Master Data overview
What Master Data covers, who uses it, and how customers, suppliers, products and shared reference lists feed every other module.
What Master Data is for
Master data is the information every other module reuses: who you trade with, what you sell and buy, and the lists that describe them (units, categories, countries, emirates and cities). If a customer, a product or a unit is wrong here, every quotation, invoice, delivery and stock count that uses it is wrong too. This module is where those records are created, checked and protected.
Master Data is spread over three apps in the application launcher:
| App | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Contacts | Keep customers and suppliers. Each contact opens as a "Customer 360" record: identity, addresses, people, sales defaults, credit, tax, controls and documents. Also holds the country, state and city lists and company-defined custom fields. |
| Catalogue | Keep products and services. Each product opens as one record with general data, sales, purchase, inventory, logistics, accounting, barcodes and variants. Also holds units of measure, categories, brands, product groups, manufacturers and variant attributes, and the Stock on hand report. |
| Master Data | The governance layer on top: shared parties, bank and tax changes that someone else must approve, duplicate detection and merges, product templates and variants, barcodes, tracking policies, account mappings, catalogues for web or POS, imports, data-quality rules and six control reports. |
Key ideas
- Contact (a customer, a supplier, or both). It belongs to one company. Its Contact Type decides where it may be used: a customer-only contact cannot be chosen on a purchase order, and a supplier-only contact cannot be chosen on a sales order.
- Party. A party is the shared legal identity of a business or person across companies. Each company that trades with it holds its own contact (its own customer or supplier account), called a release. The party carries the legal name and registrations; each release carries that company's terms.
- Product, template and variant. A product is one sellable or stockable item. A template (for example a T-shirt) describes what its variants (size M in red) share. Each variant is its own product with its own code (SKU), barcode and stock.
- Maker and checker. Sensitive changes are proposed by one person and decided by another. Bank accounts, tax registrations, merges, account mappings, tracking changes and templates all work this way. Nobody approves their own work, and this applies to administrators too.
- Immutable codes. Customer, product and master codes cannot change after the record is saved. Archive the record and create a new one instead.
- Archive, not delete. Records are archived. Documents that already use them stay readable.
Who uses it
Sales and purchasing staff create contacts and products. A credit controller records credit reviews. A finance approver decides bank changes and account mappings. A data steward runs duplicate scans, imports and quality rules. An administrator sets up units, categories, geography and the feature switches.
How it connects to other modules
- Sales, Purchasing, POS, CRM read contacts, prices, taxes and barcodes. They refuse blocked, archived, blacklisted or held customers, and customers over a hard credit limit.
- Inventory reads units, tracking, expiry and reordering data, and refuses changes that would break stock (for example changing the base unit once a product is on posted documents).
- Finance reads payment terms, fiscal positions, the receivable account, category stock accounts and product account overrides. Invoices keep the customer they were raised to, even after a merge.
- Price lists and effective pricing belong to the sales and pricing side. The contact record only stores a price list reference as text.
The Contacts and Catalogue apps follow the company you are signed in to. The shared lists (countries, states, cities, languages, time zones) are the same for every company.