Products that your company purchases or manufactures and sells may have variations, such as different sizes, colors, materials, or other variations. Different variations of the same product may have different prices and be of different demand.
In FirstBIT ERP, for products with variations you can use the functionality of inventory item characteristics. This functionality enables you to assign a single inventory item code to all variations of the item and a specific characteristic to each variation so that each variation will be tracked separately from their "origin" (opening balance, production, purchase) to their "end" (sale, use in manufacturing, write off).
Setting up the functionality
In FirstBIT ERP, you can set up the functionality of tracking item characteristics generally for any inventory item.
Note. Tracking of characteristics for items of the Service type are not supported.
To turn on the functionality of characteristic tracking, open the Administration > Settings > Purchasing and Warehouses form and select the Enable Item Characteristics option.
Then, when creating a particular item which has variations, open the Warehouses> Master Data > Items form, select the particular item, and on the Accounting Parameters tab, select the Use Characteristics option for the item. Notice that you cannot assign characteristics to a group of items as common properties.
Creating characteristics
Once the functionality is enabled, you can create a list of possible characteristics for the item with variations. Note that the item characteristics are functionally represented as a single-level list, that is, if you need to include two types of variations, for instance, size and color for TShirts, you need to create a list of characteristic combinations, such as color+size; for instance, the list of characteristics for such item may consist of strings such as: Size S White, Size M White, Size S Black, Size M Black, and so forth.
In case an item has multiple types of variations (as for Tshirts: different sizes, different colors, different necklines: v-neck, crew neck, polo, henley, the list of characteristics becomes too lengthy, you might need to consider creating inventory items for some of variations.
To create a list of characteristics for an item, on the Sales > Master Data > Items form, click to open the item's master record, then click the Characteristics link on the top of the form. The Items Characteristics form opens. Initially, the list of characteristics is blank.
The Item Characteristics
To add a characteristic, click Create on the toolbar. The Item Characteristic (create) dialog box opens. On the screenshot above, characteristics are defined as combinations of size+color. The list will include all combinations of sizes and colors that are available for the merchandize.
The Item Characteristic (create) form
In the Description field, type a characteristic. The list of characteristics is not final; when purchasing these items or manufacturing them, you can add new characteristics as needed.
Using Characteristics
You can assign characteristics to certain quantities of inventory items on their receiving (manufacturing) using the following documents:
- Opening Balances Entering (Inventory): When you enter the items' initial opening balances.
- Purchase Orders: When you order items with specific variations.
- Invoice Received or Goods Receipt Note: When you receive to warehouses the purchased items.
- Production: When receiving the manufactured items from the production process.
In any of the listed types of documents, you need to split the quantity of the item by quantities with specific characteristics.
To specify a characteristic for the specified quantity of the item, click in the Characteristics column on the Inventory tab of the document. Notice that you can select only one characteristic for the line.
This opens the following dialog box (the same for all types of documents).
The Item Characteristics (selection) dialog box
In this dialog box you can view the characteristics assigned to the specified item (or variations of the item) and select which one you want to choose for the document.
Once the characteristic is chosen, click Select to close the dialog box and use the characteristic in the document.
With each posted inventory transaction, such as inventory transfer, invoice, goods delivery note, inventory receipt, or write off, the inventory records of the items with characteristics are updated.
Viewing details on items with characteristics
To view various details on stock of the item with characteristics, use reports in the Warehouse module.
The Stock Balance by Item report lists among other available items the items with variations available in warehouses.
The changes in available item quantities with variation quantities in all warehouses
The Stock Statement (by Item) report shows the changes in item quantities during the specified period. For items with variations, the changes in all available variations are shown.
The list of items with variations available in warehouses
If you need to know where the units with particular characteristics are stocked, you can use the Stock Balance (with Locations) report which shows the item quantities in each warehouse, each location (if this functionality is enabled) on the specified date. For items with variations, the quantities are split between variations (characteristics).
The list of locations with items having variations