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What a product is

A product is the core catalog entity in Zenskar. It’s a structured, reusable representation of whatever you sell, whether that’s a software license, a consulting package, or a metered API. You build your catalog once, then reuse each product across as many contracts as you like. A product on its own doesn’t say anything about price. That’s deliberate: the same product can carry different pricing on different contracts, so you’re not duplicating your catalog every time you negotiate a different rate for a different customer.

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Where a product sits in your contracts

A contract is built from one or more phases, and each phase holds one or more products, each priced with its own pricing model.
You’ll add a product to a phase, then attach a price to it there. A single product can appear in multiple phases, or on multiple contracts, each time with whatever pricing makes sense for that agreement.

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Products vs. features

It’s worth keeping these two ideas separate, since Zenskar treats them very differently under the hood. A product is the thing being sold, it’s what shows up as a line item on an invoice. A feature is a modifier that changes how a product (or an entire phase) behaves, rather than something you’d ever bill for by itself. Discounts, tax rules, minimum spend commitments, and free unit grants are all features. You’ll find and configure them alongside a product’s pricing, not as separate catalog items.

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Standalone products and bundles

Every product has a type: standalone, or a bundle (called a group). A standalone product is priced and sold on its own. A bundle groups several other products together under one catalog entry, so you can sell them as a single package. Each product inside a bundle can either reuse one of its existing prices, or get a price that only applies within that particular bundle. You can’t remove a product from your catalog while it’s still a member of a bundle. Remove it from the bundle first.

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Pricing models

A product doesn’t have a price by itself, you attach one or more pricing models to it. Zenskar supports a wide range of pricing models, from a flat monthly fee to multi-dimensional tiered pricing, so you can match how you actually price the product rather than forcing it into a generic shape.

Pricing models

See every pricing model Zenskar supports, with a description of how each one calculates a charge.
A product can carry more than one pricing model at a time, for example a flat platform fee alongside a metered overage rate, and you choose which one applies when you add the product to a phase.

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Tax codes

Every product carries a tax code, which is what Zenskar uses to work out how that product should be taxed, whether that’s a lookup against Avalara or a manually configured rate. This is separate from any tax feature you might layer onto a specific pricing model, the tax code lives on the catalog entry itself and applies wherever the product is sold. Bundles don’t carry their own tax code, since tax is resolved at the level of the individual products inside them.

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Custom attributes

If your organization has defined custom attributes for the Products module, under Settings → Custom attributes, they’ll show up as extra fields whenever you add or edit a product, so you can attach structured metadata that’s specific to your business.

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Status and deletion

Every product has a status, active or inactive, shown as a column in your product list. Editing a product doesn’t touch any contracts that already use it, existing contracts keep working, but Zenskar flags them as needing a refresh so you know pricing or terms may be out of sync with the latest version of the product. You can’t delete a product while it’s still referenced by a contract, a plan, or a bundle. Remove those references first, and then the product can be deleted for good.