Coworking:Product

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Introduction

Product master data window is the place where you can easily organize and centralize the key data of the items of any type you might manage as part of the organization processes and/or activities.

Organizations deal with a variety of different items may be required by an organization for the performance of its daily activities.

It is possible to load Product information into Openbravo en masse using the Import Data module, or one by one using the Product window.

This section describes how to set up Products individually.

Product

Product window allows the creation of items such as products, raw materials, resources, services, etc.

The information required to create a Product in Openbravo is determined by the nature of the Product, its Product Type.

There are four product types available:

• Item. The most frequently used product type is "Item". Inventory held for resale, materials that are placed into a production process, and semi-finished or finished goods created through production are examples of products defined using the product type "Item".
  • An item should be flagged as "Stocked", if quantity tracking is required for the item, otherwise there is no need to flag the item as "Stocked".
  • An item should be flagged as "Production" , if the item is used in manufacturing.
  • If an item is an intermediate or finished good, its bill of material (BOM) should be detailed on the Bill of Materials tab.
• Service. This product type is used to identify such provisions as professional services, transportation, telephony, and other items which do not correspond with material goods.
  • Therefore, a Service is not stockable but can be purchased or sold.
  • As service can have a bill of materials to be defined in the Bill of Materials tab.
• Resource and Expense. These product types can be used to distinguish between different types of products which can be purchased or sold but cannot be stocked.
  • Resource type can be used to configure resources such as Financial, Legal or Natural resources used by the organization.
  • Expense type can be used to configure expenses such as travel expenses to be used while reporting Employee expenses.

Product types do not confer different accounting treatments. In other words, all product types account same way while being purchased, stocked or sold.

All of them use the ledger accounts defined in the Accounting tab of the Product window.

Additional key data to fill in are:

