Items and services

Items are what you buy and sell. An item is either a product (goods you can hold in stock) or a service (work you sell, which never has stock). Every sales and purchase line uses an item.

Go to Products / Services › Items.

Adding an item

Click Add Items / Services and fill in the sections of the form.

Basic Details

Field	What it is
Item Type	Product (goods) or Service. This can't be changed once the item is used on documents.
Code	Leave Auto to number it automatically, or type your own code. Codes must be unique.
Name	Must be unique in your company.
Item Category	For grouping and filtering. See Units, categories and brands.
Base Unit	The unit you count it in (piece, kg, meter...). Can't be changed once the item is used on documents.
Tax	The tax applied on sales and purchase lines for this item. New items start with the company's default tax.
Barcode	Digits, English letters and symbols, up to 100 characters; must be unique. Empty = a 13-digit barcode is made for you. Used by scanning and barcode labels.
Ecommerce	Tick to show the item in your online shop.

Prices and Accounts

• Purchase Rate: your usual buying price. It is shown only to users with the View Cost permission.
• Sales Rate: your selling price; it is filled into sales lines.
• Sales Account, Inventory Account, Cost of Goods Sold Account: the accounts this item posts to. Leave the defaults unless you report sales or stock in separate accounts (for example Sales - Spare parts). They can't be a cash, bank, customer (Accounts Receivable) or supplier (Accounts Payable) account ("An item account can't be a cash, bank, customer or supplier account."): invoices and bills post to them, so a bill would otherwise put money into cash.

Stock (products only)

• Default Warehouse: new document lines for this item start in this warehouse.
• Item Brand.
• Reorder Level: the Low Stock report lists items at or below this quantity.
• Keep Stock: on for goods you count; off for goods bought and sold without a stock count (they post to cost of goods directly).
• Batches: track stock by batch (lot) number. See Batches and expiry.
• Expiry Date on Batches: every batch needs an expiry date; expired batches can't be sold. Needs Batches.
• Variants (Color / Size): the item comes in variants with their own code, barcode and price. See below.

Service (services only)

Service Type (for example Repair or Installation), Duration (minutes) and Service Description. See Variants and service types.

Other Units

Turn on Show Multiple Units in Preferences to buy and sell an item in more than one unit. Add each extra unit with Base units in one, for example Box = 12 Piece. Each unit can have its own barcode, and its price defaults to base rate × factor. Stock is always kept in the base unit.

Images and description

A Main Image and up to 20 more images at a time (Multiple File Upload): JPG, PNG, WEBP or GIF up to 10 MB each. The Description is shown in the online shop.

Variants

With Show Variants on in Preferences and Variants ticked on the item:

1. Make sure the attributes exist (for example Color: Red, Blue; Size: S, M, L) in Variant Attributes.
2. On the item, click Create Variants, pick the values and confirm. One variant is created for each combination (Red / S, Red / M...).
3. Give each variant its own Code, Barcode, Sales Rate and Purchase Rate, or keep the item's.

A variant already used on documents is deactivated instead of removed, and its values can't change; add a new variant instead.

Copying, editing and deleting

• Clone opens a new item with the same details; change the name and code.
• An item used on documents can't be deleted; set it to In Active instead.
• Rebuild Stock (on the item list) recalculates every item's quantity and average cost from its stock movements. Use it only if a stock figure looks wrong.

Related

• Import items from Excel
• Stock rules and costing
• Print barcode labels