Setting up your product catalog is a key step in ensuring the success of your business. Your catalog is a collection of all the products available in your store, and it’s where you’ll record essential information like product names, pricing, supplier costs, variations, and inventory. A well-organized product catalog ensures an efficient sales process, accurate reporting, and reliable inventory tracking.

Understanding product types

There are three types of products that can be added to your catalog:

Standard product

A single product with a single SKU and its own inventory. Examples include a plant, a handbag, or a vintage necklace.

Variant product

A group of similar products that are offered in different variations, such as size or color. Each variant is a unique SKU with its own inventory. Examples include shirts that come in different colors and sizes or candles that come in different scents.

Composite product

Different products that are packaged together to create a product bundle, multi-pack, or fractional product. Examples include gift baskets or furniture sets.

Adding individual products to your catalog

You can add each product type to your catalog individually by navigating to Catalog > Products and clicking Add product. Growing your catalog on a product-by-product basis can be useful if you sell a limited number of products, or if you don’t regularly make significant changes to your product offering.

Bulk importing products to your catalog

For larger product offerings or product catalogs already digitized outside of Retail POS, formatting and importing products to your catalog via spreadsheet (CSV, XLSX, or XLS) will speed up the process.

We recommend familiarizing yourself with the basic premise of adding products individually before attempting to import products using a spreadsheet. Once you understand what type of product information is required, you can learn how to format your product information and import it into Retail POS.

Adding inventory to your products

The final step in setting up your catalog is adding inventory to your products, which will allow you to use inventory management features. Retail POS maintains accurate stock levels for your products as you make sales, so you’ll always know what you have on hand.

Reporting is another important part of inventory management. Reports allow you to track the sales performance of your products, estimate costs for purchase orders, and calculate profitability.

Before adding inventory to your products

Before you start adding inventory to your products, we recommend confirming that you’ve correctly entered supplier prices for each product. This will ensure that automatic reporting, which relies on the supplier price, remains accurate.

• Supplier price: The amount you pay your supplier for the product. This value is initially entered when you add a new product to your catalog, then confirmed or updated (as needed) when you create purchase orders or receive stock. The supplier price is used to calculate the product’s average cost.
• Average cost: Retail POS automatically calculates this value by averaging all supplier prices recorded for the same product over time. The average cost is then used to calculate the cost of goods sold in your reporting.
• Cost of goods sold (COGS): The direct costs involved in purchasing or making the product. When you make a sale in Retail POS with COGS enabled, the cost values associated with the products sold will be added up as part of the register closure, posted as a (zero-dollar) bill invoice, and displayed as a sum on the register closure summary report. Viewing COGS against total operating expenses helps you monitor your overall profit or loss.

A product’s supplier price is automatically set once an inventory movement is triggered, which then begins the average cost and COGS calculations.

• Inventory movement: An inventory movement is an event in Retail POS that automatically sets a product’s supplier cost and calculates the average cost for the first time. There are four types of inventory movements:
  • Adding inventory directly to your products
  • Creating purchase orders and receiving stock
  • Selling products on the Sell screen
  • Completing inventory counts

Adding inventory during the setup process

As long as an inventory movement hasn’t already been triggered in Retail POS, you can add inventory to your products directly while you’re still setting up. There are two ways to do this:

• Editing products individually
• Editing products in bulk via a spreadsheet (CSV, XLSX, or XLS)

Adding inventory after going live

Going live will trigger inventory movements and set average costs. After you’ve gone live, there’s only one method you should use to add inventory to your catalog:

• Creating a purchase order

Using a purchase order to add inventory allows you to continue recording product supplier prices, which ensures that the average cost and COGS calculations remain accurate.

Updating inventory by manually editing products after the setup process isn’t recommended because it doesn’t allow supplier price updates to be accurately captured, which may affect the average cost and COGS calculations.

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