Item naming / item description - a deep dive

BRM has very powerful inventory management.

It automatically organises your inventory into a hierarchy meaning you can easily rent them online, amongst other advantages.

The naming/description of your items is handled automatically.  Take this example, All Items in a product hierarchy share the same name / description.

They are all 'Stumpjumper ST 29'

• From the Product Family 
• to the Product line - which also knows about bike size
• to the Item - which is an individual bike within the family

Here is how it consistently looks and is managed within BRM, inventory and reservations:

Taking a closer look inside the inventory section, we see that the Name given to the Product Family, gets passed down to its children:

1. Name the Product Family (PF)
2. it is passed down to each Product Line (in that PF)
3. It is passed down to each Item (in that PL)

But what if you want to customise the names of your items?

Imagine you have Stumpjumpers of different colours and you want that reflected in your Item names / descriptions.

No problem you can rename individual Items... 

In this example I've renamed my Stumpjumpers with colours for better distinction;

If you override an individual item name it will show up in blue and can be reset back to the inherited name;

It will appear consistently with that new name throughout BRM.

Things to watch out for:

Can I change the brand name? 

Well, beware, because this might not make sense.  (to your staff or customers)

Imagine you have a family of Stumpjumpers and you rename one of them to be a Trek Fuel EX 8.

We would advise against this.  Create a different family for your Trek Fuel EX8's

Or, if you have to do this; go really generic - and call the family - "hard-tails" and then be more specific within each Item.

What if sell my Specialized's and go Santa Cruz - can I just rename items?

No!  This is a definite no because you would lose all of the valuable histories behind your bikes.

(reservation history, service history) - or even potentially booking future (if you change it while you have live bookings!)

Sell the old bikes - within BRM.

Create a new Family for the replacement bikes.

read more about selling here 

What if I re-organise my inventory?

It is true, a powerful feature of BRM is being able to move bikes around your hierarchy. (if you have made a mistake)

If you do this beware that we overwrite any Item level customisations.

Also, this is something you should only really do during setup - never when you have live reservations.

read more about changing an Items PL 

read more about changing a Product Line's PF 

What if I re-name my inventory?

Again - a feature to be used very sparingly.

Imagine the following scenario.  During setup I give them names like "Stumpy"

But then I think it would be more professional to rename them

"Stumpjumper ST 29"

You can use the Product Family renaming feature to update all of the items in your hierarchy, but again beware it will overwrite any Item level customisations.