Generating BOM's - What am I missing?

[PDMAdmin]

I have been struggling with our document control department for months on the issue of generating BOM's, and I am starting to come to the realization that we may not be able to find an ideal BOM generation tool that will make everybody happy.

Here is the "must" list:

* BOM must always be up-to-date as of the moment it is generated (seems obvious, but PDMWorks' "Reporting" function does not do this)
* We must be able to show any custom properties we choose in the BOM
* Assembly level numbers must be shown in the BOM (I cannot find any way to do this in SolidWorks, except manually or through API)
* BOM must easily switch from "parts list" to "indented" if we choose to do that

The only "preferred" item is that we would be able to generate BOM's outside of SolidWorks, since our document control department does not use SolidWorks. The "Reporting" function in PDMWorks would be ideal, but since that's only accurate as of the most recent check-in, we cannot use it for up-to-date BOM's.

We have found a variety of products, some of which are included with SW, some of which are not, but none of them has satisfied every single item on our "must" list. Is it really that difficult to generate an up-to-date BOM that meets our minimum requirements, or am I missing something?

Thanks for the help!