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.
- Find a product by barcode, including straight from a handheld scanner.
- Create a product from a line you’re part way through typing on a quote or invoice.
- Copy a product you’ve already set up, when the next one differs in a detail or two.
How it works in practice
Add a product (Products → Catalog → Products). 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.
Copy one that’s nearly right. In the product list, open a row’s menu and choose Duplicate. The new-product form opens already filled in, translations and all, with a notice naming the product it came from. Nothing is saved until you press Save, so changing your mind halfway leaves nothing behind.
It copies everything that describes a product and nothing that identifies one. The product number comes from the sequence like any other new product, and the barcode, serial number and stock start empty - a copied barcode would scan as two products. Images and attachments don’t come across either, because copying them quietly would double up your storage, so add them on the new product.
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 rule rather than a second catalog: attach one to a customer and the price you agreed with them is what appears on every document you raise. Where there’s no agreement, the standard price applies. Price lists and agreed prices covers building them.
Group what always sells together (Products → Groups). A set of products with its own code and total, sold as one thing - a fitting kit, a service bundle - and shown to the customer either as its parts or as a single line. Product groups, bundles and kits covers the pricing and the display.
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. When the count on the shelf and the count on screen disagree, click the product’s stock figure: it opens the stock tab, where you add a correction by hand. Products you never hold - services, hours, licenses - 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, numbers and barcodes, and returns groups alongside products, so you don’t need to remember which of the two something was set up as.
A barcode scanner needs nothing set up. The handheld kind that plugs into a USB port types the code and presses Enter, which is exactly what searching by barcode already does. Point it at the product picker on a document line, or at the product list, and the right row comes back.
Create the product without abandoning the invoice. Type something the catalog doesn’t have and the dropdown offers two ways forward: use the text as a one-off line, or create a product from it. The second opens a short form already filled in with the price and tax you typed, and the finished product drops onto the line you were on. One-off charges stay one-off, and the thing you’ll sell again next month ends up in the catalog where it belongs.
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.
- Any handheld barcode scanner works, with nothing to set up. The USB kind types the code and presses Enter, which is what the search box already expects. A phone or laptop camera isn’t a scanner here, so a stock count wants the handheld.
- 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.
- A price list follows the product’s sale price - see price lists and agreed prices.
- 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.