The catalog stores products, parts, materials and services your team uses in orders and quotes.
Create a product or service
- Open Catalog and choose New item.
- Enter a recognizable name and an internal code if your team uses one.
- Choose or create a category.
- Review price, currency, unit and tax.
- If the category tracks stock, add the relevant quantity and location.
- Save and reopen the item to verify its details.
Review required fields rather than assuming every optional field must be completed.
Maintain stock
Open an item to review its stock and movements. Use the management area for locations, units and groups when your workspace supports them. Categories and module settings determine whether stock tracking applies.
A service without stock tracking should not be treated like a counted physical part. Check the category when expected stock controls are missing.
Three quantities, not one
The first thing to internalise: a stock level is not one number, it is three. And the one that tells you whether you can sell is the third.
Each quantity lives per location. An item across three stockrooms has three balances and an aggregate. Query without naming a location and you get the sum of all of them; name one and you get only that one. That difference explains most “the system says five and the shelf is empty” reports: there are five, at another site.
How stock moves
A release can be partial or scoped to one location: if an order set four units aside and used only two, the other two are released without touching the rest.
Every adjustment asks for a reason and leaves a trace. That is what makes an inventory auditable: in six months the question is not how many there are, it is why it changed.
Reorder points
You can set a reorder point and a reorder quantity for each item-and-location pair. Not per item: the central stockroom and the front counter run down at different rates and deserve different thresholds.
When stock falls below the point, the item is flagged. The flag does not raise the purchase by itself: the supplier request is a separate action.
What your customer sees on the public site
The number you see is not necessarily the one a visitor sees. The workspace picks between three modes:
| Mode | What the site shows | When it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Availability only | No number at all: in stock or not. This is how it arrives. | Almost always. You do not show your inventory to competitors and you do not promise an exact figure. |
| Capped | The exact figure up to the cap, and “10+” above it. | When scarcity helps the decision — 2 left — but you would rather not publish that you hold 400. |
| Exact | The real quantity. | When the customer needs the figure to order, as in wholesale. |
Best practices
- Decide which categories track stock, and only those.A spare part yes; an hour of labour no. Turning tracking on for services fills the inventory with things nobody counts and makes low-stock flags unreadable.
- Create your locations before loading quantities.Moving balances between locations afterwards is manual work. If you are going to have a counter and a stockroom, define both first even if you start with one.
- Fix each item’s unit at the start.Litre, metre, box, each. Changing the unit once there are movements forces you to reinterpret the whole history.
- Use adjustments for reality, not to make the numbers agree.When the physical count differs, adjust with the real reason — breakage, loss, data-entry error. An adjustment with no clear reason is a loss nobody will investigate.
- Check what is held before blaming the count.When something is missing, first look at whether it is committed to an open order. It usually is.
- Leave the public site on “availability only” until your inventory is trustworthy.Publishing an exact figure you cannot honour costs more than publishing none.
Use catalog items in work
Choose the item when adding a line to an order or quote. Review the quantity, price and tax before confirming it. A catalog reference does not prove the goods have arrived from a supplier.
If the item is used on a storefront, separately review the public image and description. See public site and work orders.
Add or replace an item photo
- Edit the item, or prepare a new one.
- Use the image field’s action to choose a photo from your device.
- Check the preview and complete the item details.
- Save and wait for the upload to finish.
- Reopen the item to verify the saved image.
The primary image can be used in the public catalog, so choose content suitable for visitors. If the upload action is missing, ask the administrator to review file management permission as well as item editing permission.
If the item was saved but its image upload failed, correct the error and retry the upload on that same item. Do not create another item to upload the photo again.
Check the image on the public site
In Public site → Catalog, confirm that the item should be visible and review it in the relevant page or collection. Open the public address as a visitor to verify image, name and price. Seeing the photo in the internal editor does not establish what the customer sees.
For an order’s inventory receipts, see Receive supplier deliveries.
If something doesn’t work
Catalog is an optional module and needs Entities. Inside it, creating items, changing prices, managing stock, listing on the site and managing files are separate permissions. If stock does not move, check the stock tracking on the item’s category before checking the role: it is set per catalog category, not by a workspace switch. An item’s photo uploads after the item is saved, so save first.