Your product catalog is organized in layers, each serving a specific purpose:
- Families define shared characteristics — the “Clothing” family might have Size and Color attributes.
- Categories organize products for browsing, filtering, and reporting — completely independent of families.
- Attributes describe product characteristics — text, numbers, selections, booleans, dates.
- Products are the actual items in your catalog. They can be simple or configurable.
- Variants are the specific sellable, stockable SKUs. A “T-Shirt” product with 4 sizes and 3 colors produces 12 variants.
- Price lists let you have different prices for different markets, customer segments, or time periods.
- Currencies handle multi-currency operations with exchange rates.
Product Types
Every product has a type that determines how it behaves:
| Type | What it is | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Simple | A single SKU with no variants. | Products that do not come in different sizes, colors, or configurations. A hammer, a specific cable model, a cleaning product. |
| Configurable | Has variants automatically generated from the family’s variant attributes. | Products that come in multiple variations. A shirt in 4 sizes and 3 colors = 12 variants, each with its own SKU and stock level. |
| Bundle | A package of other products sold together as a set. | Gift sets, starter kits, or any pre-assembled combination of products. |
| Virtual | A non-physical item — a service, subscription, warranty, or digital product. | Anything that is not a physical good you store in a warehouse. |
The product type is set at creation and determines how the product interacts with inventory, variants, and pricing:
- A virtual product is never kept in stock. It is not offered on a stock movement, a transfer, a count, an adjustment, a stock level, a bill of materials or a spare part, and Beelocity refuses it there.
- A configurable product is stocked through its variants. Pick the product, then its variant; on a line that names a product alone, it is not offered.
- A configurable product needs a family, because its variants are made from the family’s attributes. Saving one without a family is stopped under the Product family field.
- A configurable product stays configurable while it has variants. Remove its variants before changing its type.
How Products Relate to Other Features
| Feature | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Families | Every product belongs to exactly one family, which defines its attributes. |
| Categories | A product can belong to multiple categories for flexible classification. |
| Warehouses | Products (and their variants) are assigned to warehouse locations for storage. |
| Partners | Suppliers sell you products; clients buy them from you. |
| Price lists | Override the product’s base price for specific markets or time periods. |
| Units of measure | Define how the product is counted, weighed, and converted between different contexts. |
Navigation
Products is the first entry of the Inventory panel in the sidebar. It takes you to the main product list.
The lists that describe products are tabs of Inventory › Setup: Product Categories, Product Families, Product Attributes and Tax Classes. The price lists are a tab of Sales › Setup — see Pricing and Price Lists — and the currencies a tab of Treasury › Setup — see Currencies.