Adding a product refers to teaching your system that concept of your product (i.e., item, parts, raw material, consumable, asset, goods, stock, etc.).
*NOTE: This is different than adding actual quantities of your items. Here, you are telling your system a name a description of a product. You do will not add quantities from particular, main window of the product’s detailed information. For example, quantities can be added later via “Quick Receive”.
Basic Pathway
MENU->INVENTORY->PRODUCTS->Click the “Add” button at the bottom of the window.
(Fill in the required fields and click Create and save.)
The Required Fields
Not all fields you see on the product window are required to create the product. Below is an explanation for the required fields:
Active
The “Active” field determines whether the item will be live. All products that have not been deleted should be active. This field is required but is already automatically filled in by default.
Track By
This field is equally as important as the product name. How are you tracking your product? Well, that depends in the type of product you have. Not all of your products will necessarily be tracked the same way. Tracking the quantity is a given, but then there’s more levels of differentiation when you need it. You have three options:
- “Quantity Only”– This is the most basic option and all some of our clients needs. If you just want to know how many of something you have, and you don’t care about differences from one to the other.
- “Lot and Quantity”– This is lot traceability accompanying your quantity tracking. It’s useful when each batch of a product needs to be tracked (e.g., expiration dates, assigning to orders or jobs, different designs or vendors, etc.)
- “Serial or Tag”– You can track every single individual item. Items that are often serialized include expensive item, custom builds, electronic devices, or assets you’ll be checking in/out and tracking repairs and services.
Product
In this field, you enter your product’s number and/or name.
Barcode
The barcode field will be automatically filled in for you based on the name of the product, or, you can enter your own barcode.
Type
The “Type” field is already filled in as “Stock” because that is most common type of inventory. a “Nonstock” item might be something like “Labor” if you want to track labor as inventory lines on orders. Consult your Flowtrac CSM (customer success manager) to discuss other types of inventory.
Expires– This is used for Lot and Serialized products. It will be grayed out for products being tracked by quantity only.
Taxable– This is set to yes by default.
The Other Commonly Used Fields
Description– This is the description of your product.
Order/Build– This refers to whether a product is being built, assembled, or combining other products. You can add BOMs to “Build” items.
Weight– The weight of the product can be entered and is paired with the field “Weight Unit” in which you choose the unit (e.g., kg, oz, inch).
Costs– There are options to track several different costs of the product. The fields are “List Price”,”MSRP”, and “Cost”.
Category– You have two fields to make two different categories and their subcategories. These are ways to group products by common traits. You can later look up products by specific categories.
When You’re Finished
- Click the “Create” button at the bottom of the window.
- If there is nothing else to add, such as any of the buttons that are now active on the right side of the window, Click “Save”. If you would like to add notes to the product, you could use the “Notes” button before clicking “Save”.
- After clicking “Save”, the “Product – Add” window will disappear. Your new product will now appear in the Product grid along with the other products.