Back to D100: Inventory Order Management Basics

Lesson 5: Creating Units of Measure

Part 1: Configuring Inventory and Order Management

In Acumatica ERP, you can maintain diﬀerent units of measure (UOMs), which are units used to account for and express the quantities of products that are purchased, stocked, or sold by your company. Multiple units of measure are required when items can be sold by the piece or be sold by boxes, packages, crates, or other storage units into which they are packaged. In this lesson, you will create system-wide units of measure.

Units of Measure: General Information

Some inventory items can be purchased, tracked, or sold by your company in multiple ways: by the piece, or in storage containers into which they have been packaged. Storage containers can include boxes, packages, or crates. In Acumatica ERP, you can define and maintain any number of diﬀerent units of measure (UOMs) to account for and express these quantities of the items. You can also define conversion rules, so that for diﬀerent UOMs of the same items, the system can calculate the prices of items to your specifications. Some units of measure apply to many items and, as such, are defined at the system level. Other units of measure are used only for particular items or for item classes (which group similar items). In Acumatica ERP, you can define UOMs and conversion rules at all of these levels, as described in the following sections.

Learning Objectives

In this lesson, you will do the following:

Create units of measure that can be used system-wide
Create conversion rules for system-wide units of measure

Applicable Scenarios

You create system-wide units of measure in the following cases:

You are initially configuring inventory in Acumatica ERP.
You need to measure stock items in specific units that are not defined among the system-wide UOMs.

System-Wide Units of Measure When you deploy a tenant from scratch, the tenant already contains predefined units of measure, which you can view on the Units of Measure (CS203500) form. If you need to define additional units of measure, you use the same form. Units of measure defined on this form can be used system-wide, for example, for all inventory items and item classes. For each UOM, you can also specify how this unit is converted to units already defined in the table, if applicable. For more information on conversion rules, see Conversion Rules. In addition to system-wide UOMs, you can create UOMs when you are creating an item class or inventory item. For details, see UOMs for Item Classes and Stock Items.

UOMs for Item Classes and Stock Items

You specify UOMs for item classes or stock items in the Units of Measure section of the General tab on the Item Classes (IN201000) or Stock Items (IN202500) form, respectively. The UOMs specified in the settings of an item class are copied to the corresponding boxes of a new stock item of this class created on the Stock Items form. For both item classes and stock items, you can select system-wide UOMs or type new item class-specific or item-specific UOMs.

New UOMs added on the Item Classes form are not copied automatically to the Units of Measure (CS203500) form. If you want to use these units globally, you must manually add the units to the Units of Measure form.
New UOMs added by using the Stock Items form are copied automatically to the Units of Measure form.
If the Multiple Units of Measure feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form, for each item class defined on the Item Classes form and for each stock item defined on the Stock Items form, you can specify the following units:
Base Unit (required): The unit of measure used to calculate unit costs and to maintain availability data for stock items (that is, the system counts the quantities of each stock item at warehouses by using the UOM specified as its base unit). For recommendations on selecting base units, see Stock Items: Units of Measure.
Sales Unit (optional): The unit of measure typically used when your company sells the item.
Purchase Unit (optional): The unit of measure typically used when your company purchases the item.
```
        If you need to change any UOM of an item class or item, make sure that rules for conversion between
        the current and new UOM are specified on the Units of Measure (for system-wide units), Item Classes
        (for item class-specific units), or Stock Items (for item-specific units) form before you use the item with
        the new UOM in any new transaction.
```
If the Multiple Units of Measure feature is not enabled on the Enable/Disable Features form, you can specify only base units for item classes and for individual stock items. When you enter a sales transaction and specify the quantity and UOM of the inventory item, the system converts the specified UOM to the base unit for cost-of-sold-goods calculation and to the default sales unit for finding the proper price (or to any other unit of the item for which a price can be found). For stock items, you can configure units of measure (UOMs) for items that can be measured only in quantities that are integers. This helps to eliminate the number of errors in inventory, sales, and purchase documents. For more information, see Stock Items: Units of Measure That Are Not Divisible. For more information about UOMs for stock items, see Stock Items: Units of Measure.

