Currently, various computing system implemented financial management systems are available including: computing system implemented business financial management systems; computing system implemented sales and inventory tracking systems; computing system implemented tax preparation systems; computing system implemented business accounting systems; and computing system implemented medical expense management systems; as well as various other electronic transaction data driven financial management systems.
Computing system implemented small business financial management systems and computing system implemented sales and inventory tracking systems help users: manage and track inventory; track sales and purchases; manage expenses; manage payroll and taxes; and generate various documents associated with business and inventory operations such as purchases orders, item lists, available inventory reports, receipts, and various other transaction forms and documents.
Many users of computing system implemented small business financial management systems and computing system implemented sales and inventory tracking systems, typically small business owners or their employees, often deal in large quantities of assorted inventory items. Often these assorted inventory items are bought and/or kept in inventory and/or sold using units of measure particular to the inventory item. Consequently, managing the purchasing, warehousing, and sale of these assorted inventory items, and tracking and documenting transactions involving the inventory items, using current computing system implemented small business financial management systems and computing system implemented sales and inventory tracking systems is quite complicated and often involves a great deal of time and manual input on the part of the user.
Further complicating the situation is the fact that many inventory items are purchased in quantities using one unit of measure, are entered into inventory and tracked using another unit of measure, and are sold to customers who wish to purchase the items using one or more other units of measure. In addition, when shipping various inventory items, yet another unit of measure typically needs to be determined.
As an example, some inventory items, such as carpet or tinting film, may be sold by the manufacturer in rolls. The same inventory item may then be stocked by a user, such as a retail store owner, and entered into the user's current computing system implemented small business financial management system and/or computing system implemented sales and inventory tracking system, in units of length, such as feet, yards or inches. A customer buying the inventory item may then want to purchase the material based on units of area, such as square feet, square yards, or square inches. Finally, to ship the inventory item, the user may need to know the weight per roll, or fraction of a roll, of the inventory item. Consequently, in this example, the same inventory item involves as many as four general types of units of measure, i.e., rolls, length, area, and weight, and four or more specific sub-units of measure such as yards, feet, inches and pounds. In addition, this does not include the complications introduced by international units such a metric units of measure vs. American standard units of measure.
Current computing system implemented small business financial management systems and computing system implemented sales and inventory tracking systems typically provide for only one unit of measure, either as a default or as user defined. Consequently, when either purchasing inventory items, warehousing or tracking inventory items, or selling inventory items, an employee or owner is often required to leave the task at hand, i.e., the purchase, inventorying, or sale of an inventory item, and look up conversion ratios between various units, and then convert units, either by head, hand, or using some other calculation means. Consequently, a significant amount of employee and/or business owner time is often utilized in making these conversions and multiple opportunities for error are introduced in the process.