Rational
In some industry sectors, it is common practice to use price units other than one unit of measure.
Example:
The price of a good is 358.02 per 1000 units. So the price per unit 0.35802.
The packaging unit may differ from the price unit. In the above example, one could sell or purchase packages of 400 or 1650 units, but the price is always expressed per 1000 units.
Tryton uses and displays the “price per unit of measure” for stock, sale and purchase.
In some industry sectors, the sales and purchase people await to see prices in their familiar and “industry sector typical” price unit, for example “per 1000 units”.
This is for the display on the screen, but also documents like offers, invoices or orders.
Proposal
To improve Tryton ERP for companies working in such an industry sector, I have the following idea:
- add a field “Default Price unit” to the Product Template, in addition to the default unit of measure
- add a field “Price Unit” to the Sale Line resp. Purchase Line
- display all list prices and cost prices for product, sale and purchase according to the chosen price unit
Important note:
my idea is to only modify the output / display of the prices accoring to the chosen price unit, based on the “price per one unit” which is stored in the database.
The resulting “price per x units” is always computed from the “price per one unit” using a Function field.
The “price per unit” keeps being the only price that is stored in the database.
This requires that “price decimal” is big enough to hold the correct price of “one unit of measure” for the desired price unit to be used. For example, a “price per thousand” requires
“price decimal = 5”.
Draft
I have implemented a non-functional, quick prototype to visualize the idea. Here are screenshots:
(1) Products: No price unit is chosen → prices are shown “as usual”.
(2) Products:
Price unit “1000” chosen → additional fields handle the price per 1000, original price fields get read-only.
(3) Add a Sale Line: Price unit “1000” is chosen, unit price is shown per price unit.
(4) Sale: The price unit is displayed in addition to the unit price
I am aware of the fact that most companies do not need this functionality.
But before I start to implement this as custom module, I ask here if anyone else is interested in such a module.
Please give some feedback if you’re interested, or maybe if there is a better way to handle price units as described.