How to Create Product Components
Create product components to easily build and modify your products.
In this article:
How to Create Product Components
Restricting Product Components to Style Options
What Are Product Components?
Components are product parts that are common to many different products, although they may vary in size and other specifications.
Example: A "Base 1 Door Cabinet" has 2 ends, 1 top, 1 shelf, 1 cabinet door, 2 hinges, 4 legs, and 1 handle. These can all be components, because most cabinet-type products will include these parts.
Think of components as "global" or "shared" product parts. For example, if you have 3 products and each product has a "top". If you add the "top" part to each product individually, then if you need to make changes to the "top", you would need to go into all 3 products and edit the parts individually.
Whereas, if you set the "top" up as a component and add the component to all 3 products, you would only need to edit the "top" component, and the change would automatically be applied to all 3 products.
Note: Be careful when creating a component, because it will automatically be added to any existing products that match the selected product type(s). If you're experimenting with a new component, it's best to set the product type to "None" and manually add the component to one or more existing products:
Read more about Products & Parts.
How to Create Product Components
To create product components, follow these steps:
Access your product components from the Catalogue tab in your user menu panel, click on Products and then Components from the tab at the top of your screen.
From the User Menu Panel, navigate to Catalogue > Products > Components:
Click Create:
- Choose a component Type from the drop-down. (Note: component types are the same as product part types.)
- Enter any other details (these will vary based on the component type).
- Enter the required quantity.
- Select which Product Types this component will apply to.
- Click Create again.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Once you've built your components, you can easily modify them in the future and these changes will apply to all the relevant products in your catalogue without having to individually change them all.
Restricting Product Components to Style Options
You can set up product components that only get added to quotes when specific style options are applied to the product.
For example, let's say you have a product that requires 20 minutes of the operation "Painting". You can create a labour component, apply it to the relevant product types, and the labour will be factored into the cost when any of the relevant products are added to a quote.
However, you may only need to paint these particular products when certain conditions are met, such as when a specific material is used.
To prevent this 20 minutes of labour being incorporated into the product's cost when it's not necessary, you can "restrict" the part to only apply if one of the style options "Category A Paint" or "Category B Paint" are selected.
To restrict a component to style options, simply create (or edit an existing) component and change Restrict to Style Options from All to Selected, then choose the relevant style options you want the part to be applied to.
When you add a product to a quote, by default this component will not be displayed or included in the calculations for the product, unless one of the style options has been applied.
Note: When viewing a product in your catalogue, the calculated values (cost/overhead/wastage etc.) will only include parts/components with Restrict to Style Options set to "All"
Additionally, if you don't want a part to be added to a quote in any circumstance, you can change "Restrict to Style Options" to "None". This can be useful for creating "Draft" parts.
Style option restrictions can also be applied directly to to Product Parts. Find out more