ManualDoc:T180

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.

• 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.

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

• 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.