Your product list
Adding what you sell and what you use — cost, price, the margin RewireBox works out for you, and the five switches that decide how a product behaves.
2 min readUpdated August 14, 2026Managers
A rep leaves you three new products and a price list. Ten minutes later they're on the shelf and nobody at the desk can ring them up, because they only exist on a piece of paper by the till.
Products is the list that stops that — and it covers what you use on clients as well as what they take home.
- 1
- 1A number, Out, or — for untracked
Adding one
Add product, then the fields that matter:
- 1
Name and category. The category is what groups the list and the checkout picker, so it's worth being consistent early. Categories & brands at the top of the list is where you tidy both.
- 2
Retail price and cost. Price is what the client pays; cost is what you paid. Enter both and RewireBox shows the margin as a percentage on the product's page — you never work it out yourself.
- 3
SKU and barcode. Optional. Both are searchable at checkout, which is what makes a scanner work.
- 4
The switches. Track inventory, back bar, revenue, commission, expiry — see below.
The five switches
These decide how the product behaves everywhere else, and they're easier to set now than to correct later.
- Track inventory — do you want a running count? On, the product shows a number and the ledger records every movement. Off, it shows a dash and can still be sold.
- Backbar / non-retail — what you use on clients rather than sell. It's the switch that separates the litre of colour from the bottle on the shelf.
- Counts as revenue — whether the sale shows up in your sales figures.
- Staff commission — whether the stylist earns on it. What they earn is a payroll question; this is only the yes or no.
- Tracks expiry — turns on lot numbers and expiry dates when stock comes in, and feeds the expiry warnings on the insights screen.
Suppliers
Each product can be linked to the suppliers who sell it, with their own cost and lead time. That link is what lets a product go onto a purchase order — a product with no supplier can't be ordered, which is the usual reason one is missing from an order.
Alternatives sit on the same panel: the second supplier you fall back on when the first is out.
Common questions
Do I have to enter a cost?
No, but without one there's no margin, no cost of goods, and no way to tell a good seller from a profitable one. It's the field most worth going back and filling in.
What's the difference between back bar and retail?
Back bar is what you use on clients; retail is what they take home. Tick Backbar / non-retail and the product stops behaving like something to sell — the colour you go through is stock you track, not a line on a bill.
Can one product be both?
Not as one record. Salons that sell the same shampoo they wash with usually carry two products — a retail size and a back-bar size — which is also how the litre bottle stops appearing in the checkout picker.
Do I need barcodes?
Only if you scan. The barcode field feeds the checkout product search, so a scanner types the code and the right product comes up. Without one you search by name or SKU, which is fine at salon volumes.
What does "Counts as revenue" do?
Keeps the product in your sales figures. Turn it off for something you ring up but don't consider income — the usual case is an item you're passing through at cost.
I stopped carrying something. Delete it?
Archive it. Deleting would take its sales history with it, and archived products stay out of the list and the checkout picker while their past sales still add up.
Related articles
- Sell a product at checkoutProducts · Putting a bottle on the bill in two taps, and making sure it counts for the person who recommended it.
- Stock levelsProducts · What the number on the shelf means, every way it can move, and the ledger that tells you why it changed.
- What's selling, and what's worth sellingProducts · The insights screen that flags thin margins, coming stock-outs and duplicates — and the five reports that tell you what actually moved.
Can’t find what you’re looking for?
Book a 20-minute walkthrough and we’ll answer it on a screen share — or start free and try it on your own salon’s data.