Brightpearl has powerful product control to help you make the most of your sales and inventory. Using the Products module allows you to:
- Add and update products and inventory quantity both manually or using data import
- Save service items or miscellaneous charges
- Monitor inventory levels, costs, value, location and best sellers
- Automatically create purchase orders from low inventory
- Easily add inventory or service items to sales orders
- Create variants (options) and bundles of products
- Use different price lists
This guide will introduce all the concepts you need to know about a product:
OVERVIEW
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Stock tracked or Non stock tracked |
Brand* | Category* | ||
|
Sell price |
 |
Product Type* |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
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Purchase price (Cost) |
Collection |
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Warehouse |
Season |
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| Quantity |
Warehouse location |
Options (variations) |
Bundle | |
* Required data
To manage or not to manage...
This means you are managing inventory levels for the item. You want to know how many you have in inventory at any one time and also when inventory is low so you can re-order. It is a physical item that you stock or store on your premises. These items have an inventory level which increases and decreases as you buy and sell the item. A stock tracked product will usually have a value, it will be recorded as a current asset in your accounting. These items can be stored at one or more warehouses, and in one or more locations within a warehouse.
Example: T-shirts
This means you are not managing inventory levels for the item. You do not need to know how many you have or when you might be running out. It might be something you do not keep in inventory; items that you drop-ship for example. It may not be a physical item; it may be a service or a miscellaneous charge. These items have no inventory level and no asset value in accounting; there may be no direct cost associated with it. It can have a price. It will have no warehouse or location.
Example: Labour
Example: Administrative fee
Why save services as products?
This allows you to add these charges to sales in the same way as a product. Not only is it easy to look up the item, but you can ensure a consistent description is used, and that the same price and tax rate are applied. You'll also be able to report on how much revenue or profit these items have brought you.
Product types allow you to categorise your products into similar groups of items, for example clothing, shoes, or perhaps simply apparel. You can report by product type, but they are most useful when it comes to applying options to products in order to create different variants, such as collar size, cuff size, shoe size. Options are assigned to product types so that only products of that type can use those options, for example, shirts use collar and cuff sizes, but not shoe sizes.
Giving each product a brand allows you to report on these groups. But they are also useful when you are selling via a website; customers can have the option to search your products by brand.
Categories have a key role in the management of products in Brightpearl. Not only do they allow you to categorise your items for reporting, but they control both static content and online product listings for a Brightpearl or Magento Webstore. A product can be assigned to one or more categories. Well thought out categories help your customers to navigate your online store whether they are looking for a specific item or just browsing.
When you sell an item, whether it's a physical product or a service, it's useful to have the sell price pre-defined. Not only does this mean you don't need to remember to manually add it on a sale, but it will also display on your Brightpearl or Magento Webstore and change automatically if you update it! You can also create as many price lists as you need. For example, if you want to offer special rates to good customers, or you are selling in a foreign currency, you can create a new price list.
Where a product has a direct cost associated with it, usually the price you pay your supplier you can create a cost price list to store the amount your supplier charges per item. This means that when you raise an order to your supplier in Brightpearl you will already be able to see how much they will charge you. The cost price is the figure used for valuing your inventory once you have received it into inventory. It will also be used for calculating the profit on items sales: profit = sell price - cost price.
Price breaks
Using price breaks you can automatically apply volume discounts to orders, for example order only 1 item and pay £10, order over 10 or more items and pay £9.
Collections can be used to group products of the same brand. This can be used for grouping special items that you wish to report on, for example a "summer collection" which you might be interested in monitoring the sales of.
Seasons can be used when you sell products at different times of year. Assign your products to a season, select your current season so you only need to deal with the relevant products at certain times of year. Also great for making your reports relevant.
Unless you switch on multiple warehousing you won't need to worry about this one. A warehouse is a physical location in which you store your products, for example, you may have a storage facility for your main inventory and then you might have a shop where you display some of your items, you can separate you inventory by adding each of these as a warehouse in Brightpearl. By transferring your inventory between your warehouses in Brightpearl you can always be sure of where you products are in the real world. You'll also be able to check availability of items across your warehouses so if a customer requests an item not currently available, in your store for example, you can get it transferred in from your storage facility.
Locations refer to a physical location within your warehouse, for example, aisle 2, bay 3, shelf 1, bin A. You'll need to switch locations on to use them, and you have the choice of allowing only a single location per product or multiple locations. You might use multiple locations if you have a goods-in unpacking location where items are placed when they arrive at your warehouse and then a storage location where they are placed once they've been checked and put away. Or you might not have enough room in the space where your product is kept and an overflow area needs to be used.
Products with options create what we call variants. An example of a variant would be a T-shirt that comes in different colours and sizes. Rather than creating each combination of the item yourself use our variant management to do it for you! Not only that, Brightpearl keeps them in a Product Group which allows you to manage them altogether, meaning you only need to change details once and can amend them all on the same screen. If you're selling online these items can also be displayed as a single product and your customer can then select the colour, size combination they want using a pick list.
When you're managing stock tracked products they'll need a quantity. This will increase and decrease as you buy and sell items through Brightpearl. You'll be able to see how many you have in inventory, how many are reserved to orders and those which are available to sell. As inventory levels change you'll see the availability change on your Brightpearl or Magento Webstore, on eBay, in the back office AND in EPOS so you don't take orders for items you don't have! Of course we give the choice to override this and take the order anyway, useful if you're drop-shipping.
If you want to group some items together to sell as a package you can create a bundled product. These aren't stock tracked, but the individual items in the bundle can be, so you don't over sell. Using a bundle means you can place a single price to your customer for a selection of products. An example of a bundle is "buy this t-shirt and get this hat free!".
