Utility mining has been emerging as an important area in data mining. While existing works on utility mining have primarily focused on the problem of finding high-utility itemsets from transactional databases, they implicitly assume that each item occupies only one slot. However, in many real-world scenarios, the number of slots consumed by different items typically varies. Hence, this paper considers that a given item may physically occupy any fixed (integer) number of slots. Thus, we address the problem of efficiently determining the top-utility itemsets when a given number of slots is specified as input. The key contributions of our work are three-fold. First, we present an efficient framework to determine the top-utility itemsets for different user-specified number of slots that need to be filled. Second, we propose a novel flexible and efficient index, designated as the STUI index, for facilitating quick retrieval of the top-utility itemsets for a given number of slots. Third, we conducted an extensive performance evaluation using real datasets to demonstrate the overall effectiveness of the proposed indexing scheme in terms of execution time and utility (net revenue) as compared to a recent existing scheme. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.