Stocked Items
Your catalogue already holds a name, a price and a barcode. A stocked item holds more: the unit it is measured in, how big its packs are, how much of it you have, and what it actually cost you.
Marking an item stocked is what turns "we sell a moisturising mask" into "we have 480 g of it in the main store, it cost 2.40 a gram, and below 1,500 g we should buy more."
TIP
Only some of your catalogue needs this. A service can never be stocked — there is nothing to count. And a product you buy and use without counting can stay an ordinary catalogue row for ever. Switch stock tracking on for the things whose quantity you actually want to know.
Find them under Products & Services, filtered to Stocked — the stocked catalogue is the product listing with its stock filters on, not a screen of its own.
Where to Find It
Click an address to open that screen on your own clinic. The first click asks which clinic you are, then remembers it. Addresses holding a {id} need a specific record, so they are shown but not linked.
| Screen | Address |
|---|---|
| Products, with the stock filters | /products |
| Below reorder level | /inventory/low-stock |
| Inventory settings | /inventory-settings |
| Units | /inventory/unit-templates |
| Categories | /inventory/categories |
| One item | /products/{id} |
The Setup Screens Live Together
Stores, units and categories are set up once when you start and hardly touched again, so they are not three rows in the inventory menu any more. Products and services → Inventory settings is one board with three tiles — Stores, Units, Categories — each saying how many you have, and each opening the screen it names. The same board is a tab on the settings strip, beside appointment and invoice settings.
Nothing moved inside those screens; only the door to them did.
First: How You Measure
An item can say what it is counted in. That is a unit template: a base unit, and the larger units that convert onto it. It is optional — an item saved without one is simply counted in plain units, and you can give it a template later.
Products and services → Inventory settings → Units. Four are there when Inventory is switched on:
| Template | Base unit | Also entered in |
|---|---|---|
| قطعة | piece | — |
| جم/كجم | gram | kilogram (1,000 g) |
| مل/لتر | millilitre | litre (1,000 ml) |
| قطعة/علبة/كرتونة | piece | box (12), carton (144) |
They are yours to change. Adding one asks for a base unit, its short name, and any number of conversions.
TIP
Each conversion reads back as a sentence — "1 كيلوجرام = 1000 جرام" — as you type it. That is on purpose: a factor typed as 100 instead of 1,000 is invisible in a number box and obvious in a sentence.
A Factor You Have Used Cannot Change
Once anything has been recorded in a unit, its factor is fixed. Changing 1,000 to 1,200 would not correct anything — it would quietly restate every quantity ever entered in kilograms, including last month's.
So the system refuses, tells you how many movements depend on it, and asks you to add a new unit or a new template instead. What you can still change: the names, the short names, the template's own name, and whether it is active. A rename restates nothing.
Switching a template off hides it from the pickers. Every item already using it keeps working.
Marking an Item Stocked
Open the item from Products and Services, press Edit, and find the Stock section.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Track stock | Turns everything below on. Not offered for a service |
| Unit template | How this item is measured. Optional — an item left without one is counted in plain units, and a template can be chosen later |
| Category | What kind of thing it is, and which expense account its use is booked to |
| Reorder level | In base units. Below this, the item appears in the low-stock list. Leave empty to never be warned |
| Usual store | Where it is normally received and issued. A suggestion on the forms, never a restriction |
Save, and the item shows a balance of 0 in every store. It stays at zero until stock actually moves — receiving, issuing and counting come with the rest of Inventory.
The Unit Cannot Change Once Anything Has Moved
Same reasoning as the factors: a balance of 480 means nothing if the unit it was counted in changes underneath it. Once the item has one movement, its unit and the Track stock switch are locked, and the screen says how many movements are holding them.
Everything else stays editable for ever: packs, the reorder level, the category, the usual store, the supplier.
Pack Sizes
The template carries the units every item of a kind shares. A pack carries this item's packaging — the 500 g jar, the carton of twelve, each with the barcode its manufacturer printed.
