What System Builder Does
Most products don't go out alone. A moving light needs a lens, a clamp, and a safety cable. A wireless mic needs a receiver, an antenna, and the right battery. Until now, LASSO let you attach those "related items" to a product as one flat list — either forced on automatically or quietly available as a suggestion. Nothing made sure the right decision got made at the right moment.
System Builder changes that. It lets you organize a product's Associated Items into named collections — "Power," "Mounting," "Color & Effects" — and decide how strongly each collection is required. Then, whenever someone adds that product to a gear order, LASSO opens a short, guided Configure Related Items step that walks them through the choices instead of leaving them to remember.
The result: fewer orders reserved with a required accessory missing, fewer trucks that leave the warehouse short a lens or a distro, and quotes that actually reflect the gear going out the door.
The Building Blocks
A few concepts make the whole feature click:
Collection — a named group of Associated Items on a product (for example, "Lenses"). You create as many as you need. Every collection has a name and a required strength.
Required strength — how firmly a collection must be answered. Each collection is set to one of three levels:
Optional — a helpful suggestion. Nothing is enforced.
Soft Required — the collection requires a selection, but items in other collections on the parent product will be added to the order if no selection is made. Accounts can prevent orders from being set to certain statuses if Soft Required collections are still outstanding.
Hard Required — a real gate. No items will be added to the order if a selection is not made in collections that are hard required.
Ungrouped — a built-in bucket for any Associated Items you haven't sorted into a collection. Ungrouped items keep LASSO's classic behavior: required ones auto-add, and optional ones show up as suggestions. You'll see the note "No collection assigned — required items auto-add, optional items appear as suggestions."
Nested collections — a related item can have collections of its own. When it does, LASSO lets you drill in and configure those too, as deep as your gear goes, with a breadcrumb trail so you always know where you are.
Note: Required Associated Items will always be "Ungrouped." Only optional associated items can be placed into Collections.
Part 1: Setting Up Collections on a Product
This is the admin side — the catalog setup you do once so every order downstream is easier.
Open the Product's Associated Items
Open the product you want to configure.
Go to the Related Items tab, then open the Associated Items relationship tab. Collections live here — on the Associated Items relationship.
You'll see your associated items in a grid with columns for Item, Qty, Per, Round, Max, Req., and Charge.
Associated Items vs. Components. Collections apply only to the Associated Items relationship — the accessories and gear that travel with a product. Components (the items inside a container) are a separate relationship and don't use collections. As part of this same update, you can now drag to reorder component items too, so your container contents list stays in the order that makes sense to your team.
Create a Collection
Select Add collection. A new collection appears (named "Associated Items" by default) — rename it to something your team will recognize, like "Power" or "Safety."
Add Items to a Collection
There are two ways to add to collections:
Add associated item adds an item to the product and drops it into Ungrouped, ready to sort.
+ Add item
on a specific collection adds straight into that collection.
Either way, you'll search your catalog the same way you add a product to an order.
A couple of rules worth knowing:
A product can be associated once. Add the same item again to a collection it's already in and LASSO simply increases its quantity.
Try to add an item that already lives in another collection and LASSO will let you know — move it or remove it from its current collection first.
Set How Required the Collection Is
Each collection has a required-strength dropdown: Optional, Soft Required, or Hard Required. This is the heart of System Builder — set it thoughtfully:
Use Hard Required for anything an order genuinely can't ship without (a lens on a moving light, a receiver for a wireless pack).
Use Soft Required for things you want flagged but not blocked.
Use Optional for nice-to-haves and upsells.
A collection counts as answered as soon as any one item in it is on the order — so a "Lenses" collection is satisfied the moment one lens is chosen.
When an item lives inside a collection, its required setting is governed by the collection, not the item. That's why the per-item Required checkbox is disabled for grouped items, with the note "Required status is set on the collection, not on individual items."
Organize Your Items
Drag and drop items between collections, and drag collections themselves to reorder them. Your order is preserved.
Bulk move: check several items and a Move items button appears. Choose a destination and select Move.
Row menu (the ⋮ on any item) gives you Move to collection..., Remove from collection, and Delete item.
Need to inspect an item? Its info icon opens that product's own details.
Fine-Tune Each Item
For every related item you can set:
Qty, Per, and Round (Up or Exact) — how the quantity scales with the parent.
