I'm not sure I'm using variations right for bulk items, and even if I am, I am wondering if I could do something else without throwing off my COGS reporting.
I run a bike shop; we frequently replace brake or shift cables on customers' bikes, and these come from our supplier in bulk file boxes of 100 per box. I have it set up in my catalog as the box of 100 being "unit stocked," because this is what we buy from our supplier. But we never sell a whole box to a customer, only one cable at a time, so I set up a single cable as a variation, equivalent to 1/100 of the unit stocked. This means whenever I write up a work order I'm always manually selecting the single cable variation instead of the whole box. I wish I could just ditch this step! Also, not that it's a hard mental math problem, but it's a little weird to see stock represented as "0.84 units" as opposed to just showing 84 cables.
If I were to create a separate SKU for the single cables, not tie it to any other products, and then manually adjust inventory--i.e., adjust a full filebox of cables to zero and adjust my homemade cable SKU to 100--is that going to throw off my COGS reporting? Not sure if I'm asking this question correctly.
If it didn't mess anything up, I would love to create this sort of SKU for several items that we buy in bulk and sell one at a time. Thanks for any advice on this!
