The Catalog is the place to keep the materials and products you estimate with, the vendors you buy them from, and the brands that make them. Because the Catalog lives at the company level, everything you add here is ready to pull into any project estimate or change order proposal, submittal package, or purchase order.
Where to find the Catalog
Open the Catalog from the navigation panel on the left side of any page in Riffle.
The three tabs
The Catalog is split into three tabs across the top:
Materials & Products: every item your company prices, with its part number, unit, category, and cost. This is where most of your day to day work happens.
Vendors: the suppliers you buy from, and how many products each one prices.
Manufacturers: the brands your products come from, with an optional link to the vendor you buy each brand from.
How products and prices fit together
In the Catalog, what an item is and what it costs are kept separate on purpose.
The product: its identity, such as the manufacturer, part number, description, unit, and category. A product carries no price on its own.
The price: added for each vendor that sells the item. The same product can hold a price from several vendors, and Riffle shows one default price: the last vendor you bought from, or the lowest current price if you have not bought from any of them yet.
A product with no price yet is normal, not an error. You can add it now and price it later.
How the Catalog connects to your estimates
Once an item is in your Catalog, you can drop it straight into a project estimate or a change order worksheet instead of typing it in by hand. Your pricing stays consistent from one project to the next, and any update you make in the Catalog is there the next time you build.
Getting your Catalog started
You do not have to build the Catalog by hand. You can import your products and prices from a spreadsheet to fill it quickly, then keep it current as your costs change.
To learn how to import spreadsheets into your catalog, read How to Import and Export Data From Your Catalog