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What is a product?
What is a product?

Learn what defines a product in Katana and how it integrates with inventory and production workflows.

Dayvid Lorbiecke avatar
Written by Dayvid Lorbiecke
Updated this week

In Katana, a product is an inventory item that is manufactured or sold. It includes key details like SKU, pricing, and inventory levels, which help in managing stock and production processes efficiently. Products can be categorized for better organization and tracking, facilitating accurate inventory control and streamlined operations.

Understanding products

Products can be produced in your workshop, a contractor's workshop, or purchased directly from suppliers for resale. Creating a product enables you to sell it with sales orders (SOs), make it with manufacturing orders (MOs), buy it with both outsourced and regular purchase orders (POs), add it to the product recipe of another product (subassembly), and keep track of its inventory level.

One product can have multiple variants (e.g., color, size). If you haven't enabled multiple variants for a product, it's considered to have a single variant.

The product card also includes a variant code. If a product has multiple variants, each variant has a unique code.

Product examples: Table, Chair

Notice that attributes like size and color are not used in the product name. We recommend handling those attributes through our variants feature.

Subassemblies

In Katana, subassemblies are products, not materials. Each product can be a subassembly and also sold to customers simultaneously. There is no difference between products and subassemblies in Katana. Both are included in the product list and have exactly the same characteristics (including a product recipe and production operations).

Products for resale

For each product, you can choose whether you make it, buy it, or outsource it. If you enable the Buy option on the product card, you can start adding those products directly to POs to purchase them from suppliers.

Contract manufactured products

If you purchase the manufacturing of the products from a contractor but need to track ingredients, enable both Buy and Make. Then you can add the product to the Outsourced purchase order and track the required ingredients.

Kit/bundle

Kit/bundle to simplify the creation, sale, and delivery of complex product combinations.


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