Licenses / virtual items / BOM

[winzkigermany]

Hi, let's say I have a BOM with a part called "license". It's a license we have to buy after producing the BOM.
This part has a price, because I want it to be summed up in the BOM.
We don't buy it in advance and stock it somehere, so the stock level is normally 0

Now I want to issue a Build Order, but of course, the license part is out of stock.

What is the intended way to build such a product?
I don't understand the ramifications of virtual parts, consumables, or starting build orders when not all parts can be allocated.

I would have guessed, that making the "license part" a "virtual" part, and then let stock become negative, would be a great solution.
That way, I could restore stock of the virtual part to zero at the end of a month, by buying the "license part" from a supplier, in the number of "license parts" we used up during the month.
Can Inventree do such a thing?

Or does anybody else know how to handle this properly?
When I buy a "fake stock" of licenses, this results in a wrong (too high) inventory value.
When I leave out the licenses as a part in general, this results in a wrong BOM (too low) price calculation.
Letting stock of virtual parts go negative would be the simplest solution, I guess?

[matmair]

You can not allocate something that is not existing, I think implementing something like this would mostly lead to confusion.
I do not think that InvenTree is able to handle builds the way you want it to; not really sure if it should.

[winzkigermany]

After fiddling around some more hours, this is what I'm doing now:
In my BOM, I set the "consumable" flag on any "license part".
This gives me a complete BOM price calculation, including a price for the "license part".
And when creating a build order, consumables always allocate just fine, even if they're not in stock, so the production can begin. Yay!

What it does not give me, is a count of the used "license part". If I want the number of license parts used, I need to count all the finished parts, that have my consumable "license part" in their BOM.

Although the solution is not perfect, I'm very happy that inventree lets me do this!

[SchrodingersGat]

@winzkigermany sounds like an interesting problem - if you do come up with a clean way of making it work with InvenTree please let us know

[winzkigermany]

Just did, see above.

Meanwhile, I also use a part "production cost" as a consumable in a BOM.
What I get from this, is the real cost of material and manufacturing, that goes into a part's BOM.
For this, I would have thought of "production cost" to be a "virtual part", but I think, I need to activate "internal pricing", to let it have a price in the BOM. I guess.

[winzkigermany]

To close this discussion, here are my solutions. Works for me.

In my BOM, I set the "consumable" flag on any "license part".
This gives me a complete BOM price calculation, including a price for the "license part".
And when creating a build order, consumables always allocate just fine, even if they're not in stock, so the production can begin. Yay!

I also use a part "production cost" as a consumable in a BOM.
What I get from this, is the real cost of material and manufacturing, that goes into a part's BOM.
For this, I would have thought of "production cost" to be a "virtual part", and I activate "internal pricing", to let it have a price in the BOM.