Workbooks can be used to store information on the goods and services that you sell or buy. Using the Products functionality is optional and you can use all other aspects of the CRM system without it. If you want to track and report on Products sold or enforce a level of control over how they are represented, you need to create your Products in advance.

A Product requires a reference code (product code), an optional description and can be allocated a category for grouping and reporting purposes. Product categories are set up in Configuration, as are Units, for example 'per hour' or 'pack of 10'; it's also possible to create units ‘on-the-fly’ as you add individual Products.

Any Product can be set up as being available to be bought and/or sold, which is particularly useful for Product re-sellers. If the Product requires different units depending on whether it is bought or sold then a separate Product record will be needed for each of them.

If a Product has been categorised as ‘Available to be sold’ the Product can be used in Customer Transactions such as a Quotation; if it has been set with ‘Available to be bought’ it will appear in Supplier Transactions such as a Supplier Order.

The default selling price, cost and sales tax code can be set for each Product, which is the price that or cost that will appear in transactions as default. The prices and costs however can be overwritten or a discount applied to them as required within the transaction document.

Products can be associated with Notes and Activities in the normal way, which is useful when storing additional Product data and for scheduling Product reviews.

Displaying Products 

Clicking on Start > Marketing > Products displays the Products Landing Page.

By default, the Products Landing Page gives you a choice of views:

• All Products - all Products on your database;
• All Products for Sale - all Products on your database marked as being for available for sale;
• All Products for Buying - all Products on your database marked as being available to be bought.

You can customise the appearance of this (and any other) Landing Page including grouping, filtering and saving views.  For more information on customising views click here.

Adding Products 

Clicking on Start > Marketing > Products displays the Products Landing Page.

You can add new Products individually or import them in bulk. Workbooks can import data from CSV (comma separated value) format files, which is a very common file format used for transferring data. To create a new Product individually, click New Product.

The only compulsory field is Product Code but complete as much information as possible.

NOTE: Make sure that the Available to be sold and Available to be bought checkboxes are ticked as appropriate. If they aren't ticked, you won't be able to choose the Product as line item to add to customer/supplier transactions. Similarly, whilst you cannot delete a Product that has already been added to an Opportunity or transaction document, you can make it unavailable for sale in the future by removing the tick from the Available to be sold checkbox.

When you’ve finished, click Save & Close. The Product you’ve created will now be available to add as a line item to Opportunities, Quotations, Orders, Invoices and Credit Notes.