---
description: Creating and using products.
---

# Products & Material Management

Products are one of the key elements of the ADempiere ERP system. A product is an idea: a definition of some thing or service that is bought, sold, produced or consumed in the course of running the enterprise. Tracking the costs and use of products is usually of great importance and the ADempiere system provides many methods of gathering and reporting on this information.

Product information is gathered on most documents that deal with purchasing and ordering, shipping and receiving, invoices and manufacturing production. Product information also appears in the Accounting Facts as one of the Accounting Dimensions allowing financial information to be queried based on the products that appear in the original documents.

Product prices are another important component of the product information and ADempiere provides a complete solution to managing the price lists that apply to various business partners.

Before the products can be setup in ADempiere, you should have a good understanding of how the product information is used to generate performance data so that you can generate the reports required to manage your operations. The first question is whether you require a product at all. Consider a bill for electricity. It would be unusual to verify that the quantity of electricity provides was actually received before the bill was paid. In such a simple case, the accounting for the electricity could be made using a **Charge** with no product definition involved and no process beyond the invoice and payment. However, if it was important to track the amount of electricity consumed and the cost of the electricity over time, creating a product for it would be helpful.

Beyond the choice of Charge or Product, there are a number of ways a product can be configured to track expenses and material costs. The rest of this section of the book describes how to configure the products.