Max — a ceiling on how many can be added.
Charge — whether the item bills or rides along at no charge (items that don't charge show a "no charge" tag).
Save Your Work
Collection changes — adding, moving, renaming, reordering — don't save on their own. They save when you Save (or Save and Close) the product. If you close the product without saving, your changes won't stick.
Part 2: Configuring Related Items on a Gear Order
This is what your sales and order building teams experience — the payoff for the setup above.
The Configure Step Opens Automatically
When someone adds a product that has a Soft or Hard Required collection to a gear order, the Configure Related Items window opens right away. Products with only optional collections don't interrupt — you can reach those anytime from the item's pill on the order.
Make Your Selections
Each collection shows up as its own tab, with an Optional Items tab for ungrouped suggestions. Inside a collection:
Check the items you want. You can pick more than one.
Set a quantity for each item you select. LASSO starts you at the recommended amount.
If an item is short on availability, LASSO shows it — but a shortage won't stop you from continuing.
Required collections are marked so you can see at a glance what still needs a decision, and the footer keeps a running count: "{n} required group(s) pending" until every requirement is met, then "All requirements met."
Drill Into Nested Gear
If an item you select has related items of its own, you can drill into it and configure those too — as deep as your systems go. A breadcrumb trail (like 6 Space Case › Dimmer Pack) shows your path; select any step to jump back. Requirements roll all the way up, so an unanswered choice three levels down still shows on the top-level line.
Read the Status Pill
Back on the order, each configurable line carries a pill that tells you where it stands:
"{n} needed" — required decisions are still open.
"Options" — only optional choices remain; nothing's blocking.
"Configured · Edit" — every required decision is made. Select Edit to reopen and change your picks anytime.
Apply — or Back Out
Select Apply to save your selections. Your chosen items are added to the order, nested neatly under the parent in the order you set them.
If you cancel out of the automatic Configure step and a Hard Required collection is still unanswered, LASSO removes the product from the order entirely rather than adding it half-configured. (Items that only have soft or optional collections stay put.) You can always add the product again when you're ready to finish the choices.
Require Complete Items Before Certain Order Statuses
This setting is really about Soft Required collections, so it helps to know how the two required levels differ in practice:
Hard Required is answered up front, the moment you add the product. If no selection is made, LASSO doesn't add the product — or any of its related items — to the order at all. Because of that, a Hard Required collection never ends up sitting unanswered on a live order; there's nothing to catch later. (As a fail-safe, LASSO will also block reserving an order if a Hard Required collection were somehow left open, but in normal use you won't reach that point.)
Soft Required is different. The product still gets added to the order even when the collection is left unanswered, so a soft-required decision can genuinely sit unfinished — right up until someone reserves or ships the order.
That's what this setting is for. You can name the gear order statuses an order shouldn't be allowed to reach while a Soft Required collection is still unanswered, so those "we'll finish it later" decisions can't quietly slip through.
Set It Up
Go to Company Settings → Inventory.
Scroll to the card at the bottom: "Require complete items before these statuses."
In the multi-select, choose one or more of your gear order statuses (for example, Reserved or Prepped). These are your own statuses, so pick whatever fits your workflow — you can add several.
Your choices save automatically as you add or remove them, so there's no separate Save button. To turn the block off, simply clear the list — an empty list means no statuses are gated.
Anyone who can open Company Settings → Inventory can change this list, so it's worth agreeing with your team on which statuses belong here.
What Happens
Once a status is on the list, an order can't move into that status while a required item is still incomplete — in practice, an unanswered Soft Required collection, at any depth. LASSO stops the move and tells you exactly what's missing:
"This order can't be reserved yet — {n} required item(s) still need decisions: {names}."
The order stays where it is until those decisions are made.
Tips & Things to Know
Start small. You don't have to group every accessory at once. Put your true must-haves in a Hard Required collection first — that's where the biggest wins are.
A collection needs just one answer. As soon as one item from a required collection is on the order, that requirement is satisfied.
Ungrouped is safe. Anything you don't sort into a collection keeps working exactly as it does today, so nothing breaks while you build out your collections.
Everything's editable. Selections aren't locked in — reopen the Configure Related Items window from a line's pill whenever plans change.
Questions about System Builder or want it enabled for your account? Reach out to your LASSO contact and we'll help you get the most out of it.