Managing products and services

In Odoo, the word product covers a physical good just as much as a service. The product sits at the centre of most processes: it is sold, purchased, stored, manufactured and invoiced. The quality of the catalogue therefore has a direct bearing on how effective the sales, purchasing and logistics teams can be.

Product types

The Product Type field offers three values:

Type	Use
Goods	A physical product that you supply: raw material, component, merchandise, finished product.
Service	An intangible service: consulting, maintenance, training, labour.
Combo	A set offered for sale from which the customer makes one choice per category.

For products of type Goods, the Track Inventory checkbox, in the General Information tab and below the product type, distinguishes products whose stock is tracked from those that are not.

Creating a product

The catalogue can be reached from several apps: Sales › Products › Products, Purchase › Products › Products, Inventory › Products › Products or Manufacturing › Products › Products. It is the same catalogue: the path taken only changes the filters offered by default.

1. Open the product list and click New.
2. Fill in the product name.
3. Below the name, tick the Sales and Purchase boxes, which determine where the product will appear. They sit above the tabs, not inside one of them.
4. In the General Information tab, complete: - Product Type; - Sales Price and Cost, each followed by the taxes that apply to it; - the unit, entered after the price following the word per, it only appears when the units of measure option is enabled; - Category; - Reference and Barcode.
5. Complete the Sales, Purchase and Inventory tabs as needed.
6. Save.

Sales tab

• Quotation Description: text carried over onto customer quotations and invoices.
• Packagings and up-selling or cross-selling products.
• Online sales options, if the website is installed.

Purchase tab

This tab holds the Purchase Description (text carried over onto requests for quotation) the bill control policy, and above all the list of vendors referenced for this product.

Vendor lines

Each line describes a purchasing condition: a vendor, a price, and the context in which that price applies. A single product often carries several: several vendors, or the same vendor with quantity breaks.

Field	Role
Vendor	The party the product is bought from.
Vendor Product Name Vendor Product Code	The product's name and reference on their side. Carried over onto the request for quotation in place of yours, which saves the vendor from having to translate them. Left empty, your own labels are used.
Quantity	The quantity from which the price on the line applies. It is a threshold, not an order quantity.
Unit	The unit in which the quantity and the price are expressed. It may differ from the product's own: buying by the kilo an item stocked by the unit.
Unit Price and Discount (%)	The negotiated price, and the discount if any. It is the price after discount that is used for comparison.
Start Date End Date	The validity period of the price. Outside that period, the line is ignored.
Lead Time	Number of days between confirmation of the order and receipt. Feeds the computation of replenishment dates.
Product Variant	Restricts the line to one specific variation. Left empty, it applies to all variants.

How Odoo picks the line

When creating a request for quotation or a replenishment, Odoo does not simply take the first line. It first discards the ones that do not fit, then keeps the best of those remaining.

A line is discarded if:

• today's date falls outside its validity period;
• the quantity to be ordered is lower than its Quantity: converted into its unit where necessary;
• it targets a variant other than the one being purchased;
• a vendor has already been imposed and it is not theirs.

Among the remaining lines, Odoo keeps the one whose price after discount is the lowest, all prices brought back to the company currency. At equal prices, the Sequence decides: that is, the order of the lines on screen.

Lines created automatically

Some lines appear without having been entered. When a purchase order is confirmed, Odoo adds the vendor to the product record if they are not already there.

The behaviour is worth knowing, because it is narrower than it looks:

• it is triggered when the purchase order is confirmed, not on receipt nor on validation of the vendor bill;
• it only acts if the vendor is absent from the list. An existing line is never updated, even if its price is zero or out of date;
• it stops beyond ten vendors referenced for the same product;
• the line created receives the price of the order, converted where necessary into the product's unit, the discount applied, a Quantity of 1, a Lead Time of 0, and is placed last.

Inventory tab

The Logistics block gathers what follows the goods:

• the Responsible for replenishment;
• the Weight and the Volume, used by the shipping modules;
• the Customer Lead Time, which shifts the promised date;
• the HS Code and the Origin of Goods, for international trade.

Three text areas follow, carried over onto the logistics documents: the description for receipts, the one for delivery orders, and the one for internal transfers.

Prices tab

It gathers the pricelist rules that target this product, covered in section 9.6.1.

