When you create a combination so that when someone selects one or more options you can map that particular option combination to the appropriate inventory sku, I see there is an inventory count function you can use. But you just enter the sku, you don’t select it from the product list. So you could enter a sku that doesn’t exist in the system.
Wouldn’t a better way be to have all the individual skus for each option combination be actual products in the system and make them hidden (or not if you don’t mind listing all the individual skus into addition to the ones consolidated into one sku with options). That way you can utilize the inventory management features better? Or do you not gain much doing it that way?
One of the benefits of the option combinations is that they can generate SKU’s that are virtual. Otherwise you’d have to have all the descriptive info, etc. for each variant.