Building your catalogue

Everything at the checkout comes from the catalogue, so it is worth getting right early. Open Products from the home screen.

Start with categories

Categories are what the Visual checkout layout shows as its top-level buttons, so they are not just filing — they are the shape of your till.

Categories nest, so you can have Drinks → Cold drinks → Cans if you need that depth. Most shops are better off with one level and around six to twelve categories, because that is what fits on screen without scrolling.

Adding a product

Click Add and fill in the fields that matter to you. Only the name and price are genuinely required.

• Name — what the cashier sees and what prints on the receipt.
• Price — the selling price. Whether that includes tax depends on your tax setup in Settings.
• Category — where it appears in the Visual layout.
• Tax rate — picked from the VAT rates you defined in Settings.
• Cost — what you paid. This is what the stock valuation report uses, so fill it in if you want that report to mean anything.
• Image — shown on the product tile in the Visual layout. Optional, but a photo is much faster to hit than a word.

SKUs and barcodes

A product can carry more than one code. That matters more often than you would think: the same bottle of water might arrive with two different barcodes from two suppliers, and you want both to ring up the same item.

Add each code to the product. At the checkout, scanning any of them finds the product, and so does typing it into the search box.

If you sell something with no barcode at all, give it a short SKU you can type — BAG for a carrier bag, say.

Weighed items

Tick Weighed for anything sold by weight rather than by the piece. The price you enter is then read as a price per unit of weight.

Weighed products are normally rung up by scanning the label your shop scale prints, rather than by typing a quantity. That has its own setup, covered in Selling items by weight.

Duplicating instead of retyping

If you are adding a run of similar products — the same drink in six flavours — add the first one properly, then use Duplicate. It copies the category, tax rate, price and settings, and you change only the name and the barcode.

Editing and deleting

Editing a product changes it from that moment on. Sales you have already recorded keep the name and price they were rung up at, so correcting a typo will not rewrite last week’s receipts.

Deleting is for products that were entered by mistake. For something you simply no longer stock, it is usually better to leave it in place so its sales history stays readable.

Doing this in bulk

Typing in a few hundred products by hand is nobody’s idea of a good time. If you already have your list in a spreadsheet, use the Excel import instead — see Importing products from Excel.