ProductGroup

A ProductGroup is the top-level commodity category under which articles are organized in the system. In agricultural and commodity trading contexts, product groups represent broad material classes such as "Cereals", "Oilseeds", "Pulses", or "Specialty Crops". Every article belongs to exactly one product group, and this membership shapes how the article is priced, reported, and integrated with external systems.

Beyond their organizational role, product groups carry functional links that drive system behavior: a connection to a marketing project (placing the group within a specific trading season or campaign), a link to a variant group (enabling PGVariants for sub-type differentiation such as crop variety or quality grade within the group), and a reference base amount (establishing the standard quantity unit for price and volume calculations). Reporting dashboards, external commodity exchange integrations, and government reporting interfaces frequently operate at the product group level rather than the individual article level, making correct product group assignment a foundational data quality requirement for accurate output across all downstream systems.