Accounting tab

It carries the Income Account and the Expense Account to be used for this product, in derogation from those of its category.

Writing a description with the assistant

The built-in artificial intelligence helps write the catalogue texts. There are two very different moves: one occasional, in the editor; the other systematic, through a dedicated field.

While typing

In any rich text field (the product Description, an email, a note) the assistant is called directly:

1. Place the cursor in the field.
2. Type / to open the insertion menu, then choose AI in the AI Tools category.
3. Describe the text you want.
4. Read the proposal, then insert it.

To rework an existing passage, select it: an assistance button appears in the toolbar and lets you rewrite it, shorten it or change its tone.

Through a dedicated field, for a whole catalogue

When the same kind of text has to be produced on hundreds of records, an AI field saves repeating the instruction. Its value is generated from the content of the record: name, category, attributes, characteristics.

1. Open a product record and click the Studio icon in the top bar (see chapitre 23).
2. From the left-hand panel, drag AI Field to the place you want.
3. Choose the Field Type: Text, Multiline Text or HTML.
4. Write the instruction describing the text expected, naming the fields to draw on.
5. Save and leave Studio.

The field then appears on every product record and offers to generate its value there.

Managing variants

Variants save you from creating as many records as there are variations of the same item: size, colour, material, finish. A single record carries the catalogue entry, the description and the photos; the variations are told apart by their attributes.

First enable the Variants option in Sales › Configuration › Settings. It brings up the Attributes & Variants tab on product records and the Sales › Configuration › Products › Attributes menu.

Choosing the creation mode

This is the decisive setting, and it is made on the attribute, not on the product. The Variant Creation field drives what Odoo actually builds:

Mode	Effect
Instantly	All possible combinations are created as soon as the attribute and its values are added to the product. Each variation becomes an item in its own right: stock, cost, barcode, reference.
Dynamically	The variation is only created at the moment it appears on an order. The catalogue stays light, and only the combinations actually sold exist in the database.
Never	No variant is created. The choice is recorded on the order line as an option, and may carry a price supplement, but it does not constitute a separate item: no stock of its own, no reference of its own.

The choice follows from the number of combinations and the need to track them. Three sizes and four colours make twelve items in Instantly mode; six attributes with five values each make more than fifteen thousand, and Dynamically mode becomes unavoidable. Conversely, an engraving or gift wrapping justifies no separate item at all: that is Never mode.

The Display Type field (Radio, Pills, Select, Color, Multi-checkbox, Image) determines how the choice is presented to the customer in the configurator and in the online shop. It has no effect on the variants generated, with one exception: choosing Multi-checkbox automatically switches creation to Never, since several boxes ticked at once cannot designate a single variation.

Applying attributes to a product

1. Open the product and select the Attributes & Variants tab.
2. Add a line and choose an Attribute.
3. Select the Values kept for this product: an attribute may offer eight colours while a given product only comes in three.
4. Save. Odoo generates the combinations according to the mode set on the attribute.

Adjusting prices and references

The Variants smart button gives access to the list of variations. Each one carries its own internal reference, its barcode and its stock.

The price supplement, on the other hand, is entered in the Attributes & Variants tab of the product, next to each value: the Extra Price field is added to the sales price on the record. The same attribute can therefore be charged differently from one product to another.

Organising the catalogue

Categories

Categories structure the catalogue and carry decisive settings: stock valuation method, sales, purchase and stock accounts.

1. Open Inventory › Configuration › Products › Categories.
2. Create a hierarchy consistent with your business: for example raw materials, components, finished products, consumables, services.
3. Assign each product to its category.

Tags

Tags complement categories with a cross-cutting classification: a product belongs to a single category but can carry several tags: current promotion, end of line, sensitive product, origin. They serve as filter and grouping criteria in every report.

Pricing

Pricelists

1. Check that the Pricelists option is enabled in Sales › Configuration › Settings.
2. Open Sales › Products › Pricelists.
3. Create one list per pricing segment: list price, reseller, key account, export.
4. Fill in the Currency of the list. It may differ from the company's: that is how you sell in a foreign currency.
5. In the rules tab, define for each line: - the scope: one product, one category, or the whole catalogue; - the calculation mode: percentage discount off the sales price, fixed price, or a formula based on the cost; - the minimum quantity that triggers the rule; - the validity period.
6. Assign the pricelist to the customers concerned, in the Sales tab of their contact record.

