SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)

What it is

A product is a commercial idea; an SKU is what actually sits on the shelf. A T-shirt sold in three colours and four sizes is one product and twelve SKUs. A detergent in 500 g and 1 kg packs is two SKUs. The SKU code is assigned by the business itself — unlike a barcode number, which is issued by the manufacturer or a global registry — and is designed to be unambiguous inside the company's own systems.

Good SKU codes are short, unique, stable and never reused. Some companies encode meaning (category, size, colour) into the code; others keep it a plain sequence and hold the attributes in the item master. Either works, provided every system — ERP, WMS, e-commerce, invoicing — uses the same code for the same item.

Why it matters for a growing business

Most stock problems trace back to identity: the same item recorded under two names in Excel, a size sold that was never separately counted, a marketplace listing that does not map to a warehouse item. Without a clean SKU list, no inventory system — however good — can give a reliable count, and reorder points and stock reports mean nothing.

For a distributor with several depots or an online retailer selling through a website and Daraz, the SKU is the thread that ties every channel and location to one stock position. It is usually the first thing an ERP or inventory project has to get right, and the item master built around it becomes the shared vocabulary of sales, warehouse and accounts.

How AutoProbaho uses it

AutoProbaho begins inventory, warehouse and e-commerce projects by cleaning and structuring the client's item master — one SKU per stock-relevant variant, with barcode, unit, pack, supplier and pricing attributes — and then builds the ERP, WMS or order hub on top of it, so that a stock movement in any depot or channel updates one clear position.