Advanced: Product Management

For users who already know the basics — this guide covers product categories, the difference between deactivating, archiving, and deleting, bulk operations, stock tracking, and how products behave across invoices, offers, and work reports.

Categories and Catalog Organisation

Categories let you group related products so the catalog stays navigable as it grows. Create categories under the Products page — each category has a name and a sort order that controls how groups appear in the picker and on the index page.

Assign each product to exactly one category. When building an invoice or offer, the product picker groups suggestions by category, making it easy to find the right item. If you restructure categories later, reassigning a product to a new category does not affect existing documents — the line items on past invoices keep whatever values they had when they were saved.

A practical approach: create categories that mirror your service lines or departments (e.g., "Consulting", "Hardware", "Maintenance"). Avoid overly granular categories — if a category has only one product, it's not adding value.

Deactivating, Archiving, and Deleting

Products have three ways to leave the active catalog, each with different consequences.

Deactivating flips the product's active flag off. It disappears from the picker so nobody can add it to new documents, but it still appears in your product list (with a visual indicator) and on all historical documents. Reactivate it at any time.

Archiving moves the product to a separate archive view. Archived products are hidden from both the picker and the default product list. Use the "Include archived" filter to see them. Archiving is reversible — unarchive whenever you need the product again.

Deleting permanently removes the product. This is only allowed if the product has never been used on any invoice, offer, or work report. If it has been used, the system blocks deletion to protect document integrity. In practice, archiving is almost always the right choice over deleting.

Bulk Operations

When you need to update many products at once, the Products index page supports bulk actions. Select multiple products using the checkboxes, then choose an action from the toolbar.

Bulk archive moves all selected products to the archive in one step — useful during year-end catalog cleanup. Bulk VAT rate change updates the VAT rate code on all selected products simultaneously, which is essential when tax rates change (e.g., a Swiss VAT rate adjustment). Both operations only affect the master product data; existing invoices and offers that already used these products are not modified.

Stock Tracking

If your organisation has stock tracking enabled, products of type "Product" (not services) can track inventory quantities. The stock quantity field shows how many units you have on hand, and the system highlights products that fall below a low-stock threshold.

Stock tracking is informational — it does not automatically decrement when you create an invoice. Use it as a visual aid to know when to reorder, not as a warehouse management system.

How Products Behave Across Documents

When you select a product in an invoice, offer, or work report, the system copies the product's current name, description, unit, price, and VAT rate into the line item. From that moment, the line item is independent — editing the master product later does not retroactively change existing documents.

This means you can safely update prices or descriptions on a product without worrying about past invoices changing. It also means that if you want a price increase to apply to a draft invoice, you need to re-select the product or manually update the line item.

Related Guides

• Modules-Produkte — basic setup and daily workflow
• Tips-Produkte — quick wins for product management