Glossary
What is SKU (stock keeping unit)?
A SKU is the unique code assigned to each distinct product you stock, so a one litre bottle and a 500ml bottle of the same brand are separate SKUs. It is what lets stock levels, prices and sales be tracked per item rather than per brand.
An SKU is the code for one thing you sell, at the level you need to count it. If a customer can pick it off the shelf as a separate choice at a separate price, it deserves its own SKU.
How it works in practice
Take a clothing shop stocking one kurta design in three sizes and two colours. That is one design but six SKUs, because a medium in blue and a large in red are counted, priced and reordered separately. A simple scheme might read KRT-BLU-M and KRT-RED-L: short, readable, and easy to sort in a list.
A mobile shop does the same with storage and colour, a kirana shop with pack size, and a hardware shop with gauge or length. The rule does not change: one sellable variant, one code.
How it differs from a barcode
An SKU is your internal code, chosen by you and meaningful to your staff. A barcode is a machine-readable number, usually printed by the manufacturer. One SKU can collect several barcodes over time, for example when a supplier changes its packaging, but each barcode should point to only one SKU. Barcode billing depends on that mapping staying clean.
Common mistakes
- One SKU for a whole brand, so the one litre and 500ml bottles share a stock count that matches neither shelf.
- Creating a new SKU whenever the supplier price changes. Price is a property of the item, not a new item.
- Codes that only one person understands, or that change format halfway down the list.
- Reusing a retired SKU for a new product, which mixes two sales histories in every report.
- Spelling variant values inconsistently, so “Blue” and “blue” become two items and neither count is complete.
Where it matters most
Clothing and footwear shops with size and colour ranges, mobile and electronics dealers, supermarkets with many pack sizes, and distributors whose price lists run to thousands of lines. A reorder level or a stock valuation per item is only useful when the SKUs are clean.
In Kuver Books, variants are generated from attributes such as size and colour, each with its own price and stock, as the product attributes and variants help page explains.
Glossary
Every billing and tax term, A to Z.
See how Kuver Books handles SKU (stock keeping unit).
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