Creating a product involves defining its key attributes such as SKU, price, and inventory details. This process helps in organizing your product catalog, managing stock levels, and ensuring accurate inventory tracking.

There are four ways to create a product in Katana.

Each product card contains 4 tabs where you can add general details, a product recipe / BOM, production operations, and supply details.

Product name - The unique name of a product. If a product has multiple variants, we recommend you avoid including product attributes in the product name (color, size etc). Use our variants feature for creating these kinds of variations.

- Recommended: Chair "Chair"

- Not recommended: White chair "Chair with black seat cover"

Category - Allows you to group your products into distinct categories. Useful for better organization and analysis of similar products inside Katana. Read more about categories, creating categories, editing and deleting categories.

- Example: Tables, Chairs

Unit of measure - The unit you're using to measure the quantity of your product (e.g. pcs, kg, m). You can manage the list of units (add, edit and delete) in the Settings screen.

Product source - Choose whether you make the product in your workshop, buy it from suppliers for resale, outsource the manufacturing, or all three. By selecting I make this product, you can create product recipes and production operations for the product and add them to MOs. Selecting I buy this product enables adding it to POs, and choosing both allow you to track ingredients on outsourced purchase orders.

Product tracking - Choose whether you want to track items (all variants) using batch /lot information, serial numbers, or no tracking at all. Tracking is a Standard or higher plan feature.

Custom field collection - Add custom fields to the product card's table by choosing a custom field collection. Custom fields are unavailable on the Starter plan.

Variant code / SKU - The unique identifier for a product variant. If multiple variants aren't enabled, the product is considered to have a single variant. You can change it to create your own product identification system. Read more about Variant codes

Default sales price - The sales price of your product for customers. Different sales prices can also be assigned to each product variant. This is the default price included in SOs and used in the "Product" list to calculate profitability.

Bin - The default storage bin for the product in your warehouse. It is shown on put-away and packing list PDF printouts. This is an Standard or higher plan feature. Read more about Storage bins.

Variants - Groups of the same product, categorized by specific attributes. Attributes could be color and size, for example. Using the variants feature (compared to creating separate product items for each variant) can save you a lot of time, as they enable changing product recipes and production operations globally for all variants of the product. Activating the variants for a product opens a Variants configuration, where you can enter Variant options (e.g. color, size) and Option values (e.g. red and blue for "Color" option). Variant options will appear as new columns in the table at the bottom of the product card and Option values can be chosen from the drop-down menu in the text fields of those columns. Those columns and values also appear in the Product recipe. If you didn't enable multiple variants for a product, the product is considered to have a single variant.

A Product recipe (sometimes called bill-of-materials or BOM) is a list of the ingredients and quantities you use to create your product in-house or at contractors. Recipes can be created for products and their variations.

Katana supports subassemblies, which means that you can add products to a recipe of another product. Read more about using subassemblies.

You can create different recipes for each product variant. Read more about creating variant-specific recipes.

Item - The raw material or subassembly used in creating a product. You can select existing materials and subassemblies or create new ones by inserting an ingredient name and selecting Create new "item name" from the drop-down menu. Then select whether you want to create a material or product (subassembly) and insert the basic information about the item. Read more about creating a material.

Quantity - The amount of a material or subassembly used in creating one unit of a product. The quantity is in the same Unit of measure that you have chosen for the associated material or subassembly.

Cost - The Average Cost of Item in Stock x Quantity. If In stock for an ingredient is zero, the default purchase price will be used for materials and manufacturing cost for subassemblies in cost calculations.

Production operations are the step-by-step operations needed to produce a product in-house.

If you need operations done in a particular order, you can use product operations routing, by turning the toggle on for Operations in sequence. Learn more about product operations routing.

Operation - The name of the operation you perform to produce your product. Examples: Cutting, Assembly, Quality control.

Resource - A workstation (e.g. cutting table, assembly machine) or a person (e.g. John), who is responsible for completing the Operation. Can be edited on each Manufacturing order if needed. Assigning Resources to Operations enables creating tasks lists for Resources. Read more about Managing tasks for Resources

Cost per hour - The hourly cost of performing the operation. This typically consists of the salary cost of the employee performing this operation but can also include the workstation's average hourly maintenance and electricity costs, for example. This cost is used in calculating the total manufacturing cost for your product and, consequently, affects the product profit and margins. What to include in this cost ultimately depends on your preferences and your manufacturing cost calculation policy.

Time - The duration of an operation step to produce one unit of a product. Useful for calculating the manufacturing cost of a product. As this is input to manufacturing cost calculations, only include the duration of actions that are related to additional cost. For example, you shouldn't include the expected time the raw material or subassembly is waiting in the queue, but you may include the setup time of the operation, if relevant.

Cost = Cost per hour * Duration. An automatically calculated field, which cannot be edited. This is the cost of completing an operation and is an input to the total manufacturing cost.

This tab allows you to add information regarding the supplier of this product, specific to this particular product (and variants).

Default supplier - The default supplier you purchase the product from. This supplier is chosen when using quick add to create a Purchase order for the product.

Variant - This column includes the names of the variants for this product

Supplier item code - Codes used to identify raw materials and purchasable products. Each variant can have multiple supplier item codes. Learn more about barcodes.

Default lead time - Lead times reflect the time it takes for an item to be delivered or produced. This time could vary based on supplier or production process.

MOQ - The supplier's specified minimum order quantity. This helps ensure that orders meet the minimum requirements. Learn more about lead time and MOQ.

Default purchase price - The purchase price of your product from suppliers or the fee paid for outsourced manufacturing. This is a default purchase price added to (outsourced) purchase orders but can be changed manually on each (O)PO. Different purchase prices can be assigned to each product variant.

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