ADMIN: Setting up your products and services portfolio
About products
The Products list contains the hardware, software, and material items your company sells or supports for customers. You will need to set up products if you plan on using the following features:
- Opportunities and quotes
- Inventory
- Devices Your Autotask instance may be configured to use one of the following terms instead: Asset, Configuration Item, Installed Asset, Installed Product.
About Services and Service Bundles
A service is a defined benefit such as "Mail Hosting", "Disk Backup" or "Virus Checking" for a covered device. They are the billing items of recurring service contracts. For information on recurring service contracts, refer to Offering your customers a Managed Services business model.
Services can be combined into service bundles. However, service bundles are always a single billing item. You cannot separate them into their constituent services after the fact. As a best practice, we recommend that you use services.
You will need to set up services if you have customers with recurring service contracts.
Configuration tasks for products
Setting up material codes
Unless you import a product list and your material codes are created during the import, you must set up material codes first. Material codes establish the tax category for a product. Refer to Material codes.
Adding product categories
Product categories are optional. Their purpose is to help you organize your product list. Refer to Adding product categories.
Creating user-defined Fields
If a Autotask does not have a field for information you would like to track with your products or devices (products installed at a customer site), create User-Defined Fields. Refer to Managing user-defined fields.
Creating or importing your product list
Only items on your product list can be procured, kept in inventory, or installed as a device. You can manually create your product list, or you can import it into Autotask. Refer to Adding, editing, or copying a product and Populating the Products import template.
- If you are tracking inventory, we recommend that your product list be fairly specific, especially if you are tracking serialized items.
- When Procurement is enabled, an additional column appears on the Products list: Does Not Require Procurement. By default it is not selected. When it is selected, the items will not be subject to approval or appear on the Purchasing & Fulfillment page.
- To add inventory products to purchase orders, there is one additional requirement: the product must be associated with one or more vendors.
Configuration tasks for services and service bundles
Services setup requires the following steps.
- To determine the tax status of a service, you are required to select a service code when creating a service. Refer to Service codes.
- Then you can set up your list of services. Refer to Setting up your services.
- Optionally, you can combine several services into service bundles. Refer to Setting up service bundles.
