Tracked items

An item is one of the things you keep track of: a pump, a vehicle, a flat, a product, a generator. Items live inside a tracker group, and the group is what decides how they are described and what is recorded about them.

Reach them by clicking a group's card, or from Tracked Items in the sidebar.

Adding items

From the group's own items page:

• The + adds one, by name.
• The layers icon adds many: paste a column of names, or import the first column of a spreadsheet.

Both routes land in the same dialog, and the names are shown to you before anything is created — a spreadsheet fills the same box a paste would, so you can see what was found and correct it before committing.

Adding items needs Level 4 clearance.

What happens to bad rows

Bulk loading is partial rather than all-or-nothing:

• Blank lines are ignored.
• Repeats, and names the group already holds, are refused by name, with a reason — refusing three hundred lines over one bad one just means finding it by eye.
• A property value the group cannot take does not cost you the item. n/a where a number belongs is one cell to fix, so the item is created and the value is reported back to you as adjusted. Created-but-incomplete is a different answer from not-created — and a silently blank reorder level is discovered at a stocktake.

Item properties

A bare item carries a name and nothing else. That is enough while a group is a fleet of machines whose only interesting facts are the readings taken against them, and it falls apart the moment the items themselves have properties worth knowing.

The group declares what its items are described by; each item carries the values. A store describes items by category, unit of issue and reorder level; a fleet by make and model; a borehole group by depth and casing diameter. Trackapt names none of them — you do.

Open the group, then Item properties. Each property has a label, a type (text, number or dropdown), and optionally a unit, a description, and whether every item must carry it.

Put the reorder level on the item, not in the alert rule

One rule then covers the whole group. Put it in the rule instead and you need one rule per item, and each one goes stale on its own.

Removing a property destroys every item's value for it

The screen confirms this before it happens. Unlike a retired form field, there is no archive to restore from.

When one name has to stand for two things

A store keeps a fuel filter for the excavator and a fuel filter for the tipper. They are not the same part, they need their own bin, their own reorder level and their own balance — and calling one of them Fuel filter (tipper) by hand puts the distinction in a place nothing can group or report on.

Instead, mark the property that tells them apart. On the property, tick This tells items apart.

From then on, two items in that group may share a name as long as that property differs, and each is shown with its qualifier — FUEL FILTER (tipper) — wherever it appears. A second fuel filter for the same machine is still refused, which is the duplicate you actually wanted stopped.

An item may still be added without it

It is then the group's only unqualified one of its name, and the screen says so as you add it. If you want to insist on the value, tick Every item should have this as well — the two settings are separate on purpose.

The mark can only sit on a property everybody can see

A property that is withheld below a clearance level cannot be the thing that tells items apart, because half your members would see two items with one name and no way to distinguish them. The tick is simply not offered there — nor on a property that points at other items, nor on the retail sell price.

Filling the values in

Declaring a property and filling it in are separate acts. There are three routes:

1. The spreadsheet you import items from. Once properties exist, the download template is headed with them — one column each — so names and values arrive in one upload. This is the only route that scales past a handful of items.
2. The pricetags action on an item's card, in the group's items list.
3. The edit action on an item's own page, under Properties.

Column headings are matched loosely but never partially: case, spaces, underscores and hyphens are ignored, but Unit does not match Unit of issue — filing one column's values under another property is worse than not matching at all. Unrecognised columns are named back to you rather than silently dropped.

Updating items that already exist

The import can fill in properties on items the group already holds, but only when you tick Also fill in items this group already has. Without that tick, a name the group already has stays a rejected duplicate.

Two rules make it safe:

• Only what the sheet supplies is written. A column the sheet omits — or leaves blank — keeps whatever was there. A partial sheet cannot blank out properties it never carried.
• Only a genuine existing-item collision qualifies. Listed more than once stays a duplicate, so a second line in your sheet cannot overwrite the first.

A property with no value is not zero

It is unknown, and the difference matters. An alert rule whose threshold resolves to nothing reads as cannot say and stays silent — it will not fire on the zero nobody entered. A group half-way through filling its properties in therefore looks like a group with nothing wrong.

Restricted properties

A property can be marked restricted, which withholds its value from members below Level 3. The item still appears; the figure does not. This covers the value wherever it would otherwise leak — filters, sorting and search included.

Property history

Properties can be auditable, in which case every change to them is kept with who made it and when. This is on unless it has been turned off for that property.

The trail is redacted the same way the item is, so a restricted property's history is not a way around the restriction.

Date a change to when it took effect

When did we decide and when did it start are different questions, and for anything priced they routinely have different answers — a price agreed on Monday and keyed on Tuesday, a rise set on Friday to start on Monday.

When you change a property you can set the date it took effect, separately from when you recorded it. Leave it alone and the two are the same.

It matters at the boundary of a period: a change keyed on the 1st but effective from the 28th belongs to the previous month's reconciliation, and dating it to the afternoon somebody sat down at the screen puts it in the wrong one.

Sellable items

In the retail module, an item becomes sellable when a retail profile carrying a barcode and a price is attached beside it. Nothing about the item itself changes, and it does not move out of its group.

This is why one group can hold some items that sell and some that are only ever read off.