship it to invoice the customer properly but sage will only relieve inventory from the components.

It is possible that your reseller implemented additional processes or tweaks resulting in how you see things now but standard sage logic will function the way Kevin and i have described it.

Kevin M said:

You have to enter quantities for that too (somehow).

The "somehow" is what our Reseller created for us because Sage did not have a way for that to happen.

Just for clarification, there is a Parent that appears in Shipping Data Entry but there is nothing physically to scan as the Parent is comprised of the Children all of which must be scanned individually.

Yes but sage invoices the customer based on the parent's quantity shipped so you still must enter a quantity to ship to bill the customer for it if your intention is to bill the customer for the parent since the customer is not billed for the components.

See this example, shipping only components does not increase the invoice amount. Notice how the component does not have a price and therefore does not have an extension. This is how sage 100 handles exploded kit components.

In order to bill the customer, i must ship the parent.

Parent A = Child B + Child C.

In Shipping Data Entry, we scan Child B and erroneously do not scan/ship Child C.

We then go in a tell Sage that we shipped Part A so it gets invoiced.

Sage then automatically marks as shipped Child B and Child C even though Child C was erroneously not shipped.

This will cause inventory to be off and also the customer to be unhappy when they receive their package that is missing Child C even though they were charged for Parent A.

This is a very simplistic example, but some of our kits are 15-20 Children and some of our Sales Orders contain 10-20 different Parents so it would be really easy to miss a Child which is why we scan everything to always double check ourselves and would not want Sage to mark everything as scanned/shipped simply because we say the Parent is scanned/shipped.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Right, for your exact process, that works and your script made it easier for you to achieve the desired results but that may not be required for every one as i've seen kits used differently where only the parent kit item was shipped during Invoice/Shipping Data Entry and they let standard sage functionality ship the components because their bills were set up for this purpose and if the parent kit item was being shipped, then all of the components had already been physically accounted for outside of sage 100 so there was no need to double check the quantity shipped of the components in Invoice/Shipping Data Entry.

The reason i mention integrations is because i have seen at least one that did not properly handle the parent kit item when processing shipments and this would cause the parent kit item to be backordered and NOT billed to the customer. This was caused by the integration only shipping the components because they did not fully understand how sage 100 handles exploded kits.

BENWKBS, can you share that script?  I am having a similar issue as I look at using barcoding and I think I need to script a change to make this work. 

Thank you
Chris