[Vtigercrm-developers] Inventory update post.

[Dave Karlsven]

I am not sure how to post my comment on the developers list, as I am new to
the community, but hopefully this works.

I think the biggest issue with the inventory is that as it stands right now,
there is a potential of deducting more than you should on a sales order if
you create more than one invoice for that sales order.

That is the #1 problem that gets inventory off track with vtiger right now.

No matter what you decide as to when the inventory is deducted,  you have to
make sure that it can only be deducted one time per sales order.

It makes more sense to me to deduct the inventory by changing a status in
the sales order OR the status in the Invoice to "Delivered" because it will
fit any business model.

The key is that you can't deduct from inventory twice for the same sales
order.

So if someone wants to mark an invoice as "Delivered" then it can deduct
from inventory.
If that same person on another sales order marks "Delivered" in the sales
order status, then it would deduct from inventory.

However, if that person has already marked a sales order as "Delivered" and
deducted from inventory and then also marks their Invoice as "Delivered"
then it should not allow them to deduct from inventory again.

To take this concept further for more types of business models, you could
also have a "Reserved" setting that deducts from inventory on both the sales
order page or the invoice page.  However once again, if the order is marked
"Reserved" and inventory is deducted, then you have to make sure that when
they mark "Delivered" as the status in the future, that it does not deduct
more inventory.

So I think the bottom line is this:  Give more flexibility to all business
models out there by having a "Delivered" and a "Reserved" status in both the
Sales order and the Invoice, but only let inventory be deducted one time per
sales order in the system.
Once the inventory has been deducted from a sales order, it can not be
deducted again for that sales order unless there is some kind of manual
override to the system.

As far as adding to inventory goes, I think you can take the same concept by
allowing the sales order and invoice to have the status settings of
"Returned" and "Canceled". When one of those is selected in either area,
then it will add the inventory back into the system.  However, make sure
that once the inventory has been added to the system for a sales order, that
it can not be added again if one of the settings is changed to the another.

You could make it so someone changes a status to "Reserved" and inventory is
deducted and then if the customer cancels you mark the status as "Canceled"
and inventory is added back into the system, then if the customer changes
their mind again and decides to purchase the order you can mark it as
"Reserved" or "Delivered" and have the system deduct from inventory.
The key here is that once inventory is deducted for a sales order, it must
be added back into the system before it can be deducted again.

An order history log could also be a nice thing to keep track of all this
and make it nice for the user to view any modifications to the order by
date.

Hope this helps.

Dave
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