Products & menus

The company owns one catalog. Each store puts its own menu on top of it. This page covers adding products, variants and barcodes, units and photos, bulk import, and how to decide what a particular till shows.

The one rule that explains everything else

Products belong to the company. What a till shows is the store's menu — the subset of company products that this shop actually sells.

That split exists because both mistakes are expensive. A chain with six branches should not re-type the same six hundred products six times, and a price change should not have to be made six times either. But a café inside the same company must not have All-Purpose Cleaner on its menu just because the grocery down the road stocks it.

This store / Company catalog

Open Catalog. Under the search box there are two buttons:

Put a product on this store's till

1. Open Catalog and press Company catalog.
2. Find the product — the Search box matches name, SKU, or barcode.
3. Press Add to menu on that row.
4. Press This store to confirm it now appears there.

Take something off a till

1. On This store, find the product.
2. Press Remove from menu.

Removing is a decision, not a gap: it sticks even if the store still has stock of that item on the shelf. The product itself is untouched and other stores keep selling it.

Create a product

1. Open Catalog and press Create product.
2. Fill in Name — it is the only required field. Everything else can wait.
3. Set Sell price ("What the customer pays (before discounts)") and, if you want margin figures, Cost.
4. Pick a Tax class. If the list is empty the form says "No store tax classes yet — add rates in Settings" — see Tax.
5. Press Create product.

The fields, in the order the form asks for them

Basics

Inventory

Physical and Medicine items get Reorder level ("Alert when on-hand falls to this quantity") and a Track inventory for this product tick. Services and subscriptions say plainly "Stock quantity is not required for this kind" and never decrement stock on sale.

Barcodes

Type or scan a code into Barcode, press Generate, or leave it blank with Auto-generate barcode on save ticked — the shop then gets an internal EAN-13 it can print a shelf label from.

Media

Upload from this device — a product photo used on catalog rows and restaurant menu cards. Images are uploaded, not pasted as a URL.

Flags

• Active — available for sale. Untick to take it off sale without deleting it.
• Age restricted — then Age minimum (required) and Age category (Alcohol, Tobacco, Vape, …).
• Returnable (refunds allowed) and Return window (days), which overrides the store default.

Variants and extra barcodes

A variant is a size or flavour of the same product — "Large", "500g", "Blue". Every product has one default variant; add more from the product's Variants & barcodes panel ("Extra sizes/flavors and alternate scan codes for this product").

1. Type a New variant name (e.g. "Large") and, if you want one, a Variant SKU.
2. Press Add variant. A barcode is minted for it automatically.
3. To add a second scan code for an existing variant — a multipack barcode, or a supplier's code alongside your own — pick Variant for barcode, type the code into Barcode (blank = auto), and press Add barcode.

Each barcode row shows the code and whether it is the primary one, with a Remove link.

Categories and departments

They are two different things and they are managed in two different places.

Aisles & departments

The page is titled Aisles & departments — "Organize products by aisle or department for catalog filtering."

1. Under Create department, enter a Name (e.g. "Produce") and a Short code (e.g. "PROD" — letters and numbers for reports and POS filters, not a long ID).
2. Tick Food department if it is food.
3. Press Create.
4. To file a product, use Assign product: search by name, SKU or barcode, pick a Department (or "— none —" to clear), and press Assign.

The department list shows Name, Code, Products and Food. There is also a Plan aisle layout panel and a Suggest aisle layout button that ask the AI assistant for a naming and layout suggestion — both need an AI key configured.

Bulk import and export

Catalog → Import CSV opens Bulk import — "Download template → fill in Excel → upload file. Dry-run first, then commit." Two methods sit behind tabs: Upload CSV and Scan items.

Upload a spreadsheet

1. Press Download template for headers only, or Download sample for a filled grocery example.
2. Fill the rows in Excel or Google Sheets. Only name is required; blank sku and barcode are auto-generated. category, department and tax_class must match names that already exist in the store.
3. Save as CSV UTF-8 and drop the file on the upload area ("Drop a .csv file here, or click to browse"). There is no row limit — a large file is read in the browser and sent to the server in batches of 500, with a progress bar showing rows done, created, updated and failed.
4. Choose what should happen to products that already exist: Create only (an existing SKU is an error — the safe default for a first import), Create and update (an existing SKU is updated, a new one is created), or Update only (an unknown SKU is an error).
5. Press Dry run. Nothing is written. The preview colours bad rows and prints the reason in the Status column, and for an update run it says per row whether it would create or update, and which fields change.
6. Fix anything red, re-upload, then press Commit import.
7. If a batch fails it is retried automatically and the rest of the file still goes through; failures are listed at the end with their row numbers, and you can download just the failed rows as a CSV to fix and re-upload.
8. You can press Stop, or close the page. Re-uploading the same file offers to resume: batches that already committed are skipped, so nothing is imported twice.

The columns are name, sku, barcode, product_type, sell_price, cost, category, unit, tax_class, track_inventory, reorder_level, department, supplier_name, description, image_url, age_restricted, is_active, notes. The page prints the same list with an example for each.

Only the first 100 rows are shown in the preview, but every row is sent on dry-run and on commit. Commit import stays disabled until a dry run has found at least one valid row.

Scan items instead of typing them

The Scan items tab is for a shop with a gun and no spreadsheet: "Scan each item with the gun, type a name and price, then build the import. Barcodes you already sell are shown and skipped, so scanning can never duplicate a product."

Export

Export CSV on the Catalog page downloads exactly what the current filters are showing (the button's tooltip tells you which: "Export products matching current filters" or "Export all products"). The import page has the same thing as Export catalog, which always exports everything.

Everyday jobs on a product row

Limits worth knowing

• Prices and tax classes are per product, not per store. A branch cannot charge a different price for the same product yet.
• There is no bulk "add these 200 products to this store's menu" action — listing is one row at a time.
• Categories cannot be created from any screen (see the warning above).
• Variant pricing is not separate from the parent product.