Overview of Units of Measure

You can cost an item using different units of measure (UOMs) for different business purposes, such as pricing, reporting or tracking costs.

The UOM is one of the attributes of a cost profile. You can calculate different costs for an item by assigning it cost profiles with different UOMs.

Primary and Secondary UOMs

To illustrate the use of a primary or secondary UOM, consider the case of chickens that can be costed by a UOM of each or of pounds. There's no standard conversion from one UOM to the other. In such a case, the costing UOM depends on how the chickens are sold, priced, or tracked. It may be more logical to cost the chickens by pound if that's how they're sold. However it may be more useful to cost them by each for planning and tracking purposes. In this case, the primary UOM could be each, and the secondary UOM could be pounds.

When an item in a cost organization and book combination is assigned a cost profile that specifies the use of the primary or secondary UOM, the cost accounting application uses the primary or secondary UOM that's defined in the item validation organization.