Items & pricing

Items are your catalog — the products and services you put on quotes, orders and invoices.

The item page

Everything about an item is on its own page, split into tabs, and every tab edits in place — there is no separate edit screen and no Edit button to go through. The tabs run in the order you use them, the weekly things first:

• Details — number and revision, name and SKU, type, unit, category, tags, description, whether it is active, and the personalisation box.
• Pricing — the sell price and the tax lines start on, what to charge (see Pricing guidance), the clients it applies to and what each of them pays, and the price lists it appears on.
• Cost — the base cost and where that figure comes from, your variables and COGS calculators, and the vendors you buy it from.
• Stock — how many there are, where they are, the adjustments, and the settings that govern them: track stock, reorder point and reorder quantity.
• Barcodes — the item's code, how it is printed, and the label printing beside it. A product sold in variants carries no code of its own: the codes belong to the variants, and the tab lists them and points at Variants.
• Variants, Recipe, Kit contents, Images — as the sections below describe. Which of them appear depends on the type: a service has no images, only a product has a recipe, only a kit has contents.
• Shipping — weight, HS code, country of origin and care instructions.
• Movements and History — the stock ledger and the trail of who changed what.

Each panel has its own Save and tells you what happened under that panel, so changing one thing never means re-saving the rest of the record. Leave a tab with something typed and not saved and you are asked first.

The tab is in the address, so a link can open straight on an item's stock or its barcodes, and only the open tab's data is loaded — the recipe, the kit's contents, the pricing guidance and the movements ledger are not fetched until you open them.

The item record

• Item # and revision — the item number is the primary human identifier. It leads the Item number column on the items list, and on a quote, order or invoice it is the first column of the line items, with the description beside it. The optional revision lets a client keep the same number across versions: the number is unique per revision, so 1042 and 1042 rev B are two different items.

  Where the number is shown, its revision is shown with it — as 1042 rev B — on the items list, the item picker, document line items, packing and shipping forms, search results and reports. Without it the number alone would name two different things.

• SKU — an optional secondary code.

• Name, description, type (product or service) and unit (each, hour, box…).

• Unit price — the default sell price; unit cost — your base COGS. Leave the cost blank and the first purchase receipt fills it in from what you actually paid; set it yourself and it stays put, with Average cost from purchases shown beside it so you can see when what you charge has drifted from what things now cost. When an item is put on a quote, order or invoice line, the line records the item's unit cost at that moment alongside its price, and that recorded cost follows the line when a quote becomes an order, an order is invoiced or duplicated. Changing the item's cost later affects new lines only, never documents you have already priced.

• Care instructions — "Trim the wick to 5 mm before every burn." Printed against this line on the packing slip, because the ten seconds after the box comes open is the only moment anybody is ever going to read them.

• Shipping weight, HS code and country of origin — what one of these weighs in grams, and the two things a customs form asks about it. The weight is what makes a rate quote real: buying postage adds up what is going in the box plus the box's own empty weight, and an item nobody has weighed is refused by name rather than quoted light. A variant can carry its own weight, which wins — a 16 oz candle is not an 8 oz candle. See Shipping labels.

• Tags and an active flag (archive an item to hide it from pickers without touching past documents).

• Track stock, with a reorder point and reorder quantity — turn it on for products you keep on the shelf. The item then carries an on-hand quantity built from a ledger of movements, confirmed orders reserve it, and shipping deducts it; see Inventory & stock. The Items list shows On hand and Available for tracked items, flags any at or below their reorder point with a Low stock badge, and can be filtered to just those (Stock → Low stock).

Variants

A product sold in sizes, colours or scents is one item with variants. Tick This product has variants on the item's Variants tab, name the options (up to three — "Size", "Scent") and type their values; Generate the grid makes one row per combination with a suggested SKU. Edit the rows — one size costs more, one combination you never make — and save.

Each variant is what is actually sold: it has its own SKU, its own price and cost (leave either blank to inherit the product's), its own barcode and its own stock. The product itself becomes a family and can no longer go on a document directly; the pickers show its variants nested underneath it, and picking one fills in its price.

Stock lives on the variant. The product's quantity on hand is the sum across its variants, and its average cost is weighted by what each one holds.

