Products

Summary: the Products catalog feeds invoices, quotes, orders, POS and purchases. Here you define the SKU, sale price, cost, whether it pays ITBIS, its category and whether it is a physical product (with stock) or a service.

Reading time: ~6 min

When to use this

Read this article if you need to:

• Register a physical product you sell and want to track in inventory.
• Register a service (does not handle stock) so you can invoice it.
• Adjust the price, cost or profit margin of an existing product.
• Associate a product with a category to group reports and margins.

Before you start

• You need the products:create permission to create and products:update to edit.
• If you are going to classify the product, first create the category in Categories.
• If you handle multiple warehouses, be clear about which will be the product's default warehouse.

Step by step

Create a product

1. Enter the module. In the side bar press Operations → Products. (screenshot: product catalog)
2. Press "New product" in the header. A form opens with four sections: Basic information, Categorization, Prices and Inventory.
3. Basic information.
   • Product name (required).
   • SKU (required) - unique internal code. It is unique per company, so it cannot be repeated.
   • Barcode (optional) - for scanning at POS. It is also unique.
   • Internal code (optional) - additional reference, with no uniqueness restriction.
   • Description - text that appears on the invoice.
   • Image - upload a file (max 5 MB) or paste a URL if file storage is not available.
   • Active - if you turn it off, the product stops appearing on invoices and POS but the history is kept.
4. Categorization.
   • Category - select the category it belongs to (can be left empty).
   • Type: Product (physical, carries stock) or Service (does not carry stock, generates no inventory movement).
5. Prices.
   • Unit price (required) - sale price with no special formatting; it is stored in cents (RD$ 100.00 = 10000).
   • Cost price (required) - acquisition cost. It is the basis for computing the margin and is preloaded when creating purchase orders. If you leave it empty, the form will not let you save - this applies both when creating and when editing, so a product can never be left without a cost (it used to be optional, which caused purchases to show a cost of 0).
   • Profit margin (%) - profit margin over cost. It is linked to the sale price: see below. If you leave it empty, the system uses the tenant's default margin configured in Settings.
   • Sales tax - the ITBIS rate (or another) applied when you sell the product. It is chosen from the configured rate catalog; "Exempt" for products with no tax.
   • Purchase tax - the rate preloaded when you add the product to a purchase order. It is independent from the sales tax because many products receive a different ITBIS treatment when bought than when sold.
6. Inventory.
   • Unit of measure - free text (unit, box, kg, hour).
   • Default warehouse - the warehouse used on this product's document lines when no other one is chosen. Leave it empty to pick the warehouse manually every time. See Warehouses.
   • Handle variants, Track lots and Track serial numbers - the three tracking switches. See below.
7. Press "Create". The product becomes available immediately on invoices, POS and quotes.

Margin and sale price are linked

In the Prices section, the margin and the sale price stay consistent automatically:

• If you change the margin, the sale price is recomputed: price = cost × (1 + margin/100).
• If you change the sale price, the margin is recomputed in reverse to show the real margin: margin = (price − cost) / cost × 100.

The cost does NOT enter this link: editing it by hand recomputes neither the price nor the margin, because cost is governed by purchases (weighted-average cost). To understand the full model of costs, margins and prices - including why a percentage like "525%" can be correct - read Costs, margins and prices.

Edit a product

1. In the list press the pencil icon on the product row, or click the row to enter the detail and then Edit.
2. Change the fields and press Update.

Cost remains mandatory when editing. The Cost price cannot be left empty when updating a product, just as when creating it. If you clear it, the form will not let you save. This prevents a product from losing its cost and ending up showing a margin or cost of 0 in purchases, orders and sales to Special Regime customers (where the price is computed from cost).

Search and export

• Search - use the top bar; filter by name or SKU.
• Export CSV - press Export CSV to download the whole catalog. Requires the products:export permission.

Advanced tracking: variants, lots and serial numbers

The Inventory section of the record includes three optional controls that are enabled independently:

All three change the inflow, not the sale: when selling you choose neither a variant, nor a lot, nor which unit goes out, and stock stays a single balance per product and section. In exchange, they leave a record of what came in and enable the expiration and inflow-traceability lookups.

Two differences worth being clear about from the start:

• Variants have to be created before the first receipt, from the Variants button on the product detail. And the switch can only be turned back off while the product has no variants created at all, not even deactivated ones, because variants are never fully deleted.
• Lots and serials can be turned off whenever you want. Future receipts stop asking for them and what is already recorded is kept and stays just as queryable.

The full procedure (creating variants, capturing the lot and serials on receipt, and looking up afterwards what came in) is in Lots, serial numbers and variants.

Initial stock and inventory

The product form does not set the initial stock. To load stock go to Inventory → Warehouses and record an inflow movement or an adjustment with the initial count. As long as a physical product has no stock, the invoices that consume it will end up with a negative available quantity.

Sales history of the product

In each product's detail you will find a Sales history view: the list of every time that product has been sold, so you can see at a glance to whom, when, how much and at what price. It is a different view from the stock movements kardex (which records any stock change: inflows, outflows, adjustments, transfers). The sales history focuses only on the product's sale lines.

Availability: the sales history per product is available from the STARTER plan onward. On the Free plan this view does not appear.

Each row of the history shows:

• Sale date.
• Order number, with a link to open the full order.
• Customer it was sold to.
• Quantity sold on that line.
• Unit price at which it was sold.
• Discount applied to the line.
• Line ITBIS.
• Line total.
• Cost and margin at the time of the sale (the line margin: line total minus cost times quantity).

You can filter by customer and by date range to answer specific questions: "how much of this product have I sold to this customer?", "what price did it go out at last month?". The view is paginated, so a product with a lot of movement is navigated by pages without loading everything at once.

Seeing this view requires the orders read permission (orders:read), the same one needed to look at orders: whoever can view orders can view the product's sales history.

Delete a product

Press the trash icon on the row. Just as with customers, it is a logical deletion: the product is hidden but past documents that reference it keep working.

Expected result

• The product appears on invoices, quotes, orders and POS when searched by name, SKU or barcode.
• The profit margin is computed automatically over the recorded cost.
• If it is of type Product, inventory starts moving with each purchase and sale. If it is a Service, no stock is deducted.

Common errors

Related

• Costs, margins and prices - the full weighted-average cost model, margin cascade and suggested price.
• Categories
• Suppliers
• Invoices
• Purchases - where lots, serials and variants are received.
• Lots, serial numbers and variants - how the three tracking controls work.
• Warehouses - the product's default warehouse and the business one.