Products
Finished goods you price, stock, and sell to customers.
Products are the finished goods you price, stock, and sell to customers. They power sales orders, inventory, and reporting.
What a product is
A product includes the standard item fields (SKU, description, category, units, cost) plus:
| Field | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Product type | Controls workflow behavior: sale, service, shipping, credit, return, tax |
| Product line | Optional grouping for reporting, pricing, and commission/freight rules |
| Margin | Profit margin |
| Unit value | The default sell price |
Product types
Every product has a type that determines how it behaves across workflows:
- Sale: standard physical goods (the default type). Appears in orders, inventory, shipping, and invoicing.
- Service: non-physical items like consulting or labor hours. No inventory impact, no shipping.
- Shipping: represents shipping charges on an order. Tied to freight calculation.
- Credit: represents credits or adjustments. Reduces the order total.
- Return: represents returned goods. Triggers reverse inventory flow.
- Tax: represents tax line items on an order.
Product lines
Product lines are a grouping for products. Each product line has:
- Name (e.g., "Dress Socks", "Athletic Socks")
- Unit group: determines which units are available for products in this line
- Commission-exempt flag: products in this line are excluded from sales commission calculations
- Freight-exempt flag: products in this line are excluded from freight cost calculations
Product lines drive reporting rollups and pricing rules across your catalog.
Product categories
Products use product categories (shared with parts, separate from material categories). A category defines the unit group, properties, and attributes: the same system used by materials with their own category type.
Categories drive reporting, pricing rules, and filtering across the products list.
How products are used
- Sales orders: products are line items with quantities and pricing
- Customer pricing: customer-specific prices, volume discounts, and discount codes reference products
- Inventory: full tracking: receipts, issues, allocations, and available-to-promise
- Purchasing: products can appear on purchase orders if you buy finished goods
- Shipping & invoicing: what gets fulfilled and billed to customers
- Analytics: revenue, volume, margins, and product-line performance
Creating a product
- Navigate to Products → Create Product
- Enter SKU (required)
- Select category (required)
- Optionally set: description, product line, unit value (sell price), unit cost
- Product type defaults to sale: change if needed
- Set attribute values for category properties
- Click Create
Bulk create: upload an Excel file to create multiple products at once. The system creates new products, updates existing ones (matched by SKU), and reports skipped rows with reasons.
Managing products
- Card-based grid like materials and parts
- Product line selector on each card (unique to products)
- Unit value (sell price) field: editable inline
- Search by SKU or description
- Filter by category, product line, customer, date range, and attributes (customer and product line filters are unique to products)
- Export to Excel
- QR code generation per product
- Discontinue (soft delete): the product remains in historical records but is no longer active
Typical lifecycle
- Create: define SKU, category, product line, and pricing
- Configure pricing: set customer-specific prices and volume discounts
- Use in orders: add to sales orders and quotes
- Track: monitor inventory, fulfillment, and margins
- Maintain: update pricing, metadata, and discontinue when needed
Related
- Sales orders: where products are sold
- Customer pricing - customer-specific product prices
- Volume discounts - quantity-based pricing for products
- Inventory: tracking product stock levels
- Items overview: shared item concepts, units, and categories
- Materials: raw inputs used to make products
- Parts: intermediate items that become products
Next: Suppliers