Creating & configuring products

The inventory is the central product database in Univents. Every product that appears on a booking page, is included in a quote, or ends up on a function sheet must be created here first.

Opening the inventory and understanding the tabs

You can reach the inventory in the left-hand navigation under Inventory. The page shows a tab bar at the top with seven sections:

• Catalog — list of all products with search, type, and category filters
• Kitchen — kitchen monitor for active production tasks
• Production list — aggregated production overview by event or category
• Calendar — calendar view of all booked products
• Categories — manage product and booking page categories
• Production categories — structure the kitchen monitor
• Questions — reusable customer questions for booking pages

In day-to-day work you will spend most of your time in the Catalog tab.

Creating a new product

Click Add product in the top right. A dialog opens for selecting the product type. Choose one of the five types:

After selecting the type, Univents immediately creates a draft and opens the product editor. You can fill in all sections right away without having to save the product first.

Basic data

The first section in the left-hand sidebar of the editor is called Basic data. Enter the core information here:

1. Optionally upload a Main image (click or drag to upload).
2. Enter the Name — visible to customers on booking pages and financial documents.
3. Fill in the Internal name — only visible internally; controls sort order in lists.
4. Select a Category from the dropdown, or create a new one directly by clicking the plus button.
5. Write a Description — appears on booking pages, quotes, and invoices.
6. Set the Billing model: Per unit, Per guest, Per hour, Per kilometre, or Per guest/hour. The model determines how quantities are calculated automatically on quotes. Where the quantity comes from: Per guest uses the event's guest count, Per hour its duration, and Per kilometre the Distance (km) field in the event's "Date & venue" step. That distance is calculated automatically on save, from your company address to the event address, provided an address is stored under Settings → Company; you can override it at any time. If the field is empty, the position is billed with a factor of 1 — the document editor flags this on the affected position; enter the distance manually in that case. You get the same note for "Per guest" when the event has no guest count. When a quote or invoice contains such a position, the distance also shows on its Event location card, where Edit lets you change it without leaving the document.
7. Optional: Color (for the calendar) and Alternative unit (DE) / Alternative unit (EN) for a custom quantity label such as "glasses" or "portions".

You can maintain multilingual names and descriptions using the Languages toggle at the top of this section.

Recipe details (only for type "Recipe")

For products of type Recipe, the sidebar shows an additional Recipe section, split into Allergens & Dietary (always visible) and further fields that appear once you enable kitchen production.

Always visible:

• Allergens — enter as tags (press Enter to confirm)
• Dietary information — e.g. vegan or gluten-free, also entered as tags
• The Add all from bundle button is only active for bundle products — for regular recipes it stays greyed out
• Ingredients — once the product has been saved, link ingredients from your inventory here

Enable Use for kitchen production to unlock further fields:

• Timing & shelf life — Shelf life (days), Prep time (hours) (start production at the latest X hours before delivery; 0 = same-day prep), and Production type (In-house or External)
• Recipe — Recipe images, Production category (with an optional sub-category — create new categories directly via the plus icon), a free-text Recipe field, and Notes

If shelf life, prep time, or production type are missing while kitchen production is enabled, Univents shows a warning — without these fields the product will not appear correctly on the production list.

Inventory & logistics (only for type "Item" and "Rental")

For products of type Item or Rental, the sidebar shows the Inventory section:

• Identification — SKU and Barcode
• Storage & Packaging — Storage location, Packaging unit, and Packaging size
• Dimensions & Weight — Weight (kg), Height (cm), Width (cm), and Depth/Length (cm)
• Power — Voltage, Wattage, and Power connection, useful for technical rental equipment such as projectors or lighting rigs

Bundle contents (only for type "Bundle")

For products of type Bundle, the sidebar shows the Bundle section:

• Enable Include bundle products in the quote description so the individual products contained in the bundle are automatically listed on quotes and invoices.
• Under Bundle Components you add the individual products that make up the bundle and set the quantity for each component.

