How can I use the BOM Quote functionality in DSPCB?

The BOM Quote dialog is accessible from BOM Quote button at the right-hand end of the menu bar. BOM Quote will display the bill of materials for your current design or project, and you have a live internet connection this will include representative price and availability of the items in your BOM directly from the up-to-date online information.

Above you can see an example of what a BOM Quote looks like. There are some buttons along the top of the dialog (see below for an explanation of how to use them), a header section describing the design or project from which this BOM is generated, then a table showing the BOM itself.

At the foot of the BOM is the estimated total price based on the information shown in the table. This total price is not an absolute or guaranteed price, it is purely an indication of the likely cost of the components needed for this design. The accuracy of any of the figures shown in the BOM will depend on how complete your part numbering is in the design, the availability of items from stock, and other factors such as any discounting you may have as part of your RS purchase account, or due to sliding scales on ordering larger quantities.

Items in the table are colour-coded to help you understand at a glance how close your BOM is to being complete. It highlights how well your design matches up to the components currently in stock, as well as indicating particular issues such as missing part numbers or items that are out of stock.

At the top of the dialog are some controls that help you manage and use your BOM:

To assist with estimating costs when building multiples of your design, enter the total number of PCBs you want to build, and click the 'tick' button. The costs in the BOM will be updated to reflect that number of PCBs.

Alongside the quantity field are some action buttons:

Refresh - refresh the BOM by fetching the latest information from the online database.

• Send to Colleague - this will create a new Email message using your Email client, containing the BOM you can see on the screen. Note that due to the limitations of how the information can be represented in the body of the email, you may not see the same colour-coding you see on the screen.
• Shopping Basket - this will transfer your BOM to the online shopping cart or ordering system, depending on what system is available through your local RS distributor.
• Export to CSV - click this button to save the BOM to a comma-separated (CSV) file for easy transfer to other systems.