OpenVPMS has a number of ways of grouping or classifying products as follows:
Type of Product
There are five types of product as follows:
| Service
|
These just have a name (and other optional attributes like prices, discounts, taxes etc etc). They are not stocked items and you cannot run out of them. Example: Consultation |
| Merchandise |
Things that are sold and hence also have a Selling Unit (eg Box, Vial, Unit etc) and associated supplier details. Example: Dog Collar |
| Medication |
In addition to the details held for Merchandise items, these can have drug labels, dispensing notes, a drug schedule and list of active ingredients. Example: Baytril Otic |
| Product Price Template
|
These just have a name and a price and are used to set common pricing for a number of products (by linking the fixed price of the product to this template rather than setting its own). Example: Dispensing Fee - Standard |
| Template |
These are used to group a number of products together. They are commonly used for procedures. When you use the template product when creating an invoice, it will be expanded into its component items. The template can include a note to be put on the invoice, and a note to be added to the patient's medical record. Hence, sometimes it is useful to have a template that includes only one product - because of this ability to automatically generate these notes. Product Templates:
Example: Cat Spay |
Note that some things that are logically services - eg cremations (and in fact any services that you offer which are in fact drawn from an outside supplier) need to be set as Merchandise so that you can record the supplier of that service.
Product Type
(Note that ‘Product Type’ is not the same as ‘Type of Product’.)
Each Service, Merchandise and Medication product can be set to be one of a number of Product Types. Examples might be: Administration, Anaesthesia, Consultation, Consumables, Desexing, Dental, etc. As well as enabling reporting by the sort of product, discounts can be set by product type. Also one can determine the appearance of invoices by the order in which items are shown and whether or not items of the same type are combined into one line item.
Product Classification
This is another method for grouping or selecting products for reporting purposes. Your administrator can set up Product Groups and Product Income Types, and you can set a product to belong to one or more of the classifications.