Master data

Items, customers, suppliers and workers — attribute groups, effective dating, and the two traps of organizational scope.

Master data is the records everything else points at: items, customers, suppliers, workers, accounts, patients, students. It sits under its own layer, with attribute groups that let a record carry far more than one form could sensibly show.

Attribute groups

An item is not one flat row. It has purchasing attributes, sales attributes, planning attributes, costing attributes, quality attributes — each a group, each edited on the item rather than on a screen of its own. The cross-item list of one group still exists by address and from a saved view, which is how you compare a planning parameter across two hundred items.

An item’s units of measure

An item is stocked in one unit and may be bought, sold, issued or reported in as many others as it needs. Open the item and use the Units of measure grid: add a row per unit, say what one of it is worth in the stocking unit (a case of 12 each is 12, a pallet of 1,440 each is 1440), and tick where it is offered — buying, selling, issuing to production, reporting. Each pack size can carry its own barcode, weight, volume, minimum order and order multiple.

• Exactly one unit is the stocking unit, and it is worth 1. Ticking a second is refused with the name of the one already set; untick that first.
• A unit is listed once per item. To change what a case holds, edit its row rather than adding another.
• The factors are what the unit converter uses to turn one unit into another for this item, and what the load builder uses to weigh and size a shipment of it.
• The same units appear on Logistics › Item Units, the cross-item list, for comparing pack sizes across the catalogue.

Effective dating

Master data that changes over time is versioned rather than overwritten. A price, a rate or a grade has a window, and asking for it as at a date returns what was in force on that date. See What may be changed for how an edit chooses between correcting the version in force and opening a successor.