Inventory by the kilo: how to track stock you can’t count
Most inventory software assumes the world comes in pieces. Ten widgets, forty screws, three laptops. That works until the thing on the shelf is a sack, a drum or a reel. A bakery does not have “12 units” of flour. A sign shop has 48.5 metres of vinyl left on a roll. A cleaning contractor buys degreaser by the litre and uses it by the splash. For all of them the honest answer to “how much do we have” is a weight, a volume or a length, and often a fraction of one.
Simple Inventory Management now tracks items in whatever unit they actually come in. This guide explains what a unit of measure is, how to set one, what changes once it is set, and the one thing it deliberately does not do.
What a unit of measure is
Every item has a unit of measure. By default it is Each, which means pieces, and that is the behaviour you already know. The moment you change it to kg, lb, g, oz, ml, L, fl oz, gal, cm, m, in or ft (or a custom label such as “bag” or “pallet”), every quantity on that item is expressed in that unit:
- The four counts: Stock, Receiving, Sending and Damaged.
- The warning and critical levels that colour the row yellow or red.
- The reorder point and reorder quantity.
- Order lines, assembly components, snapshot rows and the per-change history.
The unit shows next to the number wherever the number appears: the inventory table, the item page, orders, assemblies, reports, the Teams alert that says “2.5 kg left”, and what an AI assistant sees when it reads your stock over MCP. You never have to remember that the “12” on flour means kilos while the “12” on paper cups means cups.
Decimals, finally
Pieces are whole numbers. Weights and volumes are not. Once an item has a unit, every quantity on it accepts up to three decimal places, so you can record 2.5 kg of flour, 0.75 L of resin or 12.25 m of cable without rounding to the nearest whole thing. The quick − and + buttons still step by one whole unit, because that is what you want when you grab another bag off the shelf, and Add/Subtract and Edit take any number you type.
Thresholds follow the same rule. A warning level of 5 kg and a critical level of 2.5 kg behave exactly like warning and critical counts on a discrete item: the row turns yellow at or below 5, red at or below 2.5, and a Teams alert fires on the way down.
Setting it up
- Open the item (or create a new one) and click Edit.
- Under Unit of measure, pick a unit from the weight, volume or length groups, or choose Custom and type your own label.
- Enter the warning, critical and reorder levels in that unit. The field shows the unit beside the box so you cannot mix them up.
- Save. From now on every quantity on this item is in that unit.
Importing from a spreadsheet? Add a Unit column to your CSV and the bulk import sets the unit per row, with decimal stock values accepted. A unit like “kg” or “litre” is recognised and filed under the right group automatically.
The one thing it does not do: convert
The unit is a label, not a calculator. If you change an item from kg to lb, the numbers on it stay exactly as they were. 10 stays 10; it does not become 22.05. That is a deliberate choice. Automatic conversion sounds helpful until it silently rewrites your stock position because someone picked the wrong option in a dropdown, and it gets genuinely messy with units that are not strictly convertible (a “bag” of flour is 25 kg at one supplier and 16 kg at another).
So the rule is simple: pick the unit your scale, your supplier invoice and your team all agree on, set it once, and keep it. If you really do need to switch, set the new unit and then correct the counts with Edit. The change is logged in the item’s history like any other adjustment.
Lots, orders and recipes still work
Measured items plug into everything else. Unit-level tracking turns an item into named stock lines; for a measured item each line is a lot with its own quantity, so “Lot A, 25 kg, best before June” and “Lot B, 12.5 kg” sit side by side under one item, and an order picks from a specific lot. Inbound and outbound orders carry line quantities in the item’s unit. And an assembly can list a measured component, which turns it into a recipe: 250 g of flour per loaf tells the app how many loaves the sack can still make. Our bakery, workshop and shop floor examples walk through all three.
When not to bother
If you only ever count whole things, leave the unit alone. Each is still the default and still the right answer for laptops, chairs, cases of soda and anything with a serial number. Units of measure exist for the stock that was always awkward to fit into a count, not to make simple counts more complicated.