Product Types

Product Types group together your Products into meaningful categories. Every Product in Simple Accounting must be linked to a Product Type. Product Types set a number of very important defaults for every transaction which uses a Product in some way. This not only saves time during Product setup, but also performs the following important functions:

• It allows you to group sales in broad groups rather than strictly by a single Product ID.

• It determines whether the item is a product to be sold, or a service such as a special discount, rush charge, freight and so on.

• It links the sales and purchases of products to the General Ledger, by assigning revenue, expense, and inventory asset accounts to each product which shares a Product Type. This saves you the trouble of identifying the proper revenue and Cost Centers for each item sold. It also gives you the flexibility of assigning an unlimited number of different revenue and cost centers for sales.

• It can determine whether or not an assigned product will automatically post costs from a sales invoice to the A/P Bills Browse. This is useful in cases where you have labor or other charges which are billed to the customer but which are not expensed.

• Optional: The Product Type determines which data entry screen will appear for entering Product Specs and the layout of purchase orders and RFQs. In other words, you can have a completely different P.O. and Spec data entry screen for, say, labels as opposed to ad specs.

Example:  Your business may use these five different Product Types:

ADSPECS  Ad Specialties

ENVELOPES  Envelopes

MENUS   Restaurant Menus

SNAPOUTS  Snap-out Invoices

STKPAPER  Stock Paper

By assigning a Product Type to each Product ID you can produce Lookups and Reports that summarize sales in a very useful manner. You may have a hundred different promotional items in your inventory but only want sales information for advertising specialty items as a group. By assigning each “ad-spec” to Product Type ‘ADSPEC’, each sale of a promotional item will automatically:

• Update sales totals for promotional items as a group.

• Post income to the proper account in your General Ledger (if applicable).

• Assign each item sold as a sale of Product Type ‘AD_SPEC’ so that you can call up sales history reports for promotional items as a group.

You may not delete a Product Type to which Products have been assigned.