Inderjit,
I understand the scenario you are describing, and I agree it is commonplace in retail businesses, but I believe Alexander is giving you very good advice when he says you should not change UOMs when you have inventory and/or open orders. The reason why is when you change conversion factors for a given UOM, the inventory is readjusted immediately, but the open orders still maintain the UOMs that were in place at the time of order creation. This can lead so some real nightmares in trying to receive deliveries and/or pay invoices. The best way to avoid those sort of issues is to transact in the base UOM EA. When you do that, you protect yourself from UOM changes your customer and/or vendors make.
If you want to view inventory in Cases then I think Alexander once again gives you a good scheme for doing that: set up UOMs for each case count. For example try something like:
- For a 20 count case use: 1 K20 <> 20 EA
- For a 40 count case use: 1 K40 <> 40 EA
- For an 80 count case use: 1 K80 <> 80 EA, etc.
With that scheme, if you have 100 EA in inventory then that will be 5 K20, 2.5 K40 and 1.25 K80. Although these numbers might look funny, at least you can tell what you really have. If you simply change the UOMs on the fly then you would see a single value for cases, but it could be different today than it was yesterday. Not only is that very confusing, but it can cause some very messy issues.
I hope this helps.
Dave