When you add an inventory or service item, you can specify its unit of measure, such as Each or Hour. You define units of measure on an inventory item's Units tab.
For inventory items, you can have up to 3 units of measure:
Stocking. This is the unit used to keep track of your on-hand inventory.
Selling. This is the default unit that appears in sales-related transactions. It can be the greater than, less than, or equal to the Stocking unit.
Buying. This is the default unit that appears in purchase-related transactions. It can be the greater than, less than, or equal to the Stocking unit.
You can buy or sell items using a different unit of measure than the one you use when stocking your items. For example, you might buy and stock potatoes by the kilogram but sell them in five-kilogram bags. You can set up this relationship so that when you sell a bag of potatoes, Sage 50 Accounting knows that this represents five stocking units.
You can also buy and sell items in fractions of their units.
Serial numbers are associated with the smallest, indivisible unit that your company uses for an item (the "serialized unit"). Items that have serial numbers can only be used in whole units in transactions, they cannot be sold as fractions of the serialized unit. For example, if you have assigned a serial number to a 5 litre bottle of a cleaning solution, you cannot open the bottle and sell the solution in 1 litre units.
If you want to use multiple units of measure for serialized items, you need to make sure that the relationship between the serialized unit (the smallest unit) and the other units contains only whole numbers. Otherwise you will not be permitted to use serial numbers with the item.