Removing a variant that has stock or has been sold archives it instead of deleting it: something a customer bought has to keep naming itself in the history. It disappears from the pickers and stays in the record.

Kits and bundles

Set an item's type to Kit — on the new-item form or on an existing item's Details tab — and its Kit contents tab lists what one contains: products, variants or materials, with how many of each. Filling that tab in on an item that is not one yet turns it into a kit, so either way round works.

A kit holds no stock of its own. Track stock is therefore switched off for it and stays off, whatever the form says, and whatever it was carrying before it became one stops being its. Turn it back into a product and the stock settings are yours again; what it contained is remembered, so changing your mind twice costs nothing.

Two more things follow, and they are the whole behaviour:

• How many it can supply is the smallest number of whole kits its components allow. Three candles per set and seven candles in stock is two sets, not seven.
• Selling one takes the components down. Shipping two gift sets writes a stock movement per component — six candles, two boxes — each pointing at the kit's own order line, so the ledger says which sale consumed them. Voiding the shipment puts them all back.

A kit's cost is the sum of what its components cost, so its margin is honest without you maintaining a second number. A kit cannot contain itself or another kit.

Images

The Images tab holds the item's photographs. The first one is the main photo — what stands for the product in lists and pickers — so ordering is the whole interaction: move an image to the front, or use the star, to make it the one everyone sees. A 256 px copy is stored beside each upload so a catalog grid stays quick.

PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP and AVIF, up to 10 MB each.

Personalisation

Tick Offer a personalisation box on document lines and every quote, order and invoice line drawn from the item gains a free-text box for what the buyer asked for — the engraved name, the message on the card. It is stored on the line, shown in the picker and printed on the packing slip, where whoever packs the box will actually read it.

Making it yourself

Two things about an item matter to anyone who makes what they sell (see Production). Both are read on the item's Stock tab, under Making this, and both are set through the public API — there is no box for them on the item's own tabs:

• Made to order — this is never held on the shelf. Confirming an order for it opens a planned production run against that order line, so the work is on the production list before anyone has to remember it.
• Curing days — how long a finished batch has to sit before it can be sold. Soap, candles, cheese and spirits all cure. Every batch of the item gets a "sellable from" date at completion, and stock inside that window counts as on hand but not as available.

With a recipe the item page also answers "Buildable now: 31 (limited by Wick)" — how many whole units your materials allow — with a Make button that turns the answer into a run.

Applies to clients (per-client pricing)

Applies to clients is on the item's Pricing tab, under the price itself — it is about who buys the item, so it sits with what they pay rather than with the costing tools on Cost. Link an item to any number of clients, each with an optional client price that overrides the base price. The Items list can be filtered by client, and a client's page counts the items priced for them.

Price lists

A per-client price covers one client and one item. When you sell at a different price to a kind of buyer — every shop that stocks you, every order that comes in at trade prices — that is a price list rather than fifty per-client prices.

The item's page carries an On each price list panel: what it sells for on every sheet you keep, and the margin each one leaves. A per-client price still beats every list, which is why it is the first thing checked when a document line is priced.

Categories

Every item and material sits somewhere in the catalog tree — a managed, two-level list you keep in Company Settings → Categories. Candles → Jar, Candles → Tin, Materials → Wax.

A category is worth having over a tag for three things a tag cannot do:

• Reports group by it. Revenue by category, stock value by category, materials usage by category. A grouping key somebody retypes each time is not a grouping key: "Candles", "candles" and "Candle" are three rows.
• Items default from it. A category can carry the tax group and the unit its items start in, so "everything in Wax is measured in kilograms" is said once. Both are starting points for the form — anything you set on the item itself wins.
• A rename moves everything. Rename the category and every item under it follows. Rename a tag in a tags box and nothing follows.

Two levels, not three. One is too few for Candles → Jar; three is a filing system, and the middle layer always ends up empty. A third level is refused with the reason rather than allowed and regretted.

Which side of the catalog. A category says whether it holds things you sell, things you use up, or both. A sales document is never offered "Wax", and a recipe line is never offered "Gift sets".

Merging. Every workspace eventually has "Candles" and "Candle". Merge folds one into the other: the items move, nothing is deleted, and the duplicate goes. Deleting a category that still holds items is refused and points at merge instead.

