Searching and managing products

SECURITY  Security level with Admin permission to configure Products, Services, & Inventory. Refer to Admin security settings.

NAVIGATION   > Admin > Features & Settings > Products, Services, & Inventory > Products

NAVIGATION  Inventory > Inventory Management > Products. This option requires custom security permission assigned at the Inventory level. Refer to Creating or editing a custom security level.

To open the page, use the path(s) in the Security and navigation section above.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN  Unless you import a product list and your material codes are created during the import, you must set up material codes first. Refer to Material codes.

  • To display a list of all records of a given entity in your Autotask instance, click Search without applying any filters.

Search results containing more than 25, 50, or 100 records (depending on your Records per page setting) are paginated. Use page navigation to view additional results. At most, 5,000 data record will be retrieved at any one time.

The Active filter defaults to Active on the Organization Search, Contact Search, My Organizations, and My Contacts pages, as well as on the global Search by Organization, Contact (First Name), Contact (Last Name), and Contact (Email). The counters in the My menu also reflect only active entities.

NOTE  There are several options for phone number filters. The Phone filter will look for a contains match that includes any characters (such as - or () ) entered in the filter box. The Organization Search and Contact Search pages have a Phone (numbers only) option that will ignore special characters in the filter and the results. It will do a contains search for just the numbers entered in the filter box. The Contact Search page also allows you to do a Phone (Starts With) search. It will search for phone numbers that start with the value entered in the filter box.

The following tool buttons appear above the results list:

Tool Button Description

Many Search pages (but not the widget drill-down tables) allow you to create a new instance of the selected entity. This button is visible before you execute a search:

  • Click New.
  • Contract, Ticket, and Project entities allow you to create several different entity types. Click New and select an option.

For help with populating the fields, refer to the context-sensitive Help of the page that opens.

On the Product Search page, the Import button opens the Product Import History page. For details on importing products, refer to Populating the Products import template.

The View Price List button is only displayed for users with Admin >  Finance, Accounting and Invoicing permissions. Click the button to open the Price List page, where you can set prices for all billing item types. If you have Multi-currency enabled, this is also the page where you set prices for billing items in other currencies. Refer to Managing your price list.

SECURITY  By default, Export is available to users with Admin security level, and disabled for all others. It can be enabled for other security levels. Refer to Can export Grid Data.

NOTE  When exporting to CSV: To ensure consistent date/time formatting in the CSV output, we strongly recommend that the user’s date/time format settings in Autotask be identical to the Windows date/time format settings of the computer performing the export. This will prevent conflicts in how the software that generates the report interprets the date/time format.

IMPORTANT  Fields related to billing products for devices and contacts will not be exported.

  1. Click the Export drop-down menu and select an option.

    2. Option Description
    In Current Format If you select this option or simply click the Export button, only the columns that are displayed on the search results table will be exported.
    In Import Template Format This option will appear for entities that can be imported. For a list of entities that can be exported in import template format, refer to Importing or updating data.

    If you select this option, all columns that appear on the import template for the entity will be exported. This allows you to clean up or update records in bulk, and then import them again using the Update option.
  1. A window opens that allows you to download and open the exported file.

NOTE  Only the first 5,000 records will be exported.

The Column Chooser allows you to customize search results tables throughout Autotask. It determines the following:

  • Which columns are displayed on the table
  • The left-to-right display order of the columns

NOTE   Column Chooser settings on search results tables and some standard reports are part of the user settings stored on the Autotask server. You can log in from any computer and have your column chooser settings applied to your Autotask session. To clear the data stored in your Autotask instance and reset the column chooser settings to the Autotask default settings, click Reset Settings in My >  Miscellaneous > Settings.

To customize the table, do the following:

  1. Click the column chooser icon above the search results. The Column Chooser page opens.

Columns appear either in the Available Columns or the Selected Columns panel.

  1. Double-click a column name or select one or multiple columns and click the left or right arrow to move columns to the other panel.
  2. To change the display order of the columns, select one or multiple columns in the Selected Columns panel and click the up or down arrows.

NOTE  Top-to-bottom order in the Selected Columns list becomes left-to-right order on the Search Results list.

  1. Click Save & Close.

NOTE  If the characters + # appear after the column name, then that column may have multiple items returned for some rows. If that occurs, the first item will appear in the row followed by + and the number of additional items returned. To display the list of additional items, hover over the item in the column.

Click the refresh icon to execute the search on the current table again, using the same search criteria to find new records that were added since you first performed the search.

All customer Autotask instances are provisioned with two system products that cannot be edited, inactivated or deleted. They ensure that the Product Name field, which is required when opportunities, devices, or inventory products are created, has selectable items.

  • Equipment is available as a generic product name when creating charges, devices and inventory products.
  • None is used when you create a new opportunity and don't select a Primary Product. It can also be selected when creating charges, devices and inventory products.
Option Description
Edit Product

Use the context menu to open the Edit Product page. Refer to Adding, editing, or copying a product.

Two products, Equipment and None, are system products and cannot be edited.

Copy Product

Use the context menu to open the Copy Product page. Refer to Adding, editing, or copying a product.

Two products, Equipment and None, are system products and cannot be copied.

Delete Product

System products (Equipment and None), and products that are associated with devices, tickets, inventory products, opportunities, and quotes cannot be deleted.

Additionally, the following is true of products associated with inventory items and devices:

If you ever received, added, or kept stocked items, you will be able to delete the inventory product, which if confirmed will remove (that is, set the Quantity to 0) all stocked items. But because we track the inventory for historical reasons, the stocked item will still be linked to the product, and therefore the product cannot be deleted from the catalog. The reasoning behind that is that if you ever had stock, you may need to refer back to that stock.

EXAMPLE  Tracking the receipt or delivery of the product, verifying a vendor invoice, RMA from a customer or back to a vendor.