ENTERING NEW PRODUCTS:

The easiest way to enter a catalog of products or inventory into the system is by directly importing it into the database. But for now, let's enter products by hand. Once the inventory is imported, it will likely be maintained this way anyway.

Armed with sales privileges, we now can enter new products into the database. Let's go to LeftNav->Products->AddProduct. The following window should pop up. Note that a client connection without the admin or sales privileges will be denied this service:

Choose a product category, say, 'Hardware'. We will cover where those categories come from pretty soon, so don't worry about it for now. Enter a Monitor as a new product, and fill-in the rest with fictitious data. Note that even thought there is a product status, it is not used by the application in the current version, just enter zero for it.

Now 'Submit'. Same window will pop-up, waiting for us to enter more products. We won't do that. Go to LeftNav->Products. Choose 'Hardware'. The one we just entered should show up in the hardware products list. If we click on that item, we should see the details we just entered as expected.

Understandably, every business is different and needs to categorize their inventory differently. For that we need a helper application: Categories.