I apologize for the long post.
Our company buys and sells some products (about 150) that are boxed in quantities of 6. The purchasing and selling UOM is BX6 (box of 6). For illustration purposes I will refer to the box of 6 as item “A6”. We also sell each individual item in the BX6. I’ll refer to those individual items in the BX6 as “A1”. We do not specify A1 items on purchase orders and we do not advertise A1 in our product catalogue. What we do is break open boxes of A6 to sell some quantity (1-5) of item A1.
We do not enter inventory adjustments in GP for item A6 to accommodate for the sales of item A1. Instead, our buyers download A6 and A1 sales data from GP into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet factors in the sale of item A1 and A6 to arrive at the full quantity sold of A6. Based on this number the buyers order more A6 as needed. Once a year we conduct a physical inventory and adjust the on hand balance of BX6 items accordingly.
Recently we ran into a situation where we un-expectantly depleted all of item A6 because we had not only sold them as A6, but we also sold the item A1 at a faster than expected rate. The unexpected depletion also occurred because the frequency by which we performed the aforementioned sales / inventory analysis and reorder of A6 was not often enough.
In our production environment A6 is defined with zero quantity decimals. In our test environment I have successfully used the change decimal places utility to change the quantity decimals on item A6 to 5 decimals. I also created the associated price list to allow sales of whole or fractional quantities of A6. I created a new UOM schedule with 5 quantity decimals and specified it as the UOM schedule for A6 and recreated the item purchasing options for A6. I created a new item class for A6 with 5 quantity decimals. After the quantity decimals were changed I also used the reconciliation utility to reconcile inventory data (including inventory history).
Theoretically, in our test environment, I should be able to create sales orders for A6 in fractional quantities. However, our business does not create sales order lines with fractional quantities of A6. Instead, when less than a full BX6 is needed, it creates sales order lines for quantities of item A1. So my question is, how might we use GP to associate the sale of item A1 so that on hand quantities of A6 are updated as needed?
Thank you.