Service details (only for type "Service")

For products of type Service, the sidebar shows its own Service section:

• Booking Duration — Minimum duration (hours) and Maximum duration (hours)
• Quantity Limits — Min quantity and Max quantity

Billing model, availability, and time slots are still maintained in their own sections. For service products, the following price section is called Pricing & Billing instead of Price & stock, since services don't carry stock.

Price & stock

Click Price & stock in the sidebar.

Under Price enter:

• Price (net) — selling price excluding VAT
• Price (gross) — selling price including VAT
• Tax — tax rate as a percentage, e.g. 19 for standard VAT or 7 for food items
• Purchase price (net) — what the product costs you; the basis for contribution margin and cost of goods

The two price fields are linked: type into one and the other follows. The product remembers which side you led with — details under Enter prices gross or net.

Mind the basis on the purchase price. If you have set a packaging size — 24 bottles per crate, say — you can choose whether the amount you typed applies per unit or to the whole package. If the basis says "per unit" but you type the crate price, the cost-of-goods report calculates with 24 times your real cost. Univents flags this as soon as the purchase price exceeds the selling price.

A Cost field now appears only on staff products, where it is the employee's hourly wage, deliberately separate from the price the customer pays. On every other product it meant the same as the purchase price — the two fields have been merged, and your stored value now sits on the purchase price.

Under Stock enter the current stock level. Enable Unlimited stock if you do not want to track inventory. The Hide when sold out checkbox hides the product on booking pages as soon as the stock reaches zero.

Availability

The Availability section defines when a product can be booked:

• Buffer days (rental) — mainly relevant for rental products: reserves extra days before and after the booking for cleaning or logistics time before the item can be booked again
• Min. guests / Max. guests — guest limits for automatic filtering
• Available weekdays — click the days; leaving them empty means all days are available
• Time window (from/to time) and season (from/to date) — restrict bookability to certain times of day or seasons of the year

Availability is strictly enforced on booking pages. On quotes and invoices it appears as a note only.

Pricing conditions

Under Pricing conditions you can add dynamic pricing rules — for example, public holiday surcharges or volume discounts. Click Add pricing rule and select the Rule type:

• Time of day, guest count, quantity, distance, weekday, season, duration, public holidays, or location

For each rule you set a Surcharge type (percentage or fixed in EUR) and the Value. All fixed amounts are summed first, then the percentage surcharge is applied to the subtotal. A negative value is a discount — enter -20, for example, to reduce the price by 20%.

Example: staggering travel costs by distance. Open the travel product (billing Per kilometer), add a rule of type Distance under Pricing conditions, enter 40 in Min. km and leave Max. km empty. From 40 km onwards the adjusted kilometer price applies. Use several rules for several tiers, e.g. one for 40 to 80 km and one from 80 km. Important: the adjusted price applies to the entire distance, not only to the kilometers above the threshold. This requires a Distance (km) value on the event — it is calculated automatically from your company address when the event is created and can be overridden at any time.

Example: commission or discount depending on the venue. Pick Venue as the rule type and tick the venues the rule should apply to in the selection field. For external venues that charge a percentage commission, enter +12, for example; for your own houses, use a negative value as a discount. Three things matter:

• The rule is checked against the event's main venue — the one listed first on the event. Additional venues of the same event do not count. A rule created for a second room has no effect.
• If an event has no venue at all, or a document belongs to no event, the rule does not apply. Nothing is guessed.
• Percentages are the safe choice. A fixed discount that applies to a category or to the whole workspace is skipped on very cheap items (see “Why does a line item suddenly cost €0.00?” in the article on finance document settings). A percentage does not behave that way.

On booking pages: if the booking page has a venue selection step, the rule takes effect as soon as the customer picks a venue — on the product card price, in the cart, at checkout and in the submitted order alike. That includes webshop pages that offer the venues as selectable tiles. Ticket pages have no venue selection: there the page calculates without a venue, and the rule only applies once you set a venue on the event in the back office and the document is recalculated.

Venue groups are deliberately not offered for selection: an event is always attached to a concrete venue, never to its group — a rule on the group would never match. Select the group's venues individually.

