Products & categories
Your catalogue drives the POS, your stock counts, and your best-seller reports. Time spent here is repaid every day at the till.
Adding products
Each product holds:
- Name — what your staff would call it, not what the supplier calls it
- Selling price
- Cost price — without it you cannot see margin, which is the number that actually matters
- Barcode — scan the item to fill it in
- Category
- Reorder level — triggers low-stock alerts
- Unit — piece, kg, litre, packet
Over about thirty products, use the import template rather than typing.
Categories
Categories organise the POS grid and your reports. Products → Categories manages them.
Good categories match how you sell, not how a wholesaler ships. "Cold drinks" beats "Beverages — carbonated — 500ml". A cashier should find any item in two taps.
Category chips at the POS show a count, and low-stock categories are highlighted, so gaps are visible while you serve.
Pricing
Selling price is the default at the till; it can be overridden per sale with a line discount, and whole-sale discounts can be applied with a reason.
Cost price feeds margin. Update it when supplier prices change — a product still costed at last year's price makes a losing line look profitable, and those are the hardest losses to find.
Selling by weight
For butcheries, groceries and agro-dealers, price per kg or litre. At the till, tapping the product asks for the weight, shows the price live, and adds it. Stock counts down in kg and the receipt prints the weight.
Batch, lot and expiry
Pharmacies and anyone holding dated stock should switch on batch tracking. Sales then take the earliest-expiring lot still in date, and expired stock is never sold — it stays counted until you write it off, so it can go back to the supplier instead of to a customer.
Modifiers
For food service, modifiers capture "no onions", "large", "extra shot" — optionally with a price change. They print on kitchen dockets and show on the receipt.
Keeping the catalogue clean
Deactivate rather than delete products you no longer sell. Deleting breaks the history of past sales; deactivating keeps the history and clears the till.
Fix duplicates early. The same item entered twice splits your sales figures and makes stock permanently wrong.
Re-count regularly. Every catalogue drifts from reality. A periodic count and adjustment keeps it honest.