Filter the items list by a category and everything under it comes too — picking Candles never silently leaves out Candles → Jar. Uncategorised is its own filter, and it is the list every tidy-up starts from.

Tags still exist and still do what they always did: a thing can carry several, they are free-form, and they are for cross-cutting labels ("seasonal", "discontinued", "made to order") rather than for where something is filed. The workspace's whole tag list — with colours, usage counts, rename and merge — is in Company Settings → Tags.

Types and units

An item is a product (something you make or resell), a service (work you charge for) or a material (something you buy in and consume — see Materials). Materials never appear in a quote, order or invoice picker; they appear on purchases and in recipes.

Every item has a unit — each, hour, kg, metre — chosen from your workspace's unit list. It prints beside the quantity on documents, and it is what recipes convert through: buy wax by the kilo, use it by the gram.

Where the cost comes from

Cost follows on the item form says what maintains the unit cost:

• What I type — a figure you own; nothing overwrites it. The average from purchases is shown beside it, so you can see when the two have drifted.
• The recipe — the cost is whatever the item's recipe works out to, and it moves whenever a material's price does.
• What I pay — the cost stays equal to the weighted average of what you have actually been charged for it.

Whichever you pick, a document line still records the cost that was true when it was written, so a past margin report never changes under you.

Pricing guidance

Knowing what something costs is half the question. The other half is what to charge — and that has a different answer on every place you sell, because every place takes a different cut. The Pricing panel on the item page answers both.

What your rules say

Suggested retail and Suggested wholesale come from the markup rules in Company Settings → Pricing rules: multiply the unit cost, optionally add a flat amount, and round. The defaults are the classic ones — 2× cost rounded up to the nearest .99 for retail, 1.5× rounded to the nearest .50 for wholesale. One click sets the price, and the item's history records where the number came from, so six months later "why is this $19.50?" has an answer.

Rounding is always up. Rounding down would quietly hand back the margin the rule had just worked out.

What a price actually leaves you

Below the suggestions is the line that matters: what you keep at the current price, what margin that is, and the price that would clear your target.

At $18 you keep $7.52 once the wax and the postage are paid — 9% below your 40% target. Charge $22.52.

The target is a margin, not a markup. That distinction is where a lot of small makers quietly lose money: doubling a cost is a 100% markup and a 50% margin, and once the postage is out of it, it is neither.

Two things worth knowing:

• Postage changes the answer. What the buyer pays for postage is revenue and what the label costs is a cost, so absorbing postage comes straight off the margin. Type what you charge and what a label costs and the figures recalculate.
• Try a price. The slider recomputes as you drag it, from the same arithmetic — nothing there can disagree with the figures above it.

A different target for one item

An item can carry its own target margin, overriding the workspace's — a loss leader and a signature piece are not trying to clear the same percentage.

The items list has a Below target margin filter and a margin column, so the things quietly earning less than you meant them to are one click away rather than something you find out at year end.

COGS calculators

Instead of a single cost figure, an item can carry cost calculators — formulas over named variables (e.g. material_oz, labor_min) that each produce a candidate cost with its margin against the sell price. Use them as decision support when setting prices; the base unit cost stays whatever you choose.

A formula can use three kinds of name, in this order: the item's own variables, then your workspace variables (an item variable of the same name wins), then the read-only figures OrderDen supplies — recipe_materials, recipe_labour, recipe_overhead, recipe_unit_cost, average_cost and sell_price. So (recipe_unit_cost + packaging_per_unit) * 1.2 is a perfectly good calculator. A name nothing defines is refused, and the message says which.

Items on documents

Line-item pickers search the catalog by number and name — and end with a ＋ Quick add item shortcut so you can create a catalog item without leaving the form. Document lines snapshot the description, price and quantity at the time — later catalog edits never rewrite history. Items track last used so the catalog sorts your active sellers first.

Importing a catalog

Import on the Items list loads your catalog from a CSV — your own price list or a webstore's Products export, whose columns are recognised automatically. You map the columns, see the rows before they are written, choose what happens to items you already have, and can undo the whole run afterwards. See Importing your spreadsheet.

Every change to an item is recorded in its History card — see Activity & history.