• UOM, that is the unit of measure to be used while purchasing, storing and selling a product, for instance "Units".
  A product can also have alternative UOM besides product's UOM.
• Product Category, it is mandatory to select a product category to which the product is going to belong to.
  To learn more visit Product Category
• Tax Category, this category is key for managing the taxes related to the product. Taxes such as VAT depends on the type of product.
  To learn more visit Tax Category
• Purchase checkbox can be selected to indicate that the product can be purchased to an external supplier. This checkbox is an informative one mainly as it does not add any business logic behind but in regards to MRP.
  In that case, if selected MRP will then purchase the product if needed, otherwise it will produce it.
• Sales checkbox can be selected to indicate that the product is sold or can be sold to an external parties or customers. This checkbox is an informative one as it does not add any business logic behind.
• Stocked checkbox is selected if the product is part of the inventory, therefore proper inventory movement transactions are registered in Openbravo.
  This flag can not be changed anymore for a product, if that product is part of any sales, purchase, inventory or production document related, whatever document status is.
• Production checkbox is selected if the product is part of a production process. Once selected an additional field appears to select a "Process Plan".
  To learn more visit Process Plan
• Attribute Set, a product can have a group of features or an attribute set such as "Color and Size", to take into account while ordering or storing the product.
  • If an Attribute Set is selected here, Openbravo displays a new field named "Attribute Set Value".
    To learn more visit Attribute Set
• Attribute Set Value, if an Attribute Set value such as "Blue and Large" is selected, Openbravo displays a new field named "Use Attribute Set Value As".
• Attribute Set Value As, once an attribute set has been selected that one could be used as described below depending on the criteria selected in this field:
  • Default: This means that the attribute set value defined will be defaulted in each of the transactions, but it is allowed to be changed.
    In other words, the user will not have to care about setting it each time when creating transactions such as goods receipts and shipments.
    • For instance, it can be set to default the value of the attribute set Size of a product to Medium (because it is the most commonly used).
      This way, each time that that product is selected, its attribute set value will be set to Medium (unless selected from stock, in which case the attribute set value is set to the value in which the product is stored).
      It is possible to overwrite this attribute set value, to Small or Large for example.
  • Overwrite Specification: This means that the attribute set value will specify completely the product nevertheless, the attribute set value can be changed for this product.
    • For instance, product Alcohol Free Beer is given the attribute set Alcoholic Proof and the attribute set value 0% in the Product window. This definition specifies completely the product: the Alcohol Free Beer is supposed to have a 0% alcoholic proof. But, in the production process, some deviations can happen and this alcoholic proof can go to 0,01%. Using Overwrite Specification option the production manager will be allowed to register this deviation in the Production process for Alcohol Free Beer product.
  • Specification: This means that the attribute set value will specify completely the product. The attribute set value will always have this value and no other value will be allowed for it.
    • For instance, product Large Blue Jeans is given the attribute set Size & Color with values Large and Blue. This defines the product and will not change. Transactions are done and completed with this product, without forcing to re-set the attribute set value. User can then query all products having Large size or Blue color without having to query the transactions but only the product definition.
      To learn more about attributes, visit How to Manage Attributes and Attribute Sets article.
• UPC/EAN, used to store bar-code information
• Bill of Materials checkbox is selected when the product is a bundle of other products as listed in the Bill of Materials tab.
• Deferred Revenue: this flag is visible only for products having the Sale flag checked and indicates that by default, revenues for sales of this product need to be deferred. When this flag is checked, the Revenue Plan field group becomes visible, allowing users to configure the next two fields.
  • Revenue Plan Type: this field specifies the default frequency of the revenue distribution. At the moment, only monthly revenue plans are supported.
  • Period Number: this field specifies the default duration of a revenue plan. For example, an annual subscription to a magazine will be defined with a revenue plan of 12 monthly periods, while a season ski pass will have revenue plan of 5 monthly periods.
  • Default Period: this field specifies the first period in which revenue is going to be recognized.The options available are:
    • Current Month. This option will set the Revenue Plan Starting Period to the same period as the invoice accounting period.
    • Next Month. This option will set the Revenue Plan Starting Period to the invoice accounting next period.
    • Manual. This option will not set any revenue plan starting period, therefore a starting period can be selected while creating the sales invoice line.
• Deferred Expense: this flag is visible only for products having the Purchase flag checked and indicates that by default, revenues for sales of this product need to be deferred. When this flag is checked, the Expense Plan field group becomes visible, allowing users to configure the next two fields.
  • Expense Plan Type: this field specifies the default frequency of the expense distribution. At the moment, only monthly expense plans are supported.
  • Period Number: this field specifies the default duration of an expense plan.
  • Default Period: this field specifies the first period in which expense is going to be recognized.The options available are:
    • Current Month. This option will set the Expense Plan Starting Period to the same period as the invoice accounting period.
    • Next Month. This option will set the Expense Plan Starting Period to the invoice accounting next period.
    • Manual. This option will not set any expense plan starting period, therefore a starting period can be selected while creating the purchase invoice line.

These values are used when an invoice is created for a product having an expense plan and/or a revenue plan.

Same way, these values are also used when an invoice is created from another document (for example: the Generated Invoices process that creates invoices from sales orders). Same way these values can be modified on a transaction by transaction basis.

To learn more visit the How to manage deferred revenue and expenses article.

• Book Using Purchase Order Price: This flag is used when posting a Goods Receipt or a Matched Invoice document to the ledger.
  Normally the product cost is used while posting those transactions however this checkbox allows to use the product purchase price instead.
  This feature only works for "Expense" product type do not having the "Sales" checkbox selected.
  Notice that in this case a Purchase Order needs to be related to the Goods Receipt, otherwise an error message will be shown as the purchase product price is required.

This feature is available starting from 3.0PR17Q2.

• Returnable:This flag is used to indicate if a product can be returned and, in the case that it is, a new field called. When trying to return a non returnable product from the Return from Customer window an error will be shown.

• Overdue Return Days:In this field it is possible to configure the maximum amount of days before a product can not be returned. If the field is left in blank the product can be returned without time limitations. When trying to return a product which period has been expired a warning message will appear.

Note: If stocked is not checked and BOM is checked, the product price should be 0. Because in that special case, the product price is the sum of the prices of the bill of materials components it consists of. If promotion wanted to create, 'Discounts and Promotions' should be used.

