3. Your parts
The item master is the spine of everything. Enter it with care, and enter it once.
What is a part
Anything with a number: things you buy, things you make, things you sell, and consumables like paint and filament. If it appears on a bill of materials, a purchase order or a work order, it is a part. The part type says which:
raw_material— bought, consumed by the metre or kilo (tube, filament, paint)purchased— bought, fitted as supplied (a bearing, a derailleur)sub_assembly— made here, goes into something else (a wheel, a frame)finished_good— made here, sold (a bike)
The type changes which cards the part page shows and which lists offer the part, nothing more; it is not a straitjacket.
Versions
A new version of a part is a new part, sharing the category and stock number and differing in the last segment. This is the single most important rule in the system: because a version is its own row, a bill of materials or a movement that pointed at 902-000123-00 still means exactly that after -01 exists. Never repurpose a number.
The fields that do work
Most fields are descriptive. Four are not:
- Stocked — on for nearly everything. Off makes the part a phantom: built inside a work order and consumed by the next step without sitting on a shelf. Leave it on unless you know why.
- Minimum stock — the reorder point. At or below it (counting what is on order) the part appears on replenishment and raises a task.
0or blank means the system never mentions it — fine for things you buy ad hoc, wrong for anything you depend on. - Maximum stock — where replenishment tops up to, when set.
- Standard cost — the planning figure in company currency, used to cost a bill of materials. It is not what you last paid; that will be visible from purchase history. Enter a sensible number and revisit it quarterly.
Everything a part is — fields, images — copies with Duplicate; nothing that happened to it does. That is the quick way to enter a family of similar parts.
Getting hundreds in
Export the parts list for a file with the right headers, fill it in a spreadsheet, and import it. The whole file is one transaction: a bad row rejects the lot with the row number named, so fix and retry until it loads. Import is create-only; afterwards, edit on the page. Images cannot be imported — add them on the part page, phone camera included.
Descriptions are Markdown
Tables work. A technical specification as a Markdown table in the description renders properly on the part page and is exactly the kind of thing that saves a trip to the datasheet:
| Spec | Value |
|---|---|
| Supply | 12–24 V DC |
| Peak current | 8 A |
Next: stock.