Help with pricing one way but tracking another

[BeeandPoppi]

Hello! I am starting a permanent jewelry business and will be pricing my bracelet and anklet chains by the each. However, for inventory purposes I want to keep track of how many inches of chain I use for each bracelet. Since I buy the chain in bulk and will enter it in my inventory by the inch, I am only finding that it is letting me price it by the inch rather than by each. When I ring a customer up I want to be able to put for example that I used 6in of chain so it subtracts it from my inventory of that particular style. This will help me with ordering, etc.

Is there some custom attribute I need to do separately or something I am missing? I appreciate anyone's feedback and help with this. 

[Donnie-M]

@BeeandPoppi I think you can really only track inventory by 1 unit at a time (each versus in.).

You could in theory make an item with no price for each type of chain you have.  When you ring the item up, you could hit the 2nd item, leave price at 0, and enter the amount of inches you sell.  Yes, you will have 2 entries for each item, but one will track your sales for finished product and the 0$ item will track inventory for all of your chains.  In theory if the chain had a cost and the bracelet was 0 cost you would still be able to calculate cost of goods sold fairly easily (1 would be 100% profit and the other would be 100% cost).

I think this would be by far the easiest work around I can think of.