If a company has goods, inventory and other material assets that must be accounted for, it needs a catalogue where all of that can be booked and tracked.
SYS7 has this capability, with many extra functions that turn a primitive product catalogue into a versatile, irreplaceable aid for accounting and for selling in real life and on the internet.
The main purpose of the goods module is a product catalogue with all related data. That is:
- product nomenclature number (product code)
- product name in all required languages
- product category:
- sales markup coefficient
- attached gallery
- category name in all required languages
- category description in all required languages
- minimum normal quantity threshold; if stock falls below it, the warehouse manager is warned that stock is running out
- attached product structure, used to describe the product further and to enter structured data in the online shop (for example garment colour or shoe size)
- product manufacturer:
- manufacturer name
- external link to the logo image
- external link to the manufacturer’s website
- attached gallery
- unit of measure
- incoming price
- outgoing price
- online-shop price
- promotion price
- warehouse storage-location code attached to the product
- product barcode — a character string that can be scanned or entered by hand
- attached gallery
- unlimited file (image) upload from the product form
- if a gallery was not created beforehand, it is created automatically when the product is saved
- product description in all available languages
- product activity flag
- permission to export the product
- ability to mark dates in a calendar for each product (rental)
From this data structure you can see that “product” is only a common name for any material asset that can be bought, sold, rented, put into a warehouse and taken out. In short — a product is any material asset that needs accounting.
The product catalogue is built so that reviewing and editing products is simple and convenient. For example, to change prices for a whole category you do not open each product; you can make those price changes in the catalogue itself and save them with one click. The same applies to the product searcher.
The warehouse manager’s work has also been thought through:
- to find and issue goods faster, each product can be given a warehouse-location code — a letter-number combination that encodes where the product sits. This code is useful not only for issuing or putting away goods but also for stocktaking, because the stocktake printout is ordered by this code first and only then by product name.
- to speed up entering outgoing and incoming delivery notes, write-offs or receipts, each product can have a barcode that can be used with a mobile phone.
- in the product category you can set a critical minimum quantity. That number indicates the stock level below which you should order a new delivery from the supplier.
Manufacturers
One of the main description parameters of a product is its manufacturer. It determines not only the product logo but also country of origin, warranty obligations (if the seller wants to pass them to the manufacturer) and other information the client may want to keep for themselves or show to website visitors.
The manufacturer module matters for clients who work with specific manufacturers, for example wholesalers, because a manufacturer can be attached to the customer database and thus take part in cash flow — useful for company planning. Products can be grouped by a given manufacturer to build statistics on goods sold, the manufacturer group that yields the largest profit, and so on.
The manufacturer module is not a primitive data-storage section but a basis for serious turnover and profit planning — something Latvian business so often lacks.
Product structure (product skeleton)
To describe a product more deeply, combine it from several parts and calculate cost, we built a subsystem we call the product skeleton. For example, if you want to describe a ball, you can add extra parameters such as diameter, colour, material, and so on. Those parameters can then be used further — in the system itself and on the website as parameters for search, grouping, description, product comparison…
The product skeleton is an ideal tool for preparing this kind of data, because the skeleton module has a hierarchical structure that can be inherited from one level to the next. For example, all products share some properties — weight, dimensions, and so on. If you assign those parameters to the main product category, all subcategories of that category inherit them. Of course subcategories can add their own properties that belong only to those product groups.
Then, working with each specific product, you only fill the empty fields with the values of those properties. How that looks on the website is another question: our main task is to store the data, and then we can show it as the client wants — if it is speed, we can show a speedometer with the needle pointing at the speed entered in the product’s “Speed” field.
Web services
One special bonus for online shops is our web-services module, which lets you connect the product catalogue (and thus the online shop) to a wholesaler’s database.
Vehicle accounting
For accounting and selling vehicles you will find the vehicle register useful. Our clients use it both to account for and store data on their own fleet and to sell vehicles. Please read about this module here.
In closing we can say that once you work with the product catalogue you will see the goods module is an ideal tool for building a catalogue, for goods accounting, and for websites.