BOM and MO - Error in production phase

Greetings,

I’m new to Dolibarr and need help understanding how to handle products vs. services. I understand there are two types in Dolibarr: Products and Services.

In my case, I run a printing business and I’ve set up my printing as a Service because for each print job, I need to consume specific amounts of paper and ink. For example, one print service consumes 1 sheet of paper and some ink.

My question is:

  1. Can Services have stock/inventory?
  2. Is it correct to create an MO (Manufacturing Order) for a Service?
  3. If not, what’s the best practice for managing a printing service that consumes physical materials (paper and ink)?

I’ve created a BOM for my printing service, but I’m having trouble with the Manufacturing Order (MO). When I set up the consumption of materials (ink and paper) according to the service quantity I need, the consumption part works fine like in this picture.

However, I get an error during the production phase (see attached image).

I watched several YouTube tutorials about the production process, but I still can’t get it to work. Could someone please explain what I might be doing wrong or if there’s a different approach I should take for service-based businesses?

Thank you in advance for your help!

I could do it without errors, but defining the “printing service as a product”:

  1. I created products to be consumed: DIN-A4 paper sheets and Black-Ink (to be consumed by each sheet printed)
  2. I created creadted to be produced: BLACK-PRINTED-A4 (note: it’s very important that you specify in the product cards the “nature” of the products: “raw material” vs. “manufactured”)
  3. I created a BOM to produce the BLACK-PRINTED-A4
  4. I created a MO to “print 5 sheets” with that BoM
  5. And then i proceeded producing 2 of the 5 units

All worked fine.
I think that by now it’s not possible to create a BoM for a service.