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• Supplier checkbox : unchecked, • Contact Name : Stephen Smith,
• Address Type : Default. Then add Customers in the Categories field. Save the form. To check your work you can go to the menu Sales
→ Configuration → Address Book → Partner Categories and click on each category in turn to see the companies in the category.
Note: Multiple Partner Categories If this partner was also a supplier then you would add Suppliers to the categories as well, but there is no need to
do so in this example. You can assign a partner to multiple categories at all levels of the hierarchy.
8.5.5 Creating products and their categories
Unlike partner categories and their assigned partners, product categories do have an effect on the products assigned to them – and a product may belong to only one category. Under the main menu link Warehouse or Sale, select
the menu Configuration → Products → Products Categories and click New to get an empty form for defining a product category.
Enter Radiators in the Name field. You will see that other fields, specifically those in the Accounting Properties section, have been automatically filled in with values of accounts and journals. These are the values that will affect
products – equivalent fields in a product will take on these values if they, too, are blank when their form is saved. Click Save.
Note: Properties fields Properties have a rather unusual behavior. They are defined by parameters in the menus in
Administration → Configuration → Parameters → Configuration Parameters, and they update fields only when a form is saved, and
only when the fields are empty at the time the form is saved. You can manually override any of these properties as you need.
Properties fields are used all over the Open ERP system and particularly extensively in a multi- company envi- ronment. There, property fields in a partner form can be populated with different values depending on the user’s
company. For example the payment conditions for a partner could differ depending on the company from which it is ad-
dressed.
Note: UOM UOM is an abbreviation for Unit of Measure. Open ERP manages multiple units of measure for each product:
you can buy in tons and sell in kgs, for example. The conversion between each category is made automatically so long as you have set up the conversion rate in the product form first.
Tip: Managing double units of measure The whole management of stock can be carried out with double units of measure UOM and UOS – for Unit of
Sale. For example an agro-food company can stock and sell ham by piece but buy and value it by weight. There is no direct relationship between these two units so a weighing operation has to be done.
This functionality is crucial in the agro-food industry, and can be equally important in fabrication, chemicals and many other industries.
Now create a new product through the Warehouse or Sale menu: 1. Go to Product → Products and click New.
2. Create a product – type Titanium Alloy Radiator in the Name field. 3. Click the Search icon to the right of the Category field to select the Radiators category.
4. The Product Type field should be assigned as Stockable Product. The fields Procurement Method, Supply method
, Default Unit Of Measure, and Purchase Unit Of Measure should also stay at their default values.
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5. Enter 57.50 into the Cost Price field and 132.50 into the Sale Price field.
Figure 8.11: Product Form 6. Click the Accounting tab, then click Save and observe that Accounting Properties here remain empty. When
product transactions occur, the Income and Expense accounts that you have just defined in the Product Category are used by the Product unless an account is specified here, directly in the product, to override
that.
7. Once the product is saved it changes to a non-editable state. If you had entered data incorrectly or left a required field blank, an error message would pop-up, the form would have stayed editable and you would
need to click from tab to tab to find a field colored red that would have to be correctly filled in.
8.5.6 Stock locations
Click Warehouse → Inventory Control → Location Structure to see the hierarchy of stock locations. These lo- cations have been defined by the minimal default data loaded when the database was created. You will use this
default structure in this example.
Open ERP has three predefined top-level location types , Physical Locations and Partner Locations that act as their names suggest, and Virtual Locations that are used by Open ERP for its own purposes.
1. From the Main Menu click on Warehouse → Configuration → Warehouse Management → Locations to reach a list view of the locations not the tree view.
2. Click on the name of a location, such as Physical LocationsOpenERP S.A. to open a descriptive form view. Each location has a Location Type and a Parent Location that defines the hierarchical structure.
While you are here you should change the location’s name to Ambitious Plumbing Enterprises , since it was named before you changed the company name.
3. From the Main Menu click Warehouse → Configuration Warehouse Management → Warehouses to view a list of warehouses. There is only the one at the moment, which should also be renamed from OpenERP
S.A. to Ambitious Plumbing Enterprises .
A Warehouse contains an input location, a stock location and an output location for sold products. You can associate a warehouse with a partner to give the warehouse an address. That does not have to be your own
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company although it can be; you can easily specify another partner who may be holding stock on your behalf. Note: Location Structure
Each warehouse is composed of three locations Location Input, Location Output, and Location Stock. Your
available stock is given by the contents of the Location Stock and its child locations.
So the Location Input can be placed as a child of the Location Stock, which means that when Location Stock is
interrogated for product quantities, it also takes account of the contents of the Location Input. Location Input
could be used as a goods-in QC location. The Location Output must never be placed as a child of Location Stock,
since items in Location Output, which can be considered to be packed ready for customer shipment, should not be
thought of as available for sale elsewhere.
8.5.7 Setting up a chart of accounts
You can set up a chart of accounts during the creation of a database, but for this exercise you will start with the minimal chart that you created just a handful of required accounts without hierarchy, tax or subtotals.
A number of account charts have been predefined for Open ERP, some of which meet the needs of national authorities the number of those created for Open ERP is growing as various contributors create and freely publish
them. You can take one of those without changing it if it is suitable, or you can take anything as your starting point and design a complete chart of accounts to meet your exact needs, including accounts for inventory, asset
depreciation, equity and taxation.
You can also run multiple charts of accounts in parallel – so you can put all of your transaction accounts into several charts, with different arrangements for taxation and depreciation, aggregated differently for various needs.
Before you can use any chart of accounts for anything you need to specify a Fiscal Year. This defines the dif- ferent time periods available for accounting transactions. An initial Fiscal Year was created during the database
setup so you do not need to do any more on this. You can also create Fiscal year manually from Accounting → Configuration → Financial Accounting → Periods → Fiscal Years
Click Accounting → Charts → Charts of Accounts to open a Chart of Accounts form where you define exactly what you want to see. Click Open Charts to accept the defaults and see a hierarchical structure of the accounts.
8.5.8 Make a backup of the database
If you know the super-administrator password, make a backup of your database using the procedure described at the very end of
Installation and Initial Setup . Then restore it to a new database: testing .
This operation enables you to test the new configuration on testing so that you can be sure everything works as designed. Then if the tests are successful you can make a new database from openerp_ch03 , perhaps called
live or production, for your real work.
From here on, connect to this new testing database logged in as admin if you can. If you have to make corrections, do that on openerp_ch03 and copy it to a new testing database to continue checking it.
Or you can just continue working with the openerp_ch03 database to get through this chapter. You can recreate openerp_ch03
quite quickly if something goes wrong and you cannot recover from it but, again, you would need to know your super-administrator password for that.
8.6 Driving a Purchase Sales Flow
To familiarize yourself with the system workflow you will test a purchase-sale workflow in two phases. The first consists of product purchase, which requires the following operations:
1. Place a purchase order with Plumbing Component Suppliers for 10 Titanium Alloy Radiators at a unit price of 56.00.
2. Receive these products at your Goods In.