Rules assigned to the product's category appear in the Rules inherited from category block as read-only. You create and change them under Inventory > Categories > Edit > Pricing rules — they then apply to every product in that category.

The Priority field only controls the order in which rules appear in the price breakdown — a lower number comes first. It does not decide which rule wins: if several rules match the same line item, all of them are added up. With just one rule the value does not matter.

A rule only takes effect if its condition is filled in. A rule of type Time of day without a from and to time, or one of type Quantity without a quantity range, is never applied — the list marks it as No effect. Add the missing condition via Edit, or delete the rule.

Booking

Under Booking you will find two sub-sections:

Custom questions — link questions to this product. They appear on the booking page as soon as a customer selects the product (e.g. "Should the cocktails be non-alcoholic?"). You can create new questions directly here or add them from the central question pool in the Questions tab.

Bookable time slots — enable time slots if the product should be booked at specific times (e.g. a photo booth from 2:00 pm–4:00 pm, independent of the event duration). Select a mode (manual times or fixed intervals) and a Capacity per slot.

Back office

The Back office section groups settings that customers never see. It is divided into three areas:

Accounting — enter the Contra account and Cost centre. Clicking Show advanced fields reveals the additional Credit account and Revenue account fields — useful for DATEV exports.

Automation — under Staff schedule templates select a template so that shifts are created automatically when a booking is confirmed. Enable Send order email automatically to trigger an internal notification whenever a new booking comes in. Use Who should be notified about a new booking? to add users or contacts. Under Supplier you assign the supplier of this article, and below it under Supplier item no. the number that supplier uses for it in their own catalogue. That number is printed on the supplier order — in the preview, in the PDF and in the order email — so the supplier recognises the line straight away. Without it, your own item number is shown as before.

Miscellaneous — assign Tags for filtering and enter Internal notes that appear on production lists and function sheets.

Tips

• Draft vs. published: A newly created product starts as a draft. It only becomes visible on booking pages after you click Publish. Saved changes to products that are already active take effect immediately.
• Rename a position instead of creating a product: You can overwrite a position's name straight in the quote, invoice or delivery note — turning "ciabatta with ham" into "ciabatta with salami" because that article does not exist yet. That name then counts everywhere: on the document, on the kitchen sheet, in the supplier order, in material planning and in the Bookings tab. Your product catalogue stays untouched. Clear the name on the position again and the product name takes over automatically. The same applies when you swap the article on a position: the new article's name travels to every sheet.
• Descriptions come from the position: The description under a position's name — a dish's ingredients or sides — is printed on the function sheet and the production list exactly as it appears on the document. Adjust it on a position and the adjusted version counts. Only when the position has no text of its own does the product catalogue's description step in.
• Use the internal name for sorting: Prefixes such as 00, 01, 02 at the start of the internal name control the order in lists, in the line-item picker of quotes and invoices, and in the product selection on your booking page. Your customer only ever sees the regular name. Products without an internal name are sorted under their regular name.
• View categories alphabetically: In the Categories tab, the Sorting switch at the top right toggles between Manual order and A–Z. The A–Z view helps you find an entry in a long list and leaves the saved order untouched — that order still drives dropdowns, documents and the function sheet. Switch back to Manual order to rearrange by dragging.
• Production categories stay out of product pickers: The categories from the Production categories tab (kitchen, storage, logistics …) only structure the kitchen monitor. They never show up in the product picker of quotes and invoices, in filters, or on booking pages.
• Category order beats the name: On the booking page your category order decides first (Inventory → Categories, field Order), the internal name second. To push travel or equipment to the bottom, give those categories a higher number.
• Switch the catalog sorting: The catalog shows the newest products first. The selector in the filter row switches to internal name, product name or price.
• Calculate bundle price automatically: Enable Calculate the bundle price from the bundle products in the Price & stock section so that the selling price is summed from the individual components.
• Multilingual products: Use the Languages toggle in the Basic data section to maintain names and descriptions in English (or other languages) — useful for international clients.
• Create categories directly in the product: If a suitable category is missing, click the plus icon in the category field. The category dialog opens without you having to leave the product editor.