Variants

Product can be marked as Is Generic. This means that variants of this product will be created based on some characteristics such as colour, size, etc. The definition of these characteristics takes place in the generic product so it can be said that a generic product is like a template where newly variants will inherit all the attributes (taxes, prices, image) of this product. Because of this a generic product cannot be used for transactions but its variants.

Note:Products that are marked as generic cannot be used in transactions operations such as sales orders, purchase orders, goods receipts, etc

When this flag is marked two buttons are shown:

• : It shows all variants that have been created or not for that specific generic product. It is very useful when:
  • The user does not want to generate all variants but just some of them. The button allows to select the possible combinations
  • The user adds one more value, for example, red when having before green and white and the variants were already created in the past. It will show the new combinations

For example imagine generic product T-Shirt Model A has the characteristics:

• Colour: Blue, White
• Size: S,M,L

But still variants have not been created. If you press the button you see all possible combinations:

Then all combinations can be selected or just pick some of them. Once the selection takes place pressing Done, combinations will be created as Products. This newly products will have the Generic Product field filled with the product that was marked as generic. We can say it is their parent product

• : It creates/explode all product variants, that is, all combinations based on the characteristics defined

Another button that might appear is . It only shows up when the generic product or the newly product variant has a non-variant characteristic related. Two scenarios:

1. Generic product: This button allows to enter the value of that characteristic.
   Imagine the characteristic is Fashion Line that has three value: Sport, Vintage, Classic.
   Unlike the characteristics that are variants users cannot enter the value through the Characteristic Configuration tab
2. Variant Product: This button allows to enter/update the characteristic that is not variant

Once a variant has been created its characteristics and values can be viewed either in the grid or in form view:

• Grid view: There is a new column Characteristic Description. This column is calculated and is not editable. It shows the characteristics with their values as a text. This column has a new search-selector in order to find product variants based on its characteristics

Press the button and opens a pop-up to select values:

• Form view: Product variants have a new section named Characteristic Description. This section contains as many fields as different characteristics the product has

There is a preference Show Product Characteristics Parents: Values can be 1,2,3,4, etc. The number means how many levels in the hierarchy tree the user wants to show in form view in the Product window. For example if the tree is: Colour->Green->Green light->0034

New values of an existing characteristic can be added. For example colour red when already having Blue and White. When it happens this new value is automatically added to all generic products that already have the characteristic Colour. This new value will be present in the configuration tab but deactivated. If the user wants to use it in a specific product in order to create new variants he can just activate the value and use the button "Manage Characteristics"

Modify Tax

This feature is available starting from 3.0PR19Q2.

• Modify Tax: This check allows services to modify the taxes of the product linked to. This allows to modify taxes calculation of a product depending on a service condition. For example, a new kitchen furniture is sold to a customer, the taxes applied to the furniture might change if the installation of the furniture is also provided by the seller of the furniture. Also, this functionality applies only to Orders. The documents that are created afterwards will take the information from the Order document.

This taxes modification is implemented through a service linked to the product. This service has to be marked as can modify taxes of the products linked to, and the configuration of the products to modify taxes and the new tax to apply must be also specified.

To configure it go to the Product window and create a new service. A service is just a product with the field Product Type set to Service. It has to be activated also the field Linked To Product and the field Modify Tax. When this field is activated, an new tab named Modify taxes categories is visible. In this Tab is defined the configuration of the taxes categories of products this service will modify when linked and the new tax category to apply.

To ease the configuration process two components have been added:

1.- Modify Tax for Product Category (Button): Pick and Execute window to assign the product categories and tax categories in the same action.

2.- Copy Service Modify Tax Configuration (Button): Pick and Execute window where services which modify taxes are displayed. User can select one to many service, and current configuration will be assigned to selected services. Once process have been executed, the old configuration (if exists) will be deleted and new one will be added. This process helps in deploying the same configuration to multiple services.

Price

A product can be part of many Price List Versions which are valid for a given time period.

