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Hello,

      We are selling food, and we have several similar items, like: Chicken1, chicken2, chicken3, chicken4….   currently, these chicken items are handled in different individual item ids.
       These items are similar only with the Brand difference. 

      So now the management have a need to see the inventory(Qty on hand) of “Chicken” together at once. we previously did this by manually adding different chicken qty together.

       I know Acumatica having item class/item sub class,  item/sub item, matrix item, a lot of ways to define a group. But in my case, which is the best way. Can anyone give me some advice?

You can use subitems to take advantage of Inventory Summary showing the total figure for all subitems for an item, but this will require having the same inventory id for all items in the group (they differ only by subitem code), with no possibility (at least as far as I am aware of) to set up different sales and purchase prices for subitems


You essentially just need a common value to link these groups of items together. A relatively low impact solution could be using a stock item attribute. This attribute can then be used in your grouping for generic inquiries and reports to get a sum by attribute value.

I use something similar when we have customers that fall under the same customer class, but we then require more granular reporting on buying groups within that customer class.

Below is a quick example if I wanted to see the On Hand Qty for items that were listed on our advertised promos when group by an attribute CSAnswers.Value].

 

Sample Relations
Sample CSAnswers Join

 

 


Hello,

       As I studied item/sub item and  matrix item. I think both the two ways are complicated.

For me ,right now, only report purpose is needed.

     So my solution is to create a sub item class, and assign all the chickens to this sub class.

    And Then I can do reporting by sub class if needed.


@Neil Cantral 
Thank you, Neil , for sharing with us this bright idea.
unlike customer class, item class do support hierachies, so I can directly use sub class to do the more granular things.
But I do can use your help if we are in need of defining buying group under a certain customer class.
Thank you.


@mvolshteyn 
Thank you, Mark. Sorry for the late reply, I’ve took a sick leave for a while.

Thank you for sharing this information. Yes, you can right, for sub-items, the prices seems can not be defined separately. And, what’s more, it looks like if sub item be actived, it can not be deactived, and the sub item would be applied to all items, even if this item has no child. 
So, we decide not to use it.
By the way, in my opinion, the matrix item is what acuamtica trying to replace the sub item functions.
But matrix item is also complicated.


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