Stock Management

[strangeware]

Would it be possible to add the ability to enable stock monitoring for individual choices within product attributes? At present, if you have a product with choices such as various colours, you cannot monitor the stock for the choices separately, only the whole product and therefore all choices together.

[Mike Hughes]

You can do this today.

Actinic is quite logical about it. To monitor stock of a product with choices you need to create a separate product for each choice (which can be hidden) and then associate that product with the choice.

That way each product choice has a unique part number (product ID) and quantities can be monitored and adjusted as desired.

Mike

[strangeware]

Thanks for your reply Mike,

I wasn't aware that was possible, even so I was thinking of something a little more efficient. Creating a product for each choice, associating them and then hiding the product will surely increase the number of products (and therefore the size of the database) exponentially. It is also untidy and for those with stores already built, such as myself, it will require sitting down and going through several thousand products and creating a product for each choice. I was thinking more along the lines of directly enabling stock monitoring on the choices themselves?

[Mike Hughes]

I know what you're saying. The addition of a stock counter for each choice would be a quick, simple and database efficient way of monitoring and controlling stock quantities.

The way actinic does it though is very powerful and effective even if does take more time and effort to set up. One of the key advantages of actinics full product approach is that it's much easier to control the back end, product ordering side of things as each product now has a proper product reference which can be the suppliers product code. This can then be linked into Sage or an external spreadsheet to control stock orders, etc.

There definitely some time and effort advantages to what you're suggesting though which I'm sure would be a huge plus for anybody that doesn't need the full product approach.

Mike