There are two ways you can get a product to be part of a Price List:

1. by selecting the Price List/s and entering both the "Net Unit Price" and the "Net List Price" values in the Price List tab, while creating the product.
   As a consecuence of that, the product being created will also be part of the Price List selected.
2. by selecting the product and entering both the "Net Unit Price" and the "Net List Price" values, while creating the "Price List".
   As a consequence of that, that the Price List as well as both "Net Unit Price" and "Net List Price" values will be automatically shown in the "Price List" tab of the product.
   To learn more visit Price List.

Accounting

Accounting tab allows to configure the ledger accounts to be used while posting product related transactions such as product purchase or sales to the general ledger.

As shown in the screen above, you can configure for each product and general ledger some accounts to be used in the below listed transactions:

• Product Assets: this field stores the default account to be used to record inventory transactions such as:
  • Inventory Counts
  • Inventory Movements
  • and Goods Receipt

This account is typically an asset account

• Product Expense: this field stores the default account to be used to record product's purchases:
  • Normally, this account can be configured as an "Expense" account type in case of not managing "Perpetual Inventory".
    In that case the expense is accounted at the time the goods are purchased at the purchase price.
    Same way, the revenue is accounted at the time the goods are sold at the sales price.
    Not managing "Perpetual Inventory" implies the need of manually adjusting the inventory value at the end of the year.
    That inventory adjustment implies to calculate the difference between the "Final Inventory Value" and the "Initial Inventory Value".
  • However, this account can also be configured as an "Asset" account in case of "Perpetual Inventory" management.
    In that case the expense needs to be accounted when the product is sold to the customer as "Cost of the Goods Sold" at the product cost.
    In Openbravo, the revenue is accounted at the time the goods are sold at the sales price and the cost of the goods sold is accounted at the time of shipping the goods at the product cost.
    Managing "Perpetual Inventory" does not imply the need of adjusting the inventory value at the end of the year.
• Product Deferred Expense: this field stores the default account to be used to record deferred expenses.
  This account is typically an asset account.
• Product Revenue: this field stores the default account to be used to record product sales revenues.
  This account is typically a revenue account.
• Product Deferred Revenue: this field stores the default account to be used to record deferred revenues.
  This account is typically a liability account.
• Product COGS: this field stores the default account to be used to record the cost of the goods sold.
  This account is typically an expense account.
• Product Revenue Return: this field stores the default account to be used to record sales returns .
  This account is typically a revenue account.
• Product COGS Return: this field stores the default account to be used to record .
  This account is typically an expense account.
• Invoice Price Variance: this field stores the default account to be used to record price differences between posted Goods Receipts and booked Purchase Invoices.
  This account is typically an asset account

At first, these accounts are inherited from the Defaults accounts of the organization's general ledger configuration for which the product is being created. The end-user can always change them.

Besides, it is important to remark that it is possible to configure the creation of new correlative accounts for the products as described in the General Ledgers tab of the Organization window.

Bill of Materials

This tab allows to edit the bill of materials components the selected product consists of.

Bill of Materials apply to products flagged as Bill of Materials.

This tab provides information of the list of products contained and its quantity for the Bill of Materials production.

If the product Tax_Category is flagged as As per BOM, this tab also provides information for the price of each product in the Bill of Materials list. The price and quantity in this list is used to perform the division of the base amount to calculate the taxes based on the taxes configured for each product of the list

Transactions

The transaction tab is a summarized view of all the transactions of a product.

There is not a way for you to directly create new product transactions in the transactions tab.
Product transactions of any type are automatically saved and listed in this tab as they are booked in Openbravo.

