Item Types: Choose the Tracking, Then Check Before You Save
Steps 2 and 3 of Choosing an Item Type: choose the sub item type — where serial number and batch tracking are turned on — and answer the three questions to ask before you save. It follows Bundle or Grouped Item?.
The running example: GadgetSphere’s smartphones and laptops are serialised; its accessories are counted as plain quantity.
On the edit screen, both the item type and the sub item type are fixed at the item’s first save, and no permission unlocks them afterwards. (A Doc Item import of the same code does rewrite both, with no checks at all — creating an item explains when that is safe.)
Step 2: Choose the sub item type
This is where serial number and batch tracking are turned on. Basic Items and Aliases offer all five choices. Other types offer fewer — Service and Voucher, for example, offer Basic Quantity or Serial Number — and of those only a serialised Voucher is counted in and out of stock.
| Sub item type | Use it when |
|---|---|
| Basic Quantity | You just count units. Accessories, cables, most things |
| Serial Number | Every single unit has its own identity — one serial per unit. Smartphones, laptops |
| Batch Number | Units are identical within a batch, and the batch matters — expiry dates, recalls |
| Bin Number | Quantity is tracked by physical container or bin |
| Unity | Single-unit items |
Choose Serial Number only if you mean it. A serial number in BigLedger is a stock record of its own, held per item per location, and every receipt, sale, transfer and count of that item has to name the serials. A sale is refused with Serial Number does not exist in this location when the serial is not held where you are selling (serial numbers). It is the right choice for a RM 4,000 phone and the wrong one for a RM 12 cable.
And choose it when you do mean it, because the chance to add it later never comes. Picture a phone model set up as plain quantity and sold for months. Then a warranty claim arrives that nobody can match to a handset, because no handset was ever recorded. The natural next question — can an administrator unlock serial tracking for us? — has the answer no.
Like the item type, the sub item type is fixed the moment you first save the item, and no permission unlocks it. There is one with a name that suggests otherwise; granting it changes nothing, because the field is disabled for everybody once the item is saved. The reason is the damage the change would do: switching how quantity is tracked on an item that already has stock and documents would have to rewrite both, and BigLedger will not attempt it. If you get this wrong, you create a new item.
Nothing on the screen warns you that a serial-worthy product was set up without serials. The first moment a person can notice is the first goods receipt: if the person receiving handsets is looking at serial labels on the boxes and typing none of them in, stop there, before the first sale makes the history you would have to live with.
Step 3: Check yourself before you save
Two people should agree on a new code before it is created: whoever owns the catalogue, and whoever will reconcile the stock and cost it produces — usually the stock controller or the accounts clerk. Five minutes on paper costs less than a replacement code later.
Before clicking Create, three questions:
- Is the type right? It cannot be changed on the edit screen.
- Is the code right? Also normally immutable, and it is what everybody will search by for the next ten years.
- Is the sub item type right? Serialising later is not a setting change; once the item has stock, it is a new item.
Then fill in the rest — name, base unit, currency, tax codes, e-Invoice classification — as described in maintaining the item master.
What success looks like for this part
Before Create, whoever owns the catalogue and whoever will reconcile the item’s stock and cost have agreed the new code, and you have answered Step 3’s three questions. After it, a serialised item asks for serials when you add it to a draft sales invoice line, and at its first goods receipt the serials on the boxes are typed in. The whole item’s checks are on the front page.
Common mistakes in this part
| What goes wrong | What you see | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Everything serialised “to be safe” | Every receipt, sale, transfer and count now needs serial entry | Serialise what genuinely has unit identity and nothing else |
The rest are on the front page, including the wrong item type, and on Bundle or Grouped Item.
Related documentation
- What a wrong type touches elsewhere — once documents start using the item
- Serial numbers — a serial is a stock record per item per location
- Maintaining the item master — everything else on the item record
- Creating an item — the step-by-step
- Doc Item Maintenance applet — every type, tab and field, the reference