Historically, projects in SI were Unit-Based, meaning that all products were displayed as line items with a quantity of 1. As of SI v18, we introduced Quantity-Based projects, allowing you to create them and display items of the same type as a single line item, with the "Total Quantity" displayed next to each.

Quantity-based projects allow you to have fewer line items in your Project Editor. They will improve your experience during the quoting phase of a project, allowing you to easily adjust quantities for similar items within a project.

To make quantity-based project creation easy, you can enable the Project Rules setting under the Control Panel to auto-set new projects as quantity-based.

If you do not set the Project Rule setting, you can always select the quantity-based checkbox in the New Project wizard.

In a quantity-based project, SI will automatically display items with a quantity greater than one as one line item and list the quantity. For items, there are two columns in the project grid: Quantity and Total Quantity.

Example: Product A has 2 of Product B as accessories, and adding 4 units of Product A to a project. Product A will show 4 in the Quantity and Total Quantity columns, and Product B will show 2 in the Quantity column and 8 in the Total Quantity column.

The following screenshot shows the Quantity and Total Quantity of Product A and Product B.

The quantity can be edited directly in the project grid, or you can modify the Quantity field when in the Edit Product interface.

When an accessory or item in a package is open for editing, the Quantity and Total Quantity fields will be displayed.

Quantity can also be changed via the Mass Update feature.

There are some areas in the quantity-based project where you may need to consider displaying all or selected items in the unit-based style.

Only one shape or block will drop on a drawing page when an item with a quantity greater than 1 is dragged and dropped.

There is a Project Setting that determines whether you want to be prompted when you attempt to add an item with a quantity greater than 1 to a drawing.

If you want separate shapes or blocks for each item, you must convert them to a quantity of one.

See the Converting Items section below.

You must choose to allow purchase orders to be created for quantity-based projects via a Project Rules setting.

The reason for this is that since there is only one line item for items with quantity greater than 1, there is only one instance of the following fields: Order Status, Order Number, Ordered Date, Expected Delivery Date, Received Date, and Tracking Number.

If you need to track these fields for each item, you must convert the items to a quantity of 1 before creating the purchase order.

See the Converting Items section below.

In addition, if you enter Serial Number, MAC Address 1, or MAC Address 2 when creating Item receipts, there is only one instance of these fields for items with a quantity greater than 1.

If none of the above matters to you, you can certainly create a purchase order for items with a quantity of more than 1.

You must allow tasks to be created for quantity-based projects via a Project Rules setting.

The reason for this is that since there is only one line item for items with quantity greater than 1, there is only one instance of the following fields: Task Number, Picked, Picked Date, Installed, Installed Date, and Install Notes.

If you need to track these fields for each item, you must convert the items to a quantity of 1 before creating the task.

See the Converting Items section below.

You can convert a line item with a quantity greater than 1 to all single line items or just some of the items to single line items if you need separate line items to be created in a Visio or AutoCAD drawing, or if you need to order only a select number of items.

Select the items you want to convert, and from the Tools tab, click the Quantity button and make your choice.

This one is straightforward. All items will be converted to individual line items in the project, and the location and system assigned to the line items you are converting will be maintained.

You will need to click Yes on the following prompt to proceed.

Here, you can choose to convert the items into any quantity and assign those quantities to a location and system within the project.

At any point, you can convert a quantity-based project to a unit-based one.

You can convert a project when it is approved, and you need to order products or add them to tasks. This will open up additional racking fields specific to each item, such as Serial Number and IP Address.

This will convert all items in the project with a quantity greater than 1 to their own individual line items in the project.

To do this, select the project in the Project Explorer and click the Convert to Unit-Based Project button on the ribbon.

There is also a Project Rules setting to automatically convert quantity-based projects to unit-based projects when you approve the project.

If you do not want an item to be converted into individual line items in the project when it is converted from a quantity-based project to a unit-based project, select the Bulk Item checkbox for the item.

This can be set at the catalog level or the project level. This can be used for items that don't need to be converted into individual line items in the Project, such as 2000 J-hooks and 9,921 RJ-45 connectors.

If you change your mind after the project has been converted to a unit-based project, you can still convert bulk items into individual line items in the project using the convert function as described above in the Converting Items section.