Building an Inventory Item

Is anyone able to walk me through the building of an inventory item from start to finish? I'm confused on how to use the program for this... I have a single product, we have multiple things that went into creating this product. I want to be able to track or know how much a single unit of this product cost us to make, considering there is a cost to manufacture, label and ship the product to us. From reading on the knowledgebase, I think I would use the "build from assembly" icon, but it makes no sense to me. If I have a purchase invoice FOR a component of the product, how do I link it to that product to know that was a cost of making the product?