Overview
Your stock comes from brands. Surf Excel is made by HUL, Lifebuoy by HUL too, but Tata Salt by Tata. The manufacturer master is the clean list of those brand owners — the company that makes a product, separate from the supplier you buy it from. Keep it tidy and your catalog groups by brand, your tax category sits in one place, and Packs (Pharma, Dairy) have somewhere to hang their licence trail.
Opt-in Capability · off
Manufacturer Master is switched offManufacturer Master
You can read the guide. An owner or manager flips this Capability on in settings — it then lights up across the app.
This is a core, always-on master — it ships enabled for every tenant, so there is nothing to switch on. The Owner does not install anything; the manufacturer list is live the day you sign in.
Where to find it
Manufacturer master is a web-only admin surface. You reach it through product and catalog setup — when you create or edit a product you pick its manufacturer, and the master is the list behind that picker. It is wired into the app under the capabilities area of the admin shell. There is no separate top-level sidebar entry for it in the current build; it lives alongside your catalog masters.
Everyone signed in can view and search the list. Only Manager and Owner add or edit a manufacturer; only the Owner can archive one.
Key concepts
- Manufacturer — the brand owner / producer behind a product. Used for catalog grouping and to carry a tax category. Not the same as a supplier: the supplier is who you place a purchase order with; the manufacturer is who made the goods.
- Tax category — one of
regular,composition,exempt,sez,unregistered. It records the manufacturer's GST standing. - State — a manufacturer is either active or archived. Archived ones drop out of pickers but stay on record.
- GSTIN — the 15-character GST number. Neev checks both its format and its mod-36 checksum, and blocks a second manufacturer with the same GSTIN.
- Linked counts — how many products and batches point at this manufacturer. The detail view shows them, and they decide whether you can archive.
Common workflows
From the manufacturer list, hit Create. Name is the only required field. Add GSTIN, PAN, phone, email, website, address and a tax category if you have them. Save — Neev publishes a manufacturer.created event and the brand is now pickable on products.
The product-picker typeahead prefix-matches on name — type the first few letters of "Hindustan" and it surfaces. The full manufacturer list also lets you filter by GSTIN, so pasting a GST number into the list filter lands the right brand. Archived brands stay hidden unless you ask to include them.
Open the manufacturer and Edit. Change the name, GSTIN, tax category or contact fields and save. A name or GSTIN that clashes with another brand is rejected on the spot, so you can't create a silent duplicate.
Open it and Archive — you must type a reason. It vanishes from pickers but the record and its history remain. Changed your mind later? Reactivate brings it back to active.
A bulk-import path for manufacturers is modelled in Neev (a two-step CSV preview-then-commit), but it is not yet a live screen in this build — add brands one at a time for now, and watch the release notes for the importer.
Role notes
View and search are open to every signed-in role. Writes are tiered: managers maintain the list day to day, but archiving — which hides a brand from everyone — is held to the Owner.
| Role | View & search | Create | Edit | Archive / Reactivate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Owner | Allowed | Allowed | Allowed | Allowed |
| Manager | Allowed | Allowed | Allowed | Not allowed |
| Operator | Allowed | Not allowed | Not allowed | Not allowed |
- Owner — full control: view, create, edit, and archive or reactivate.
- Manager — view, create, and edit. A manager cannot archive or reactivate a manufacturer; that is an Owner-only, irreversible-feeling action.
- Operator — read-only. An operator can look up and search brands while taking an order, but cannot create or edit a manufacturer, and cannot archive one.
Tips & time-savers
Keep the manufacturer name clean and consistent — Neev lowercases, trims, and collapses repeated spaces for matching, so "HUL", "hul " and "HUL " are treated as the same brand and the duplicate is refused. (Internal spaces still count, so "H U L" is a different name from "HUL".) One clean spelling per brand keeps your catalog grouping tight.
Gotchas
Two more blocks worth knowing: a manufacturer name that already exists for your business is refused (no duplicates), and a GSTIN must pass both format and checksum — a typo in the GST number is rejected before it saves, and you can't reuse a GSTIN that another manufacturer already holds.