Within the Item card of a product, you will see three choices under Product tracking: No tracking, Batch / lot numbers, and Serial numbers.
No tracking is used if item traceability is not required.
Batch / lot tracking allows you to assign batch numbers or lot numbers to purchased and manufactured items. This enables you to track batches for products and materials in your stock. You can also assign expiration dates to batches to give further control over the shelf life of your items.
Serial number tracking allows you to track products using a unique identifier. This allows you to track every item's history from the initial production stage to its sale. This is useful for warranty tracking, assistance with device support, refunds, and recalls.
Batch and Serial number tracking are set at an item level, which also affects the variants of the item. However, enabling or disabling batch or serial number tracking for one item will not affect other items.
Note: Both Batch and Serial number tracking are included in the Full Traceability Add-on (automatically available in Professional plans).
If you're enabling batch tracking for an item that already has stock, all existing items are assigned to a batch called unbatched. For historical items in stock, you can connect them with serial numbers by using stock adjustment or import.
If you're using batch instead of serial number tracking, you cannot switch from one to the other. Instead, you can either create a new item and start serial tracking from scratch, or disable batch tracking for the item by selecting No tracking and then enabling Serial numbers tracking.
NOTE: Turning off batch tracking for an item will also delete batch tracking information for all variants of that item. The same applies if you switch serial number tracking to No tracking.
If you enable batch tracking for an item and you've already created batch numbers in Katana, disabling the batch tracking functionality will delete the existing batch tracking information from Katana for that item. We recommend exporting historical batch tracking info before disabling by exporting the data to a CSV file.