Tracking Inventory for a Meeting Product

In cases where meetings have limited seating, the amount of available space can be tracked through Aptify's Inventory Management system. When inventory is required, the meeting must be configured with the appropriate inventory settings, including a ledger to track the inventory. This can be a time-consuming task for organizations whose meetings are largely driven by available space, especially when managing events with a large number of sessions and meeting rooms. Aptify provides the ability to generate inventory meetings automatically based on the value in the Max Reg. field on the Meeting record's Meeting > General sub-tab.

This topic includes the following sub-topics:

• Tracking Inventory Automatically
• Tracking Inventory Manually

Note to Administrators: This feature is disabled by default. Aptify recommends that an organization only enable this feature if your organization is prepared to manage meeting inventory exclusively using the new automated functionality. We strongly discourage mixing inventory methods for Meeting products as this can produce undesirable side-effects. In other words, allowing users to manually create PIL locations and PILE entries may result in inventory not being tracked correctly. To use this functionality, a system administrator must enable this functionality by setting the attributes described below, which are found on the Meetings Entities record's Configuration > Attributes tab:

• The Generate Inventory attribute is used to determine whether or not inventory should be generated automatically. When set to 1, inventory will be generated automatically based on the value in a Meetings record's Max Reg. field. When set to 0 (the default value), inventory entries will not be generated automatically.

• The Default Location attribute identifies the ID of the Inventory Location the system will use to automatically manage inventory for Meetings (when the Generate Inventory attribute is set to 1). Note that Aptify uses the location identified by this attribute if the Meeting's Product does not have a Default Inventory Location already specified. If this attribute is not specified or has a value of -1, Aptify uses the Inventory Location with the lowest ID to generate inventory for Meetings.

Tracking Inventory Automatically

When a user specifies a maximum number of registrants for a meeting, Aptify automatically does the following:

• Selects the Require Inventory option on the Meetings record's Inventory tab.
• Creates an inventory ledger for a predefined virtual inventory location based on a global default location (as configured on the Meetings entity by an administrator) or the value in the Meetings record's Default Inventory Location field (if a value is specified).
• Creates the necessary inventory entries within the ledger based on the value in the Max Reg. field.

If the space available for a meeting change, a meeting coordinator simply modifies the value in the Max Reg. field at a later date and the inventory entries are adjusted accordingly.

If a meeting already has one or more registrants (in other words, a meeting order was created that deducted inventory), the value in the Max Reg. field can't be less than the number of registrations.

In addition, if a Meeting product is linked to a meeting room, the Capacity field on the Meetings record's Location tab is taken into consideration when determining the amount of inventory needed. For example, if you choose a meeting room with a capacity for 50, the value in the Max Reg. field must be less than or equal to the meeting room's capacity.

If you don't want to track inventory for a particular meeting, simply leave the Max Reg. field set to 0. In this case, when the Meetings record is saved, the Required Inventory option is not selected, and an inventory ledger is not created. If you want to track inventory at a later date, you can do so by setting an appropriate value in the Max Reg. field.

If you no longer want to track inventory for a meeting, you can disable inventory checking with the following steps. Note that if a meeting has one or more registrants (in other words, a meeting order was created that deducted inventory), inventory checking cannot be disabled.

Follow these steps to setup automatic inventory tracking:

1. Set the Max Reg. field on the Meetings record's Meetings > General sub-tab to 0.
2. Clear the Requires Inventory option.
3. Save the Meetings record.

Tracking Inventory Manually

In cases where meetings have limited seating or space available, the availability of space can be tracked through the Inventory Management system. If the meeting product is set up to track inventory, the meeting cannot be oversold in the Order Entry system.

Follow these steps to setup meeting inventory:

1. Select the Require Inventory option on the Inventory tab of the Products record.
   
   
2. Create a Product Inventory Ledger record for the meeting. 
   • See Creating Product Inventory Ledgers for more information.
      
3. Create a Product Inventory Ledger Entries record for the maximum number of spaces that can be sold for the meeting. Enter 0.00 in the Unit Cost field. 
   • See Adding Product Inventory for information on creating product inventory ledger entries.