As shown in the image above, Openbravo saves and informs us about below relevant data for each product transaction type:

• Storage Bin where the product has been stored in or taken from
• Movement Quantity, as the number of product units moved internally or either in or out
• Movement Date, as the date of the product transaction
• Movement Type, such as:
  • Customer Shipment, this type can have:
    • a negative movement quantity whenever a product is shipped to a customer in a Goods Shipment document.
    • a positive movement quantity whenever a product is returned back from a customer in a Return Material Receipt.
  • Internal Consumption, as the units consumed in internal activities such as projects, reparations. This type can be:
    • Positive if the units of the product reduce stock from the warehouse
    • or Negative if an internal consumption transaction is cancelled, this works like when a shipment is cancelled.
  • Inventory In, this one relates to a Physical Inventory Count higher than the Stock booked for a product in Openbravo.
  • Inventory Out, this one relates to a Physical Inventory Count lower than the Stock booked for a product in Openbravo.
  • Movement From, this one relates to Goods Movements from a Warehouse & Storage Bin
  • Movement To, this one relates to Goods Movements to a Warehouse & Storage Bin
  • Production, as the units of a product included in a work effort. This type can be:
    • Positive, for P+ when products are added to the warehouse
    • or Negative, for P- when products are consumed
  • Vendor Receipts, this type can have:
    • a positive movement quantity whenever a product is received from a vendor in a Goods Receipt document.
    • a negative movement quantity whenever a product is returned back to a vendor in a Return to Vendor Shipment.

Openbravo also informs us about the specific:

• Goods Receipt/Shipment Line
• Physical Inventory Line
• Movement Line
• Production Line
• or Project Issue

information of the product transaction, as applicable.

It is also possible to review:

1. the Costing Status of a transaction.

Costing status of a transaction can be any of the ones listed below and has a lot to do with the Costing Background Process:

• Not Calculated. This status means that the costing background process has not taken the transaction yet to calculate its cost.
• Cost Calculated. This status means that the costing background process has already taken the transaction and its cost has been calculated.
• Pending. This status has been implemented to get that the costing background process do not throw an error whenever it is not possible to calculate the cost of a transaction.
  This status is not used by the Costing Algorithms currently implemented in Openbravo but can be used by other costing algorithms such as FIFO for those cases where a product output transaction is booked without booking its corresponding product input transaction.
• Skip. This status has been implemented to get that the costing background process do not take into account the transactions set as "Skip" while calculating costs.
  This status is not used by the Costing Algorithms currently implemented in Openbravo but could be used by other costing algorithms.

2. and whether the cost of a transaction has been calculated or not.
As soon as a product transaction gets its cost calculated by the Costing Background Process the field "Is Cost Calculated" gets the value "Yes".

Once the cost of a transaction is calculated you can also view the:

• Trx Original Cost, that is the original cost of the transaction
• Total Cost, that is the sum of the original cost of the transaction and all adjustment costs of any type.
• Unit Cost, that is the sum of the original cost and all the "unit cost" type adjustments.
• Currency used for the calculations.

Additionally, "Is Cost Permanent" field informs whether the cost of a transaction is permanent or not. In case it is permanent, it will not be changed anymore.

Finally, it is important to remark that in the case of "Average" cost algorithm, the "average" cost of a product is calculated as "Moving Average" as explained in this wiki article.

The average cost of a product is calculated based on the product's transaction flow, therefore it is the sum or subtraction of the "Total Cost" of the transactions listed for the product, divided by the sum of the "Total Movement Quantity" of the transactions.

For instance the average cost of a product which transactions are listed below is equal to 23.33 = (2000.00-1000.00+2500.00)/(100-50+100):

• goods receipt for Movement Qty 100 for a Total cost of 2000
• goods shipment for Movement Qty -50 for a Total cost of 1000
• goods receipt for Movement Qty 100 for a Total cost of 2500

Manual Cost Adjustment

Additionally, the cost of a transactions can be modify by clicking on Manual Cost Adjustment process button. After clicking this button a new popup is opened:

This pop-up allows entering below detailed data:

• Total Cost Amount: that is the new total cost of the product transaction
• Accounting Date: that is the date when this manual change which will imply a cost adjustment is going to be post to the ledger
• Incremental:
  • if not checked the amount entered in the total cost amount field is the new Total Cost of the transaction which besides that will be set as a "Permanent" cost which cannot be adjusted anymore.
  • if checked the amount entered in the total cost amount field is going to be added to the current total cost, besides "Unit Cost" check-box is shown.
• Unit Cost: This check-box is shown only if "Incremental" check-box is selected.
  • if not checked, the incremental amount entered in the field total cost amount is not going to be consider part of the transaction unit cost but total cost. This is like entering an "extra" cost such as "Landed Cost", which does not change the unit cost of that transaction but the total cost.
  • if checked, the incremental amount entered in the field total cost amount is going to be consider part of the unit cost of the transaction.

