request for comments on inventory experiment

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 05:13:33PM -0500, Josh Sled wrote:
> "Lianto Ruyang" <lianto.ruyang at gmail.com> writes:
> > I hope my description is quite clear and understandable. I need inputs from
> > all of you whether this idea is good enough for an inventory system in
> > gnucash and can be developed for future needs, any ideas, any directions
> > will be greatly appreciated.
> 
> I know hardly anything about the practical concept and requirements of
> "Inventory" tracking.

One of the more difficult issues is tracking parts of greater wholes
in a manufactured product. And there is need to track at both levels:
the raw goods and the finished product (and maybe the in between
levels as well: subassembly A, B, C etc). And one needs to be able to
convert between these.

> 
> However, the system you proposed sounded very similar to Commodity accounts.
> They, too, are children of Asset accounts, with Lots of "shares" (not
> necessarily in integer values/units only), where the price of the commodity
> varies over time.
> 
> I'm wondering if you can leverage that mechanism to implement inventory
> here without such extensive changes.  Maybe just modifying the app/UI-layer
> to accommodate Inventory.

I think you're on to something here. 

> 
> 
> > Account-T\ree
> > |---Asset
> >       |---Inventory Account 1
> >       |       |---lots (goodsA's lots + goodsC's lots)
> >       |---Inventory Account 2
> >       |       |---lots (goodsB's lots)
> >
> > The only difference of an "Inventory Account" with other type of accounts
> > is: the lots in "Inventory Account" will have a path "goods-guid" in its
> > slot, pointing to a goods' GUID.
> > So in the above example some  of "Inventory Account 1" lots will have a path
> > "goods-guid" pointing to goodsA's GUID, an the rest will be pointing to
> > goodsB's GUID.


Why not something like:

Inventory
	|---Item 1
	|---Item 2
	|---Item 3
	|---Item 4

And call items 1, 2, 3 raw materials and "buy" Item 4's with
proportional amounts of Items 1,2,3? You could even set up exchange
rates (more handwaving) so that it takes 3 item 1's and 2 item 2' and
5 item 3's to make one item 4? 

A
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/attachments/20080105/b4a0d76a/attachment.bin