Packs are added on the item's own page, under Stock:
| You type | The system stores |
|---|---|
| برطمان = 500 جرام | 500 g |
| كرتونة = 12 برطمان | 6,000 g |
Every pack shows its own resolved size in base units, so you can check the arithmetic before it governs a purchase. A pack may also be marked the default when buying or the default when selling — one of each per item.
WARNING
A barcode identifies one thing. If you enter a barcode already used by another item or another pack, the system refuses and names what already holds it — so a scan always lands on exactly one shelf.
What You Have, and What Is Running Out
There is no separate stocked-items screen any more: it was the product catalogue with a second set of filters on it, so it is the product catalogue now. Products & Services carries a balance column for the branch you are working in, and two filters beside the type ones:
| Filter | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Stocked | Only what the clinic counts |
| Not stocked | Services and items nobody counts |
| Below reorder level | What must be bought |
| Zero balance | What has run out |
| Category | Everything filed under one category, by either its accounting category or any it is filed under |
The balance column and both filters appear only for a clinic with Inventory on, and only for a user allowed to see stock. Everyone else sees the catalogue exactly as before.
Below reorder level is the buying list: the balance, the level, and how much you are short by, so nobody has to subtract.
TIP
The reorder level is compared against the whole branch, not one store. A treatment-room cupboard running low is a transfer between stores, not a purchase.
The Two Cost Figures
A stocked item carries two, and they are not the same thing:
| Figure | Where it comes from | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Cost price | You type it | What you say the item costs. Used exactly as it always was |
| Average cost | The system works it out from what you actually paid | What the stock you are holding really cost |
Average cost cannot be typed into. It reads 0 with a note until your first receipt sets it. That is the point of it: it is evidence, not an opinion.
Both are hidden from anyone without the See what things cost permission — a receptionist sees the item and its selling price, and nothing about your margins.
Categories
Products and services → Inventory settings → Categories — طبي، تجميلي، بوفيه، نظافة, whatever your clinic actually sorts by. A category can sit inside another.
Each one names the expense account that consumption of its items will be booked to, which is what makes the category worth having rather than just a filter. If that account is later switched off, the category is flagged here rather than silently pointing at nothing.
A category holding items cannot be deleted — move them first.
Filing an Item Under Several Categories, Without Leaving the Form
The categories field on the product form is a tag box: type a name and press Enter, and it becomes a chip you can remove. It suggests every category you already have as you type; pick one, or write a name nothing matches and the save files it as a new category.
An item may sit in several categories, and the first one is special. That first chip is the accounting category — the one whose expense account consumption of the item is booked to — because a journal entry cannot name two accounts. The rest are for finding and filtering, and the category filter on the listing matches any of them.
Removing a chip and saving unfiles the item from that category. Nothing else about the category changes.
A name is matched ignoring case and surrounding spaces, and in either language — so "بوفيه" typed with a trailing space is the category you already have, not a second one beside it. Creating from the form needs the manage items, units and categories permission; without it you may pick from the list, and a name that matches nothing is refused rather than quietly dropped.
The full category record — its parent, its Arabic name, its expense account — is still edited on the categories screen. The form creates the name; the screen is where you say what it books to.
Loading Many Items at Once
The ordinary product import takes the stock columns too: unit template, category and reorder level, by name rather than by number. A row whose template is blank or unrecognised loads as an ordinary, untracked catalogue item.
Re-running an import never changes the unit of an item you already have — that would restate its history, so it is a decision made on the item itself.
Who Can See It
| Permission | Lets somebody |
|---|---|
| See stocked items | Open the lists and read balances |
| Manage items, units and categories | Mark items stocked, add packs, units and categories |
| See what things cost | See cost price and average cost anywhere they appear |
Working Without Internet
These screens are setup work, done once at a desk, so they need the connection. The reading side travels: a device that cached the catalogue for the clinic day still knows what a برطمان is, so a sale offline knows what it is selling.