New field request: Virtual Stock

New field request: Virtual Stock

Hi there,

We have a Shopify store and we sell a lot of product bundles, i.e. Composite Items. 

If you want to sync stock of a Composite Item in Zoho Inventory to Shopify, you have to use the Create Bundle feature. This will consume stock of the associated Component Items and add stock to the Composite Item. However, this feature is very limited for us because we sell a lot of product bundles that all make use of the same Component Items.

That being said if we use the Create Bundle feature to add stock to one of our Composite Items, stock of the associated Component Items are consumed and can not be used by one of our other Composite Items using the same Component Items.

We need a Virtual Stock field for Composite Items in Zoho Inventory and we want to sync this field to Shopify's Available Inventory field. Let me explain the proposed Virtual Stock field as explained by Cin7 (https://connect.cin7.com/s/article/Virtual-Stock-with-Bills-of-Materials).

Virtual stock is the amount of Composite Items you could potentially make, given the stock of its Component Items. For each Component Item, Zoho Inventory would calculate the Stock Available for Sale (in the same branch) divided by the Qty in the BOM (Bill of Materials). The lowest result of these calculations equals the Virtual Stock for the Composite Item.

For example, let's say that you have a chair that is made from four legs, one seat, and one cushion. If there are 20 seats, 20 cushions, and 8 legs, all in the same branch, then we can calculate the virtual stock as follows:
  1. Seats: 20 / 1 = 20
  2. Cushions: 20 / 1 = 20
  3. Legs: 8 / 4 = 2
The smallest result is 2. Therefore, the Virtual Stock of the chair in this example is 2. This means you could only sell 2 chairs based on the current stock of its components.

The Virtual Stock field does not consume or use the stock of the Component Items, it is "Virtual" as the name suggests.

This allows Component Items which are used by multiple Composite Items to be available for Virtual Stock calculations.

I think Virtual Stock would be a great addition to Zoho Inventory for many users.

Regards,
Michael