Hello Zoho Creator community!

I'm looking to use Creator to help me with our inventory management, ordering, etc. for our manufacturing business. I'll be hiring a developer to help eventually, but I'd like to get some core parts of the structure in place.

My big issue is that I want to have the form structure correct to be able to manage multi-level BOMs (bills of material - essentially the manufacturing recipe).

If the jargon isn't clear, multi-level would mean that Item C might be composed of 1 Item A and 2 Item Bs. Another assembly, Part E might be composed of 1 Item C and 2 Item Ds.

In this example the single-level BOM for Item E would be:

The fully "exploded" multi-level BOM for Item E would be:

There's theoretically no limit to the number of levels for a manufacturing BOM, though I suspect my use case is no more than 10ish levels.

I currently have a Form called Inventory Items. This has the item's SKU, description, cost, labor, etc. My instinct is to add a subform for the BOM for that Inventory Item. That subform would consist of a lookup field (back to Inventory Items) and a decimal field for quantity (some recipes use fractions of an item).

I know that there are some subtleties around whether one creates a new subform in a form or references an existing form for a subform, but I don't understand those nuances very well. Does the new subform in the current Inventory Item form make sense for this use case?

One of the main functions here will be to be able to back-calculate raw material needs from projected final product sales, and I want to make sure I'm setting this up for success.

Any thoughts or advice will be appreciated. Thanks in advance!