Combo Products

A combo product, also called "inventory assembly" in QuickBooks, is a kit that are sold on one listing as a single item with a single price, but may contain several parts that are tracked individually for inventory purposes.

You can define combo products in ActionShip Inventory Advisor. If you have QuickBooks integration, Inventory Assembly will sync to Inventory Advisor as a "combo product". For customers using QuickBooks integration, combo products must be first created in QuickBooks then synced to Inventory Advisor. If you created them in Inventory Advisor, you cannot rely on Inventory Advisor to create the products for you in QuickBooks. You must also create the products as inventory assemblies in QuickBooks.

Combo products has item type = 1 in the database. Each combo product must have child items defined. Currently, child items in a combo can not be combo themselves.

Definition
To add a combo item:

Go to Inventory => Products page, click on "Add One" link, and change the item type to "combo".

To make an existing item combo:

Go to Inventory => Products page, find the item, click on "edit", and change the item type to "combo".

You then define the children information. The child item must already exist in Inventory Advisor products list.

Bulk Import Export

You can use csv files to bulk define combo products. To do that it takes 2 steps:

1. (option) if you need to define the "normal" properties of combo products, use normal product csv import to define the products and properties (eg. picture, customs description, customs value, etc etc)
2. use "combo product import" to define the children of combo products. To get a sample file format, you can manually add a combo product using "Add" link, and export the combo products to csv.

Usage
Once you define a product as Combo, the following changes will happen:

• in "Inventory Report", the children SKUs are listed with the proper quantity reported
• the quantity available for combo products are adjusted based on their child products

Quantity Calculation For Combos
For a combo product, available quantity is calculated specially. This is best described using an example.
Take a combo product X, defined as A x 2 + B x 3.

We will work through the following scenarios:

1) no quantity info for the combo in "Quantities" page -- in this case, quantity available information is entirely computed by the child products. The "available" quantity for X, will be available quantity for A / 2, or available quantity for B / 3, whichever is less.

2) if we have quantity info for combo in Quantities page -- in this case, assume that quantities page says we have 2 of X in stock. The real "available" quantity for X is adjusted by further looking at children A and B. If we have 10 A and 12 B, then we potentially have 10/2 = 5 extra X, or 12 / 3 = 4 extra X, so we compute the available quantity for X as 2 + 4 = 6.