For recalls and audits, you need to be able to trace when a specific product batch arrived in the warehouse, where it's stored, and which customers it was shipped to. Pickware supports you with tracking profiles, so you can consistently record and fully trace batches and best-before dates (BBD) throughout the warehouse process.

Open the relevant product in the Admin and scroll to General → Inventory management. Select the desired tracking profile (Batch only / Best-before date only / Batch & best-before date) and save.

If you're working with variant products, you need to configure the tracking profile for each variant separately.

For bills of materials, no separate tracking profile is maintained on the bill of materials main product. Tracking is configured at the level of the sub-products. If sub-products are tracked, the mechanisms apply automatically during shipping.

Navigate in the Admin to Inventory management → Batches. Click Create batch.

Here you enter the product, the batch number, the best-before date (if relevant), the production date, as well as comments and tags. In the interface, a small asterisk shows you which fields are mandatory for the selected tracking profile (e.g. batch number and/or best-before date). These mandatory fields must be filled in before you can save or complete the process.

A product can have multiple batches, while a batch always belongs to exactly one product.

You also have access to our custom fields for individual information, which you can configure directly from this view.

In the batch overview, you'll then find all the batches you've created and can open and edit them at any time.

The batch details also show you which tracking profile is assigned to the related product. This lets you quickly check, in the context of the batch, whether only a best-before date is tracked, for example, or both batch and best-before date.

In the batch overview under Inventory management → Batches and best-before dates, you can import and export batches via CSV.

Click Export to download the batches currently shown in the overview as a CSV file. The export takes into account the displayed columns and active filters — so you export exactly the data you see in the overview. You can also add a user comment directly, which is stored on the export detail page.

Click Import to create new batches via a CSV file. You can drag and drop the file into the popup or upload it via Select file. Use Download minimal CSV template to get a template with the available columns.

The following information can be imported: batch number, best-before date (in DD.MM.YYYY format), product number, production date, and tags. If you want to import multiple tags for a batch, separate them with the character | (e.g. Organic|Refrigerated|Batch 2025). Tags that don't yet exist in the system are created automatically.

The same rules apply during import as during manual creation: the mandatory information required by the product's tracking profile must be present, and the combination of batch number and best-before date must be unique per product.

If errors occur during import (e.g. an unknown product number, missing mandatory information, or an already existing batch/best-before date combination), the import is not aborted. The faulty rows are documented with an error message in the import log, and all valid rows are processed. You can find the import and export logs under Import/Export (Pickware).

For traceability, it's crucial that you record the batch (and, depending on the tracking profile, the best-before date) before putting the goods away. In practice, this often happens right at goods receipt, because you have the information