Conversion Rules

If the same item can be measured in multiple UOMs, you should define conversion rules between these UOMs so that the system can recalculate item quantities to the base UOM of the item. For system-wide UOMs, you add conversion rules to the settings of a unit on the Units of Measure (CS203500) form. If you specify diﬀerent UOMs for base, sales, and purchase units for an item on the Stock Items (IN202500) form, you need to add conversion rules for the sales and purchase UOMs with respect to the base UOM on this form.

          You define conversion rules similarly for a non-stock item on the Non-Stock Items (IN202000) form.

Before you define conversion rules for UOMs, you must make sure that the decimal precision specified in the Decimal Precision box on the Companies (CS101500) form corresponds to your organization's rounding policy for the base currency. In conversion rules, you use the operations of multiplication and division and the conversion factor, which is a number the system uses to convert one UOM to another UOM. For example, suppose that your organization purchases bottled lemonade in crates and sells lemonade by boxes and crates. The base UOM for lemonade is BOTTLE. The BOX UOM contains 10 bottles. The CRATE UOM includes six boxes or 60 bottles. The conversion rules between these UOMs are listed in the following table.

UOM                           To Unit                       Multiply/Divide               Conversion Factor

BOX                           BOTTLE                        Multiply                      10

CRATE                         BOTTLE                        Multiply                      60

CRATE                         BOX                           Multiply                      6

The conversion rules are not reversible—that is, the system cannot use the rule in the first row of the table above to recalculate the quantity specified in bottles to the quantity specified in crates. To convert bottles to boxes and crates, you need to add the conversion rules listed in the following table.

UOM                           To Unit                       Multiply/Divide               Conversion Factor

BOTTLE                        BOX                           Divide                        10

BOTTLE                        CRATE                         Divide                        60

Units of Measure: Implementation Activity

In this implementation activity, you will learn how to create system-wide units of measure and conversion rules.

Story

Suppose that you are an implementation manager. You are configuring inventory for the SweetLife Fruits & Jams company, which produces and sells bottled juice. The company sells juice in 0.5-liter and 1-liter bottles. For wholesale customers, the company sells juice in boxes: a box that contains twelve 0.5-liter bottles, and a box that contains eight 1-liter bottles. Before you can start creating stock items for juice in the system, you need to create the units of measure and conversion rules that will provide default settings for juice items.

Process Overview

In this activity, you will create system-wide units of measure and conversion rules for these units of measure on the Units of Measure (CS203500) form.

Step 1: Creating the BTL05 and BOX12 Units of Measure To add units of measure for a single 0.5-liter bottle and a box of 12 0.5-liter bottles along with the rule for converting the quantity of the 0.5-liter bottle to the quantity of these boxes, do the following:

On the Units of Measure (CS203500) form, add a new record.
In the Unit ID box, specify BTL05.
In the Description for Reports box, specify BTL05.
On the form toolbar, click Save.
On the form toolbar, click Add New Record.
In the Unit ID box, specify BOX12.
In the Description for Reports box, specify BOX12.
On the table toolbar, click Add Row.
In the To Unit column, type BTL05. 10.In the Multiply/Divide column, select Multiply. 11.In the Conversion Factor column, type 12. 12.On the form toolbar, click Save.

Step 2: Creating the BTL1L and BOX08 Units of Measure To add units of measure for a single 1-liter bottle and a box of 8 1-liter bottles along with the rule for converting the quantity of the 1-liter bottle to the quantity of these boxes, do the following:

While you are still on the Units of Measure (CS203500) form, click Add New Record.
In the Unit ID box, specify BTL1L.
In the Description for Reports box, specify BTL1L.
On the form toolbar, click Save.
On the form toolbar, click Add New Record.
In the Unit ID box, specify BOX08.
In the Description for Reports box, specify BOX08
On the table toolbar, click Add Row.
In the To Unit column, type BTL1L. 10.In the Multiply/Divide column, select Multiply. 11.In the Conversion Factor column, type 8. 12.On the form toolbar, click Save.
You have created units of measure and conversion rules. Now you can create availability calculation rules, as described in Availability Calculation Rules: Implementation Activity. For the full list of inventory entities to be created, see Configuration of Order Management: General Information. Part 1: Configuring Inventory and Order Management | 33