Available to Sell Inventory

Available to Sell Inventory

I am hoping someone from the community can help me out because at the moment, it doesn't seem like inventory/books/CRM system can actually show items availability to sell information quickly and I am a bit baffled. I am new to Zoho, tech-aware but like things easy, because it's not something I really can do except when forced to learn.

We are a small e-commerce company selling clothing with both Shopify (DTC) and Wholesale (Inventory/books/CRM in any combination). Many sales orders are often in the system for months because wholesale customers (retailers) buy for immediate shipment and some can buy for months ahead to reserve/commit the stock.

The situation we are faced with on a regular basis:
1. Retailer calls our salesperson asking what is available right now. 
2. Let's assume either CRM(desktop)/Inventory/Books. Salesperson goes to Inventory to "search" the item and not oversell what has been committed.
3. If it were a single item it's one more click into the item details, scroll to the bottom to give the answer.

HOWEVER, 
In the case of clothing, the Retailer is most interested in getting size runs in a style. So the item to them is Shirt A in 6 sizes X-Small to 2X-Large. If there is no or limited stock in key sizes they may not order or manipulate based upon sizes and when offered in two or three colours they may pick the other colour instead. 

This is where we are stuck in how to do this quickly and efficiently. Essentially if we were to pull up those styles, a quick 2-second answer for a couple of styles.

1. Clicking into each item is too long. If it's just in 2 colours, that's 12 clicks and 12 scrolls, and writing down to not forget while on the phone (or even in email). NOT PRACTICAL.

2. We had wrongly assumed there would be the basic column "Quantity Available" that we could add to the Item view. Not available. DEAD END.

(*this information is somewhat available if you deduct two columns in CRM, however, if you use the finance module they are zeroed out in products until you click into an item and scroll. If products were created on CRM native it sounds complicated to get the sales orders back to Inventory especially when the only way to get items to integrate with shopify means they must be created on Shopify first - CRM is DEAD END too). 

3. Zoho support suggested starting a sales order. However, this involves adding and looking up every item of interest (*don't save it because Zoho doesn't allow you to change the overall warehouse even on a save draft order and would have to change singularly each item to see a different warehouse) and trying to toggle between warehouses to see if you can get the inventory answers. That could be a half-hour process and multiple sales orders started with a different warehouse saved so that a discussion can occur with the retailer about what is available. NOT PRACTICAL

3.  Item Groups have the same issue as items, and you can't search by Item group anyway as it just takes you back to individual Items and no views can be saved. USELESS

4. The Inventory Report, has the information in company totality and can provide some filters. Again a lot of clicks for the salesperson to get the right filters etc on the fly. 200 designs at 6 sizes = 1200 SKU's so filters are essential but clicking every size that the customer is interested in is also too challenging. Saving some prefiltered reports can help but it's then a lot of save reports and crossing between some. MAYBE?

5. The Warehouse Report, is even better as it would give insight down to the locations it's in, but it has no filters at all. Export 1200 SKU's, sort, filter etc. that salesperson will not fiddle with. NOT PRACTICAL

6. Zoho support suggested Analytics. Which I have loosely played in but don't know where to get this information so my salesperson can very quickly get the information an Inventory system should provide in a meaningfully helpful way. MAYBE?

I think to myself every single customer of Zoho that holds inventory must be most interested in the number of items available to sell for salespeople...so where is this information quickly for a customer...and can someone point me in the right direction even if on Analytics.

I have a couple of other questions the community may be able to help me with this basic one. 

Thank you to all in advance!

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