Create and manage catalog items in Pimics
Catalog items are items that you don't manage in Business Central until you sell them.
Pimics allows catalog items (or non-stock items) to be seamlessly included in product offerings on your website or printed catalog. Although they are not 'real' items from an ERP's point of view as you cannot make transactions with them, they are treated by Pimics as regular items from the point of view of PIM data, which means you have great freedom in presenting them to your customers, just like you do with your Item table SKUs.
For example, if you have a vendor that offers 5,000 SKUs but you only have 1,000 of those in your Item table because you stock them or sell them more or less regularly, you may decide to import the remaining 4,000 products as catalog items in Business Central, manage them with Pimics, and include them in publications.
That means you can display the vendor's full range to your customers and let them choose if they want to buy, even though you only have 1,000 products as permanent SKUs in your Item table. If a customer orders a catalog item, then a special customization of Business Central can be set up that will automatically convert that catalog item into a full-fledged SKU in your Item table and then put it on the sales order.
This is how a catalog item card looks:
As you can see, all PIM data for catalog items can be managed as in the case of regular items.
Catalog Item lifecycle
1. Create Catalog Items
Catalog items can be created manually or imported by using the Vendor Catalog, following similar procedures as for regular items. Please refer to Microsoft's documentation about standard working with catalog items in Business Central here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/inventory-how-work-nonstock-items
However, by far the most frequent use case for companies that use Pimics is the bulk creation of catalog items through Vendor Catalog import.
2. Convert Catalog Items to Items
Whenever a catalog item is in demand and must be sold, it needs to be converted to an SKU. This can be done directly on the catalog item card as shown in the image below, or by adding it to a sales order as per Microsoft's documentation above.
We won't describe here how to create features, texts, pictures, and other data on catalog items. In Pimics, these processes are the same for catalog items as they are for items.