Material items are the bedrock of any ERP system. In other contexts they can be called "SKU's" (Stock Keeping Units), "part lists" or just "materials".
In Manu Online, material items are one of the five items types supported. The others are "work time" "machine time", "subcontract" and "other cost". Material items can be set for either "plan for purchase" or "plan for manufacturing". The latter is for products and subassemblies. It is possible to switch this planning setting later, but here we are looking at setting up a purchased item.
Unique item id's
Every item created in the system must have a unique item id.
The system will propose the next sequential number from system settings (and this can be changed for instance to follow on from your previous system).
We recommend that you use a 6 digit numeric code. However lots of people want to use alphanumeric numbers and this is ok as well so long as you appreciate it can be some effort to set your policies on this. Manu Online supports any character as part of an item id but we recommend against using special characters as they can be confusing and might not be supported in any future barcode labeling equipment or in integrations to other systems.
Do not use your suppliers' item ids as your own! You may want to change suppliers later, and Manu Online has a seperate place specifically for linking suppliers numbers to your own.
Item families and units of measure
Although these are not required for minimum working data, many Manu Online users will create Item families and units of measure lists in the System Settings. These values will populate the drop down lists on the item card after the item is created.
Create the item
Go to the Items menu and press New
This will open a popup. Select "Materials" from the drop down list of the template. The next sequential item id will be prefilled but you can overwite it with your own value. Press Create.
This will open the "item card" to enter details of the item.
There is no minimum data needed here. Of course it is strongly recommended to add the description of the item.
As an alternative to pressing the "New" button, it is also possible to go to any material item and use the Copy button. This will create a new item in a similar way but with all fields copied to the new one.
Further actions
Read more details on the item card
Create your first manufactured item
Import items from your accounts system such as Xero
Copy and paste items in the Start up wizard
Import items using Excel
Setting an initial inventory value by stock adjustment