Creating variants allows you to manage different versions of products or materials by defining attributes such as size, color, or configuration. This helps you to keep inventory organized and makes it easy to track variations of the same item. By setting up variants, businesses can ensure accurate stock management and simplify the process of handling diverse product lines, leading to more efficient operations and better data organization.
Creating variants
The first thing to do is to enable variants on the item.
Note: If the option to create/edit an item is not available, take a look at this article regarding user permissions.
Go to the Items screen and select a product or material.
From the product/material card, you can enable variants by checkmarking Yes, this product/material has multiple variants. This will open a Variant configuration window.
Create variant options and option values.
You can create a variant structure or copy an existing variant structure from another product or material.
To create a new variant structure, you'll need to add:
Variant options - Attributes (up to 10) of the product or material. E.g. color, size, type.
Option values - Values (up to 40) of a variant option. If you inserted "Color" as a variant option, values might be "Red" and "Blue".
Click Generate product (or material) variants.
(Optional) If you want to copy the variant structure from another product or material, click on Copy variant setup from... in the variant configuration window. Search for a product or material name to use as a template for the current item.
Katana will auto-generate items for all possible variant combinations.
For example:
- You defined "Color" as a variant option with values "Black" and "White".
- You defined "Size" as another variant option with values "50 ml" and "100 ml".
- Katana will generate 4 variant items: Black/50ml, Black/100ml, White/50ml, White/100ml.
Note: Variant items can only be auto-generated once for each product or material after completing the initial variant setup. You can later edit variant options and values, but those changes will not apply to the variant items list automatically.
Variant items can be seen at the bottom table of the product/material card. Variant options show as columns in the table, and option values can be chosen from the drop-down menu in the text fields of those columns.
Each row represents one product or material variant. You can delete items for variant combinations that you don't use. Click on the trash can icon at the end of a variant item line to delete.
Manually add variant items by clicking + Add new row below the table.
Add details to variant items
For each variant, you can fill in the variant code, sales price, and/or purchase price. Reorder points for variants can be defined directly from the Stock screen. All these fields are optional.
Edit the variant options and values by clicking Open configuration... for variants on the item card.
If you delete a variant value in the variant configuration, a blank field will be displayed for variant items that were previously using this variant value.
If you delete a variant option along with its values, the associated Variant option row will be removed from the variant items table.
Copying a product recipe with the variant structure
On the product recipe page for a product, you can copy a product recipe from another product. If the variant structure of products is different, Katana will ask whether you want to copy the other product's variant structure together with the product recipe. You can copy the variant structure from the other product to quickly match the current product's variant structure with the other product's variant structure.
Importing variants
You can import product and material variants using our templates. Read more about importing product variants and importing material variants.
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