Your catalogue and aliases
Products, aliases, units, stock, order limits, and the one-word-one-product rule that keeps matching honest.
The catalogue is the vocabulary the whole system reasons in. A product that is not in it cannot be ordered, and a word that is not on it cannot be understood.
What a product holds
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | What the customer sees on the order card and the invoice. |
| Aliases | Other words that mean this product. Any number. |
| Price | Per unit. Snapshotted onto every order line at the moment it is added. |
| Unit | kg, bag, tin, pkt — whatever you actually sell in. |
| Stock quantity | Decremented on confirm, restored on cancel or expiry. |
| Low-stock threshold | At or below this counts as low. Zero is legal and means "only when actually out". |
| Minimum order quantity | Optional floor per order line. |
| Maximum order quantity | Optional ceiling per order line. |
| Active | Inactive products cannot be ordered and do not appear in the catalogue PDF. |
There is no delete, only deactivate. A deleted product would take its history with it, and that history is on old orders and old invoices.
Aliases, and the one-word-one-product rule
An alias is another word customers use. maida, atta, flour and maavu
might all point at one line.
A name or alias can only ever answer to one product. If you try to add a word another product already uses, it is refused and you are told which product owns it.
Search in the catalogue matches names and aliases, because the question an owner actually has is "which product owns this word?"
Units are read from the product, never assumed
A shortfall message about a tinned product says 1tin, not 1kg. Every
customer-facing quantity reads the unit off the product it belongs to. This
sounds obvious and was, for a while, not true.
Stock
Stock moves at exactly two moments:
- Down when a customer confirms an order (or when a line is added to an order that has already passed confirm — each such addition is its own small stock commitment).
- Up when an order is cancelled or expires unpaid.
It does not move when a draft is built, when an invoice is issued or when a delivery completes. If your counts drift, those are the only two events worth auditing.
Low stock
One rule, read in three places — the Today screen, the catalogue list, and your daily summary: a product is low when it is active and its stock is at or below its threshold.
At the threshold counts. A threshold of zero is legal and means "tell me only when it is actually out".
Low stock does not raise an alert. It is a persistent condition, so a daily alert would be inbox noise and "resolving" one would be a lie — the shelf is still empty.
Order limits
Minimum and maximum order quantity are per product, per order line. They exist for the real cases: a wholesale item you will not break a case for, and a promotional item you do not want one customer clearing out.
A line outside the bounds is rejected before confirm, with the bound named.
Getting a catalogue in
For anything past about twenty products, do not type them in. Send us the price list in whatever form it exists and we will load it. Once loaded, prices and stock are yours to edit from the dashboard.
Customers can ask for the catalogue at any time and receive it as a PDF.
Words that matched nothing
Every time a customer uses an order-shaped word that matches no product and no alias, it is recorded — on every plan, from day one. On Pro and Business you can review that list, ranked by how often each word came up, and either teach it as an alias or dismiss it.
Out-of-stock and over-limit lines are not recorded, because those products matched perfectly well. See catalogue intelligence.