Everything you sell has a price, a tax treatment, an account it belongs in, and often a different price for the customer who buys a pallet at a time. Typing all that onto each document is how the wrong price goes out.
The catalog holds it once, and every quote, invoice, purchase order and stock movement takes what it needs from there.
What you can do
- Keep one record per thing you sell or buy, with its code, barcode, unit and description.
- Set selling and buying prices separately, with or without tax, to however many decimals your trade actually uses.
- Put the accounting on the product - revenue account, cost account, tax codes - so documents post correctly without anyone picking an account.
- Build price lists for customers who’ve negotiated one, so the agreed price is what appears.
- Sort the catalog with categories that nest as deeply as you need.
- Sell several products together as a group, shown either as its parts or as a single line.
- Publish a selection of products to a catalog for a customer, a season or a channel.
- Keep names and descriptions in every language you invoice in.
- Track stock levels and a reorder point on the things you hold, with the movement history behind them.
How it works in practice
Add a product (Products → New). The form is tabbed rather than one wall of fields: what it is and what it costs, then the supplier, stock, dimensions, settings, translations and images. You only need the first tab to save something usable. A name and a price will do, and the rest can wait until the product earns the attention.
Give it its accounting once. A revenue account, a cost account and the two tax codes live on the product, and from then on every document line using it posts to the right place without the person raising the document knowing which place that is. This is the highest-value ten minutes you’ll spend setting up a catalog.
Price it for the customer in front of you (Products → Price lists). A price list is a set of prices attached to customers, and their price list applies itself on every document you raise for them. Where there’s no agreement the standard price applies, and any default discount on the product is taken into account too.
Group what always sells together (Products → Groups). A group is a set of products with its own code and totals. On a document you can show it exploded, with every component on its own line and whichever columns you want visible, or imploded, which is one line at one price with the parts still behind it. Fitting kits and service bundles are the usual reason.
Turn on stock for the things you hold. Marking a product as a stock item starts the count moving: selling reduces it, purchasing increases it, and every change is recorded with the document that caused it. Set a minimum quantity and the product will tell you when it drops below it. Products you never hold - services, hours, licences - simply stay off.
Look at one product’s whole story (Products → the product → View). Which documents used it, which customers bought it, what its stock has done and when. It answers “are we still selling this?” without exporting anything.
Search finds it the way you think of it. On a document line, typing matches product names, codes and numbers, and returns groups alongside products, so you don’t need to remember which of the two something was set up as.
Good to know
- Stock movement and stock accounting are two separate settings. Marking a product as a stock item makes the quantity move. Posting the value of that movement to your books also needs the stock and cost-of-goods accounts filled in on the product. Without them the quantity still moves and the accounting entry is skipped rather than guessed at, so check this before your first month-end rather than after it.
- Images and translations only become available after the first save. Both need the product to exist, so on a brand-new product those two tabs say so instead of failing later.
- Prices can be stored with or without tax, per product. Mixing both conventions in one catalog is legal and occasionally necessary, but decide your default before you import a few thousand rows.
- Deleting a product doesn’t destroy it. It goes to the recycle bin and can be restored, which matters because products are referenced by documents you’re not allowed to change.
- A product used on a finalized document should be superseded, not edited. Changing the price never rewrites a document that already went out, so a genuine change of specification is usually a new product rather than an edit to the old one.