Item familiesعائلات الأصناف

A family is a group of items that share a place in the tree and, more importantly, share default accounts. Set the family up once and every item you create under it starts with the right sales account, purchase account, VAT rate and warehouse already filled in.

That is the whole point. The person entering items all day is rarely an accountant, and the family is what stops them having to be one.

Where it lives

Open General setup → Inventory control setup. It is a page of tiles, and Family is one of them.

Three levels, and the numbering

The tree is three levels deep at most, under a fixed root called Inventory Item Tree View. The numbering is positional and Libra maintains it: 01 → 01-1 → 01-1-1. The Description beside each number is the name you actually read.

The footer tells you how to build it: Press f5 to add a level under the current level and Press delete button to remove the current kind. The ribbon adds Sorting, Reset variables and Expand all nodes.

How deep should you go? Only as deep as the business really divides. A workshop that sells whole cars, spare parts and fitting services needs three families at the top level and often nothing below. Splitting finely at the start is easy; unpicking it later is not, because the accounts hang off the level you chose.

What a family carries

Then the Defaultvalues panel, which is what the family is for:

A worked example

An auto-parts business separates:

• Cars - whole vehicles bought and resold, on their own sales account
• Spare parts - the pieces, on the goods accounts (7011 / 60111 for VAT-subject goods)
• Services - fitting and labour, on a service income account, and every item under it ticked Service

Three families, three sets of accounts, and from then on the person creating an item picks the family and the accounting is already right.

What the default does and does not do

The values are copied into the item when you pick the family, not linked to it. Change a family's sales account later and items already created keep the old one - you edit those yourself. The default decides where a new item starts.

An individual item can always override any of them, and an auxiliary record's account can be reassigned later. That is unlike the chart of accounts, whose parent/child structure freezes once a posting exists - see How to open an account.

Next steps

• The item definition screen - where the defaults land
• How to create an item - the walkthrough