For additional information about which cost adjustment is or it is not unit cost, please review this wiki article : Cost Adjustments - Introduction.

Once done a "manual cost correction" cost adjustment will be created.

This cost adjustment can be reviewed and post to the ledger in the Cost Adjustment window.

Same way, this cost adjustment can also be reviewed in the Transaction Cost tab.

Purchasing

Purchasing tab information is used for products that are planned by the purchasing plan.

In this tab the information that is required for the creation of the Purchasing plan and of the automatic creation of Purchase Orders from the Purchasing Plan is entered.
Also, the Requisition process uses the Business Partner information for the automatic creation of Purchase Orders.

• Business Partner, the vendor that will appear on the Purchase Order when created automatically from the Requisition or from the Purchasing Plan.
• Quality Rating: qualtiy rating of the vendor. Information only field that is not used by the MRP process.
• Current Vendor checkbox: indication of the default vendor that will be taken into account by the MRP process.
• UPC/EAN: Universal Product Code/European Article Number (barcode) of the product as used by the selected vendor. Information only, this information does not appear on a created Purchase Order.
• Currency: currency of the purchase order.
• Net List Price: information only field of the Net List Price that has to be updated manually on the automatically created Purchase Order from the Purchasing Plan.
• Price Effective From: the date that the entered prices became valid. Information only, not used by the MRP process.
• Purchase Order Price: information only field of the Net Unit Price that has to be updated manually on the automatically created Purchase Order from the Purchasing Plan.
• Last Purchase Order Price: the Net Unit Price on the most recently added Purchase Order.
• Last Invoice Price: the Net Unit Price on the most recently added Purchase Invoice.
• UOM: the unit of measure of the product.
• Minimum Order Qty.: a minimum order quantity for the vendor. In the Purchasing plan the quantity for suggested purchase orders is this value or above.
• Quantity per Package: information only for the packaging of the product. This information is not taken into account for the creation of the information in the Purchasing Plan nor for the creation of Purchase Orders.
• Purchasing Lead Time: time in calendar days between when the product is ordered from the vendor and when it is received in stock. In the Purchasing Plan this information is used to calculate when purchase orders should be placed, resulting in the Planned Order Date for the suggested purchase order.
• Fixed Cost per Order: information only field of a fixed amount that has to be added manually to the automatically created Purchase Order from the Purchasing Plan.
• Vendor Product No.: the vendor reference for the product
• Vendor Category: information only field to add vendor category information.
• Discontinued: information only field to indicate that this product is no longer used. The Purchasing Plan does not take this set up in account when generating the plan and when creating Purchase Orders. When selected the field Discontinued by date to indicate when the product is discontinued. For information only purposes.
• Quantity Type:
  • Exact: each suggested purchase order is for the exact required quantity. For example if the demand is for 85 units, the quantity for the suggested purchase order is 85 units.
  • Multiple: the quantity that appears as the quantity for the suggested purchase order is a multiple of the standard quantity (as defined on this screen). For example if the standard quantity is 20 units and the demand is for 85 units, the quantity for the suggested purchase order is 100.
• Manufacturer: information only field to indicate the manufacturer of the product.
• Standard Quantity: quantity that is taken into account in combination with the Quantity Type for the quantity value for the suggested purchase order.
• Capacity: quantity per day the vendor is able to supply. Based on this field and the lead time the purchase order date is calculated. The number of days is calculated as the max value of the lead time and the required quantity / capacity.

Translation

Product names can be translated to any language.

The way to get that is as simple as:

• select first the language required
• and then enter the product name translated into that language.

Full list of Product window fields and their descriptions is available in the Product Screen Reference.

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