Adding products and services

Adding products and services (i.e. creating rate cards) to the database is necessary for compiling quotes, orders, sales invoices, purchase orders, and bills – in essence, to sell or buy products and services. So, before you start compiling any documents, get your product list sorted. 

To get to the product list go to Settings > Sales and Finance > Products and services.
 
There are two ways to add new products/services to the database – either manually or via import. If you’re interested in how to import a list of products and services, you can find the detailed article here. In this article, we'll take a look at how to add products/services one by one.

1. Defining name, unit and quantity

To add a new product, click on the button +New in the product list. When adding a new product or service, fill in as much data as possible – this information will be automatically added to sales and purchase documents (and later on, of course, to reports) when selecting the product/service. 

Name the product or service and select a suitable unit – the quantity counted in hours, pieces, meters, etc. You can easily add more units to your Scoro site if the existing ones don’t cover your needs under Settings > Sales and finance > Units.

Add a default quantity that’s automatically used when selling or buying this product or service. Note! A secondary quantity can be used to multiply the quantity. For example, if you sell 5 hours of consultancy services for 3 separate sessions. To use this option, first activate the possibility to use secondary quantity under Settings > Sales and finance > General. 

2. Product and service types

You can define each product and service as an in-house service (delivered by someone in your own team) or an outsourced product/service (purchased from a supplier) that you then resell to your customer. This distinction allows you to easily differentiate income and cost related to your own team vs suppliers. It also helps to track project-related income and cost, compare quoted vs actual data, etc. in the project detailed view.

In addition, you can pick a default doer/supplier for each product or service. This way, when compiling an invoice, the correct type and default provider are already linked to the service line on the document. You can, of course, assign or change the doer/supplier on the sales invoice if needed. When creating tasks from that quote, each task is automatically assigned to the user defined on the relevant service line.
For this option, first enable the setting Assign users on sales document lines under Settings > Sales and finance > General.

3. Different selling prices

Add a selling price to the product or service that’s used when compiling sales documents (quotes and invoices). Of course, you can modify the price of the product/service on the document, if needed.

To automate your workflow, you can create price lists and use custom rates for different customers. In that case, when you sell this product or service to a specific customer, their custom price list is taken into account instead of the default selling price of the product/service.

If you sell services based on the work-time put in, you can set up user-based prices. These prices are only used in the invoicing stage, not when quoting different services to a customer. If you wish to use these prices on quotes, it's best to add them to your database as services. Apply user-based prices for products or services if you need to add different prices according to different team members. For example, if you offer consultation services and have various hourly rates for consultants (e.g. an hour of a senior consultant's time costs more).

4. Default cost

Setting up costs allows you to get a better overview of the possible profit and helps to make better decisions on pricing your products/services.

In Scoro you can use two types of costs – one for reselling purchased products/services, the other for offering services provided by your team.

1. In addition to the default selling price, also set up a buying price for each product and service you purchase from a supplier or a third party.
2. When offering services provided by your team, add labor cost to your site instead under Settings > Work and projects > Labor cost. Labor cost is calculated automatically based on done activities and is taken into account, for example, when calculating project costs. The labor cost is visible in the activity log in the client and project view, but also in the work reports.

After defining costs in the system, it’s automatically added to the sales document when adding a product/service. As a result, the margin of the product/service is calculated by default, allowing you to see whether the deal is profitable or not even before making the sale.

PRO TIPS: 

• You can use brackets [ ] in the product name to include information visible to your team, but not to the customer on the PDF document.
• Plenty of more things that you can set up for an even more granular overview and reporting:
  Tax rates – if different products/services have different tax rates, the correct rate is automatically filled in when adding a product or service to a sales document.
  Product description – add notes, product specifications, and other information automatically with the product to the sales document. You can use a secondary description to include notes for inhouse use.
  Accounting objects – Accounting objects give you a real-time overview of income and cost based on products, projects or departments. They can be used to measure any income or cost item you wish to get detailed financial reporting on. For example, accounting objects could be Transportation, Rent, Payroll, Export, etc.

5. Quick-add for products and services

If you wish to add new products that are not yet in the database while creating a quote (or other sales documents), activate the option Ability to add new products/services when creating sales documents under Settings > Sales and finance > General. Products added this way are saved to the product database when saving the sales document. A better way to save a new product from a sales document is to click on the plus sign on the product line and fill in the product card with all the necessary details. That way, all the information on the product is in your database to use in the future but also allows to get detailed reporting on everything offered and sold. 

6. Product or service groups

Product groups allow reporting based on product groups and makes creating quotes, invoices and orders easier, segmenting the list and dividing it into smaller parts. It’s especially helpful if you have many products and services in your database.

If you wish to divide the products/services in your database into groups, start by adding product groups.

Open the tab called Product groups, where you can modify existing groups and create new ones.

Click + New group in the Product groups list view to create a group. Add a name to the group and also decide if it is the main group or belongs to another group. If so, start by adding the main groups first and then create smaller groups to link to the main groups.

To add products and services to groups, just open the product list, select the relevant products and from the additional menu bar select the group you wish to add them to. Just click on the name of the product group to select the products under it, so you can make changes to all of them at once.

To change the name of a product group or modify it, just hover over the name of the group and click on the pencil icon.