Service Items — Selling Without Stock
A service item is a catalog entry for something you sell that is not a physical good — a consulting day, a maintenance month, a repair charge. Setting one up takes a minute, and from then on it behaves like any other item on an invoice, minus everything stock-related.
Creating a service item
- Go to Masters → Stock Items → + New Stock Item.
- Tick “This is a service.”
- Set the name, unit, selling rate, and whether VAT applies — and save.
Ticking the service box hides all the stock-specific fields — godown, opening quantity, reorder levels, batch and serial tracking — because none of them apply. There is no such thing as stock for a service.
What changes when you sell one
- No stock check — you can invoice a service with nothing “on hand”, because on-hand is meaningless here.
- No stock movement, no cost-of-goods-sold — the sale posts clean revenue and VAT only.
- Works everywhere — Sales vouchers, CRM quotations, and the POS counter all accept service items exactly like stock items.
Free-text service lines
If you run accounting-only (no inventory module at all), you can skip item masters entirely and type each service line’s description, quantity, and rate straight onto the invoice — free-text lines print itemized on the invoice like any other. This is also handy for one-off charges that do not deserve a catalog entry. When using a recurring contract line, the free-text description works reliably everywhere and is the recommended way to describe the charge.
Printing the invoice
Open the Sales invoice → Preview Invoice → Print / Save PDF. With IRD e-billing enabled for your company it prints as a two-copy Tax Invoice carrying your PAN; otherwise as a single-copy document without one. See sales and purchase invoices for the full printing walkthrough.