Managing and keeping track of your materials is vital for the success of your business, especially if you are into production. Doing so enables you to accurately calculate the products' pricing.

Thankfully, Uphance makes it easy to manage your material inventory, and in this document, we will show you how to go about it.

Step 1: Create a Material Warehouse

Before proceeding to add materials, it's important to first create a warehouse where the materials will be stored.

To do so, navigate to Settings >> Warehouse Management. If you don't have an existing warehouse, create one, while ensuring you click the Material checkbox in the process. But if you have an existing warehouse you would like to convert to a material warehouse, edit it and select materials as illustrated below:

Step 2: Add the Material

After setting up the material warehouse, you can then proceed to add the material. To do so, navigate to Product Information >> Materials >> Actions >> Add Material.

Enter the required information and create the material.

On the next page that shows up, add the Material Details, including material image, season, category, sizes, etc. It's also on this page that you get to add the material's color variants and check the inventory level.

Don't forget to click the Update button each time you make a change to the material.

Adding materials manually isn't practical, especially if you have a lot of them you want to add. As such, it's best you upload them in bulk.

To upload materials in bulk, open Materials again and select Upload Raw Materials from Actions. If you have the materials saved in an Excel/CSV file, select and upload it to the system.

Otherwise, download the materials template and use it to build your upload data.

If the upload went through successfully (or failed), you will get a notification that indicates so.

You can always retire or delete a material when you no longer need it.

When you retire a material, it will still be in the system, but you can't use it or assign it to any product. Plus, you can always Reactivate it. To do so, open the material and click the Retire button as illustrated below:

The process for deleting material is the same for retirement. However, you can only delete material that isn't attached to any product or in a sales order.