How to Handle Your Products

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Here's how to use the system to keep track of your products and their associated prices, taxes, and descriptions.

1. Products are simply defined as those things that you sell.  Typically, this includes such things as propane, parts and equipment, tanks, and labor.

2. Products are of two basic types:

• Inventory products . . . These are products that have inventory quantities associated with them. If you are using the full General Ledger part of the system, they are also the products for which you calculate a Cost Of Goods Sold (COGS) each month. See Add an Inventory Product for help on this.
• Service products . . . These are products that DO NOT have inventory quantities associated with them. "Labor" would be a product of this type. See Add a Service Product for help on this.

3. All products are part of an appropriate "Product Group". There are eight Product Groups created by the system and these cannot be changed.

 

4. All products have a name that you key in, like this:

5. All products have a "Product ID" that is created by the system. This number corresponds to Sales Account numbers in your General Ledger Chart of Accounts, like this:

6. You can have as many prices for any given product as you want. For instance, you may sell commercial propane at two different prices, in which case it might look like this:

See Add a Product Price for help on this.

 

7. In addition to assigning prices to each product, you will also assign taxes (if appropriate) to each product. The rules on this are:

• If a tax NEVER applies to a product, DO NOT add it to the product.
• If a tax ALWAYS applies or SOMETIMES applies, then DO add it to the product.

See How the System Handles Taxes for help on this subject.