Hello everyone, I am relatively new to modeling and SolidWorks especial 

My question is really a multiple part question, I am working for a company and we currently have a customer wanting a lot of work done in a short turn around so to keep up with work flow we are going to start trying to utilize SolidWorks more than we have previously we are experiencing a bottle neck in our detailing department which uses 2d AutoCAD to redraw just about everything we do which sometimes is necessary since most of our customers just send us a pdf drawing so we redraw to our company standard but that situation is changing as we grow and we feel we need to figure out a way to leverage the models we are provided by some of our customers to be more effective. we have managed to get assembly files and part files directly from the customer so that will speed things along greatly by itself. what I do currently is kind of a process quoting type job I do take offs to get material amounts and requirements, and I am trying to find a way to speed up this process. I have had luck putting parts alone inside of an assembly file and getting it to give me the type and qty of weldments and sheet metal parts what I am not getting is when we have multiple sub-assemblies it doesn't break it down in a way that does what I need it to do am I Missing something? I have asked on reddit from home and gotten the oh its possible answer but nothing beyond that and most of the videos I have found do not cover exactly what I am looking for

Also, I want to set up some custom properties to do what I need it to do we have some other software that does a good job I would like to be able to export the info in an excel format that way I can then import it into our material handling software to get my material nesting requirements.