TL;DR:

Zoho Inventory appears to not allow for composite items that are made up of a single unit of one other item. There's no reason for this artificial restriction, and it should be removed.

I'm working to transition our manufacturing / direct-to-consumer e-commerce company from Quickbooks Enterprise to Zoho Finance (Books + Inventory). In general, I've been pretty pleased thus far. There are definitely some quirks to the Zoho Finance suite that should be addressed, but the functionality is frankly better than I thought it would be going into this.

As I have begun to import our composite items (assemblies in Quickbooks parlance; items that are built up from other inventory items), I ran into the following error:

So Zoho Inventory is not allowing me to have a composite item that only has a single ingredient if the amount of the ingredient consumed is one.

Simple question: why on earth is this a restriction?

This seems extremely arbitrary. I can't imagine how this is a technical restriction, as the composite item bundling process is essentially removing the BOM item(s) from inventory and adding the composite item into inventory. Rather, this seems like something developers decided users shouldn't do, and hard-coded this restriction in place.

I'm sure there are a ton of use cases to show how a 1:1 composite item to BOM item would work in the real world. One easy one is a manufacturing operation where one piece has an action done to it (let's say a hole drilled into it), resulting in a new, completely different part. The composite item has a BOM of one unit of one single item, and Zoho Inventory apparently doesn't allow this.

I don't need suggestions for a workaround. I'm actually going to be tracking labor value with my inventory, so that will solve the problem for me. But not everyone chooses to account for things this way, so this isn't for everyone.

I suggest strongly that Zoho removes this arbitrary restriction.

This issue is consistent with many that I see in Zoho in general, and Zoho Finance specifically. There are multiple instances of developers limiting users' abilities to do what needs to be done for no apparent reason. Journal entries can't be made to some accounts, negative credits or debits can't be made when entering expenses, etc. While all bookkeeping software has quirks, Zoho seems unique in that the developers had to go out of their way to put unnecessary roadblocks in place. I don't understand it, and the software would be much improved if these unneeded restrictions were eliminated.