Manufacturing & Inventory

Hello,

I own a small manufacturing company and we just upgraded to quickbooks enterprise manufacturing.  We sell custom parts manufactured to our customers specifications.  Most often we do not do the manufacturing in house.  Normally we buy the raw casting from one vendor, then have another vendor machine it, and then another vendor paint it, and another vendor grind it, and then we turn around and sell it.  Sometimes we just buy the raw casting mark it up and turn around and sell it, but this is less common.  I am struggling with the correct way to set this up as items.  Originally I thought of setting up the items we sell as assemblies and have the subcontracted processes as non inventory items or services within those assemblies.  That way I could see all of my costs rolled up and put a markup on it, but we don't really want to tract inventory as an asset, because everything is specific to that customer and job.  We don't buy 1,000 bowling bowls and then sell them to 1,000 different customers.  We manufacture custom items for the specific order and then close that order out once the manufacturing is complete.  We never sell the same item to more than one customer

I also thought of setting up the item we sell as a parent and then setting up the inputs as sub items, but then you loose the ability to roll up your costs and add a markup, which would mean I would have to track all the costs separately in a spreadsheet for quoting purposes. 

Any suggestions would be extremely helpful.