Variants are groups of the same product or material, categorized by specific attributes. Attributes can include parameters like color, size, and type.

Variants are managed on the product or material card. A product or material can have a single or multiple variants. If you enabled multiple variants, you can define Variant codes, Reorder points, and Sales or Purchase prices for each variant.

Example: You want to manufacture a particular wooden table. If you manufacture this wooden table in different sizes and colors, those are variants for this wooden table. Variants might include "Wooden Table Black Large", "Wooden Table Black Small", "Wooden Table White Small", and so on.

Using variants saves you a lot of time as:

- creating variants using Katana's Variants Configuration is much easier and faster than creating a separate product or material cards for each variant;

- you can create and change Product recipes and Production operations centrally for all variants of a product. At the same time, you can also create variant-specific recipes from the variants set up on the parent product card.

Example: You manufacture a leather wallet that comes in five colors and three different textures. This means you have 15 variants of this product in total. One of the materials you use for manufacturing all these variants is a 0.4mm thread (i.e. it's included in the product recipe). Some other materials vary for those variants (e.g. color and type of leather). You wish to change the thread to a new 0.2mm thread. If you have created 15 separate products, you need to manually change the product recipe for each product. However, if you have used variants, you only need to change the product recipe for the parent product, and the recipes for all the product variants will be changed automatically.