Quantity discounts

To encourage volume, create several rules on the same product with increasing minimum quantities. Odoo automatically applies the rule matching the quantity entered on the quotation line.

Chaining pricelists

A rule does not necessarily start from the catalogue sales price. The Based price field offers three starting points: the Sales Price on the record, the Cost, or an Other Pricelist. This third choice lets you build a pricing tree instead of duplicating the same amounts across several lists.

For the Reseller list applying a 20% discount off the List price list:

1. Create the Reseller list and add a rule to it.
2. In Apply To, choose Product and leave the product field empty: the rule then applies to the whole catalogue.
3. Choose the Price Type Discount, enter 20, then designate List price in the pricelist field that follows.

Setting an exception

The cascade sets the framework; exceptions are laid on top of it. The Apply To field delimits the scope of a rule, from the widest to the narrowest:

• Product with the product field left empty: the general rule of the list;
• Category: one family of the catalogue;
• Product with an item designated: that item and all its variations;
• the Variant field, which only appears if the item designated has at least two variations: a single one of them.

Within a given list, the most specific rule wins. A list can therefore carry a 20% discount across the board, a 5% discount on a sensitive category, and a Fixed Price on one particular variant: it is this last one that will apply to it.

Tracking costs

The Cost field on the product record carries the unit cost of the product. It serves two purposes: computing the margin on sales, and valuing stock.

Valuing stock means translating the quantities held into a financial value: a hundred pieces in the warehouse at fourteen euros each represent one thousand four hundred euros of assets on the balance sheet. That value appears in the company accounts, and Odoo keeps it up to date from the unit cost. Hence what is at stake: the way that cost is established determines what the stock is worth.

It is not set on the product but on its category, through the Costing Method field:

Method	How the cost behaves
Standard Price	A fixed value, entered manually and revised periodically.
Average Cost (AVCO)	Recomputed automatically on every receipt, weighted by quantities.
First In First Out (FIFO)	Each layer of stock keeps the cost at which it came in.

Vendor price and cost: two fields not to be confused

The product record carries two purchase amounts, fed by mechanisms that have nothing to do with each other.

Amount	What makes it move
Vendor price (Purchase tab)	The price negotiated with a given vendor. It is never computed: it is entered, or created once when an order is confirmed. The product category has no effect on it.
Cost (General Information tab)	The unit cost of the product in stock. It is this one that the method defined on the category drives: never recomputed under standard price, recomputed on every receipt under average cost and under first in first out.

Special products

Services billed on time spent

1. Create a product of type Service.
2. In the Sales tab, choose the appropriate invoicing policy: fixed price, on delivered quantities, or on timesheets.
3. Link the product to a project if time is to be tracked in the Project app (see chapitre 18).

Packagings

A product can be handled by full packaging rather than by the unit: a box of twelve, a pallet of forty-eight boxes. Entry becomes faster both on receipt and on shipping, and the documents carry the quantity as the customer or the vendor understands it.

A packaging is a unit of measure: the box of twelve is not an object separate from the unit, it is another way of counting the same thing. Units therefore nest inside one another, each defined in relation to another.

1. Enable Units of Measure & Packagings in Inventory › Configuration › Settings.
2. Open Sales › Configuration › Products › Units & Packagings.
3. Create the Box unit and fill in the Quantity line: 12, then Units in the reference unit field that follows.
4. For a second level, create Pallet whose Quantity is 48 in Box. Odoo works out the equivalent in units on its own.
5. On the product record, add these units to the Packagings field.

The packagings declared this way are offered when entering quotation lines, purchase order lines and stock movements. The quantity is still converted into the reference unit for stock and valuation: ordering two pallets does reserve one thousand one hundred and fifty-two pieces.

Importing a catalogue

Loading the catalogue follows the general procedure described in chapitre 22: export a few representative products to obtain the template, complete it, then import it back, testing first.

The order specific to the catalogue is as follows:

1. The product categories, on which valuation and accounts depend.
2. The units of measure and packagings, if the catalogue uses them.
3. The vendors, before the prices that name them.
4. The products themselves.
5. The vendor prices and the pricelists, which reference the products.

Good practice